INTERVIEW: Natixis Investment Managers CMO talks maternity leave and the evolution of marketing

The CMO of Natixis Investment Management is preparing for a broader evolution of the way she leads the marketing function after returning from maternity leave, focusing on empowering the team and creating room for her leaders and team to step up and take decisions.

Emily Askham returned from having her second child  in the middle of March, resuming the role that she began back in 2022.

“I will be very honest – coming back from maternity leave can be difficult if you are not prepared,” she says. “The one thing I want people to know is it’s natural. We all feel vulnerable returning to work and question what has changed and whether we are still relevant.

“But to keep your focus positive, you’ve got to shift perspective and think about how you come back, and ensure you set the right foundations before you leave. A real boost for me was knowing I was coming back to a team who had been empowered to manage the department whilst I was looking after my family”

Emily places a huge focus on supporting and empowering her teams. Her team has always been structured to promote talent and give opportunity for growth.

When she was planning for maternity leave, Emily says she spent a lot of time and thought on the future development of her team.

“The plan was offset with the ambition of elevating my team to achieve more, rather than just keep afloat and give senior leaders the opportunity to step-up and take on more responsibility – to challenge themselves and provide an opportunity for personal growth.

“Part of the role is always working with your team  to find out where their gaps are and where their skills are. This was an opportunity for me to ask my senior leaders where they wanted to develop and where they wanted exposure on new topics from budgeting to client experience or strategic projects. It felt good to make the process collaborative and ensure that the team holding the fort were comfortable and excited by the growth opportunities.”

She says that this comes with obvious worry as a leader, because it meant developing people to “the point where they can operate without you. But I knew I had to be brave, because that is what I need to do as a leader.”

On her return, Emily notes that the benefit from doing this is that the growth of the team has been “exceptional”. All in all, she thinks this approach was more effective than putting a CMO in for maternity cover, given the complexity of the business could require six months to get up to speed with.

“I look at some of my senior leaders and am amazed at their progression. Even with me being there and training them every day, I couldn’t have given them the growth they’ve had in that time and I’m incredibly proud of them. It comes down to the way that they speak, the way that they engage stakeholders, the way that they talk about their team. That is the product of being given the room to grow.”

She underpinned this by adding more resource to support these leaders, meaning they weren’t trying to do the additional layer on top of their day job.

Having returned from maternity leave, she now sees her role having a heavier focus on helping to manage their further growth. Emily says she feels lucky to have a team who are genuinely passionate about their jobs and wants to further encourage this momentum.

“I have to ask myself, where is it my support is required? Where can I actually empower people to take decisions and provide solutions so that we are more effective and efficient for the business?

“It’s a different way of approaching it versus just coming back and slotting back into the old world – because things have changed. When looking at my day-to-day, I can’t compare like-for-like with my pre-maternity leave situation. I see this as a real achievement and opportunity to transform the department and respond to what our landscape needs.”

Giving yourself permission

So what advice would Emily pass on to anyone else navigating the return from maternity leave?

“I think the second time was easier for me and the reason is not that anything was different – your heart still hurts when the kids are crying at nursery drop off.”

“The first time, I didn’t know it was going to get easier, whereas the second time you know that this too shall pass and things will get easier.”

She also felt more prepared for the return to work itself and approached it in a more structured way. Rather than expecting to get immediately back into the swing of things, Emily says she assigned each week a different function. Week one was about listening and gathering information, week two was about digesting it, and week three was about acting.

“I gave myself permission not to add value for the first two weeks and just to digest and take it in.”

She does think that there is still a problem of double standards when it comes to men and women. This is still reflected in outcomes such as not only salary and responsibilities on the home front but also a pronounced pension gap, since many woman are unaware that pension contributions stop while they are on maternity leave.

“It’s a problem in the way it’s talked about, but I think it needs to be a cultural change. For me this comes from senior leadership and anyone who’s managing people, male or female. It’s my belief that the only way women get equality is making it equal for men and women. That means splitting the responsibilities – encouraging the men in your team to pick up some of the home tasks which are traditionally on the woman’s to do list.”

For example, in the Natixis Investment Managers marketing leadership team, men are encouraged to do drop off and pick up and she encourages them to work flexibly to accommodate this.

“This is how we can implement a small change to drive equality outside the financial elements.”

She relates an anecdote about a woman in a previous organisation who was in a senior position, but had sole responsibility for drop off and pick-up five days a week before working from home was commonplace. This meant her day involved arriving at 9.30 AM and leaving at 4.30 PM, putting pressure on her time, particularly when it came to meetings.

“At the time, people would get frustrated. But actually, what we should have been doing is looking at the equality piece and saying – it’s on her five days a week to make sure everything is looked after, how can we make her life easier?”

“I do think it is changing, but there’s more that we can do from a cultural and senior leadership perspective to make sure that’s embedded.”

Evolving the CMO role

Alongside the announcement of a potential €1.9 trillion joint venture between Generali Investments and Natixis Investment Managers, Emily sees her role evolving in a broader sense, with more for a CMO to do now than there ever has been. It often means owning the client experience and client engagement programs and feeding these back into the business across all business units. You have to have the correct people in place to run core functions and centres of excellence to make sure that things are running smoothly, that everything’s going out effectively and efficiently so you’re able to maintain that business momentum and align to your commercial objectives while driving and articulating a clear return on investment and impact on the commercial objectives.

“For the last two years we’ve taken on client experience within Natixis Investment Managers, and my role is really to have the client voice in the heart of everything we do. Marketing controls 70% of the touch points in the customer journey and now with the addition of the client net promoter score and feedback. We are able to embed the client voice and share this with the business. Defining how we need to evolve is championing this change.

“”We’re being asked to have growth and revenue targets and link everything to the commercial objectives. There is more of a focus on ROI, so the role of marketing has expanded, the conversations we are having with our CFOs and CEOs are more sophisticated and we are being challenged on our investments and the results they deliver.”

She believes that the goal of establishing marketing as a strategic partner is an ongoing mission, but progress is being made.

“The business sees the value of what we do and that’s a huge step change to where we were three years ago. Taking the time out has allowed me to reflect on how far we have come and appreciate the successes we’ve had along the way.’’

Another part of this is looking at the whole client life cycle: “not just making sure we have good communications and marketing but also great sales interactions and then onboard and service them correctly.

“Then we can be more sophisticated in our marketing materials looking at retention and cross-selling and those sorts of things.”

As part of this continual improvement of client experience, Emily wants to move much more into lead generation for sales. She calls this the 80-20 rule – the sