Holy cow. We made it.

And this has multiple meanings for me. I’m now back home after a whirlwind four weeks of travel, which included Inspire (our user conference where we hosted 1,000 people in Miami), Learning Technologies UK (our largest tradeshow/conference in Europe), a board meeting in Toronto, and the Winning by Design conference in San Francisco. 

And we’re finally at the end of the Don’t Get Fired series for all you CMOs, potential CMOs, VPs, and marketing leaders. There are so many lessons that I’ve learned over the last 15 years of running marketing teams. And I’m finally on the last of many lessons I’ve written about over the last couple of months. 

We are going to cover the last set of lessons in my Don’t Get Fired series, but first, I want to thank with the wonderful marketing team at Docebo.

Within my first couple of months at Docebo, we wrote down a mission statement: Make Docebo Impossible to Ignore. And the team has over-delivered over the last four weeks. 

Inspire in Miami. A thousand people at the Fontainebleau. Customers, prospects, analysts, partners, board members. The biggest event of our year. Want to read more? Check out my entry on the lessons learned.

And then, while half the team was still recovering from Miami, the other half flew to London for Learning Technologies UK. The biggest learning conference in Europe. We debuted our first full-scale booth since the Neon Renaissance rebrand we launched in January.

A massive marble arch as the centerpiece, our logo visible from across the show floor. Twin marble arches were built around the product demos so they didn't feel like demo pods. Soft neon ambient lighting in the meeting spaces.

Mannequins styled in branded swag paired with designer pieces. Living plants tie it all together. A Pantheon-inspired back wall celebrating our customers' learning programs. It was beautiful. I mean, hell, people were taking selfies. (At a B2B booth. Let that one sink in.)

Hats off to Manny Gonzalez and the rest of the creative and events team. They delivered something the show floor had never seen.

And before I get the inevitable email or question... yes, we beat our opportunity-creation goal, too. The aesthetics and the numbers are not on opposite teams. It’s always been one team, one dream.

From Inspire to LTUK, one team turned that five-word mission “Make Docebo Impossible to Ignore” into something tangible.

And that’s the through-line through this entire entry. Because what I’m about to write about… Leadership & Career lessons (in the Don’t Get Fired series) is impossible to write about without acknowledging what the team I’m lucky to serve just delivered.

This team continues to make the following lessons true. Not me.

The series started in Entry 66 with one premise: the average tenure of a tech CMO is around 18-20 months, which is fucking brutal. I've been doing this for fifteen years. I've watched friends get fired. I've almost been fired. This series contains everything I wished someone had told me in year one of marketing leadership.

As my eight-year-old would say before all of his YouTube videos: Let’s GET INTO IT!!!!!

♥️ kyle

Don’t Get Fired: Part 5: Leadership & Career (And the end of this damn thing)

If you’ve been following along, you know what’s happening. If you’re new, here’s what we’ve written about over the last few months:

• Revenue & Pipeline (Entry 66)

  • Own a number that ties to revenue.

  • Report the numbers weekly.

  • Run a real pipeline council.

  • Build a Revenue Handbook.

  • BFF your CRO.

• Team & Culture (Entry 68)

  •  Lead with clarity.

  • Stop asking permission to do your job.

  • Cultivate and protect good taste.

  • Co-own enablement.

  • Give them space to change.

• Budget & Brand (Entry 69)

  • The 80/20 brand budgeting rule.

  • When (and why) to rebrand.

  • You must measure brand.

  • Build a core narrative and a manifesto.

So, now it’s time to talk more about leadership and career because it’s super important to think about both as you grow your team and experience. Too often than not, people ignore their own personal brands and careers while working for “the man.” You can’t do it. You can’t ignore your own personal development.

Alright… enough of the setup, let’s get to the first lesson around leadership & career development.

You Must Build a Personal Brand

Here’s the thing nobody told me when I left Anderson University to build my “career.”

“Kyle. One of the more important things you can do while working is to work on your personal brand just as hard.”

I was lucky enough to have a father who taught me the important lessons on networking and building a bench of experiences and people to help me along the way.

So here is a question that should equally keep you up at night with your pipeline number: why you leave your current job, what do you have?

If the answer is "a great job at one company," you have a problem. Because the second that job ends, you have nothing. Just a resume (blah) and a LinkedIn profile with 800 connections and a really hopeful update post.

I have watched this happen to incredibly talented marketing leaders. Heads down for five years at a company and absolutely CRUSHED the work. Then the CEO changed, or the company was sold, and they were out. And they looked up and realized they had no community and no backup. They didn’t have an audience to pull from.

And personal branding can help you overcome the obstacle of not having the “next step.”

I’m not going to pitch you the LinkedIn guru framework. Let’s move on from that IMMEDIATELY. Your personal brand as an executive is not about being famous or having 100,000 followers. It’s strictly about INSURANCE and optionality.

Here's what showing up consistently in public does:

Talent funnel. The people who want to work with you find you. They read your stuff, they like your taste, they DM you. When you have a req open, you don't post a job listing and pray. You text three people who already want to work with you.

Personal brand IS company brand. Whether you like it or not. Your reputation reflects on the company you run marketing for. If your CEO and your CRO are invisible, your company is fighting from a deficit. Posting helps shape the perception of the business.

Pipeline and deals. Yes, even for the company you work at right now. I have personally seen my LinkedIn presence and personal brand drive business to every company I’ve worked for.

Optionality. And no, this is not disloyal. When you leave (or get fired), where do you land? If you have an audience, the answer is "anywhere I want." If you don't, the answer is "whoever calls back."

Sanity. Executive jobs are isolating in ways that are hard to describe until you're in one. Having a creative outlet that is yours, not the company's, is a release valve, and believe me… you need the release valve.

I don’t have to prove this to you. There are plenty of examples and lessons out there. I’m a living, breathing example of this working. If you wait until you need it, you’ve waited too long. By the time you need a personal brand, you can’t build it. It takes years.

The best thing about a strong personal brand. It’s yours. It’s your story. It’s your energy. It’s your enthusiasm. Nobody else can take that from you. Nobody else can tell the story as well as you.

So don’t wait. Start posting. Start meeting every other week with a new peer. Start building the bench of people who will make a difference in the future (and you can help them as well).

AI Adoption is Mandatory

I wrote about this a couple of months ago in Entry 65, so I'm not going to belabor it. If you missed it, the short version was: I got 10x better at AI and accidentally started drowning my team in output they couldn't absorb. But here's what I want to add now, six weeks deeper into this amazing experiment.

AI adoption on your team is no longer a nice-to-have. It is not a "we'll figure it out next quarter.” I do believe It is the single most important thing you are doing as a marketing leader right now. Period.

I don't say that to be dramatic. (Okay, maybe a little dramatic. It's me.) I say it because the gap between teams building this muscle and those that aren't is widening every single week. And in twelve months, that gap is going to be damn huge.

So here are the two lessons I’ve learned: You must budget time & money for this endeavor. You can’t HOPE the team starts using the tools, you have to give them the right tools and time to learn. Training. Enablement. Support.

Second lesson? YOU MUST START WITH THE CONTEXT FIRST. If you don’t start with the context/knowledge graph/whateverthehellwearecallingitnow, you are going to have a team building solutions which are connected to NOTHING.

I learned this after receiving the third ICP application, which was linked to a third ICP document. That, my friends, is not efficiency. It’s busy work.

We don’t need busy work. We are busy enough.

Most CMOs I talk to are in Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever else, prompting away and getting strategic briefs in 20 minutes. Great. The problem is they haven't built the same muscle on their team. They're 10x. The team is still 1x. And they're calling that a productivity story when it's actually a leadership failure. And could lead to being fired if you don’t bring the team along.

The risk isn't that your team uses AI wrong. The risk is that you don't build the muscle at all.

So here's the new commitment I'm making in year two at Docebo. Adoption is the metric. Not output volume. Not how many tools the team built on AI Build Day (although we love a good Build Day). Adoption. Are people using these tools every single week as a default part of how they work? Are they experimenting? Are they uncomfortable in the right ways?

If yes, the rest takes care of itself. If not, you have a real problem, and you need to address it directly.

Know When to Leave Your Job

I wrote a full piece on this back in Entry 33, where I broke down the 80/20 rule that's guided my career. 80% of the job should energize you. 20% can be hard. When that ratio flips, that's the signal. Read that one if you want the full version.

But for the close of this series, I want to add a wrinkle that didn't make it into Entry 33.

Don't leave because it's hard.

Do me a favor and read that twice.

Don’t leave because it’s hard.

The hard parts are the job and shouldn’t be used as the only signal to move on. If you leave every time something gets hard, you will spend your career running from things that were about to teach you something. Hard is not the signal.

The signal is when you stop growing.

When the same problems keep showing up, and you've stopped having new thoughts about them. When you're running plays you ran two companies ago and they're still working but you're bored. When you find yourself coasting on what you already know instead of getting humbled by something you don't. When the 20% creeps to 50%, not because the job got harder, but because YOU got smaller in it. It’s time to move on.

And you do decide to leave. Please for the sake of all that’s holy, leave the job well. This industry is much smaller than you think. I have seen people burn bridges on the way out the door for reasons that felt righteous in the moment and looked petty six months later. I have seen people stay loyal to companies that were not loyal back, and watched them get rewarded for the loyalty in their NEXT job, by a hiring manager who saw how they handled the exit.

How you leave matters more than why you leave. Always.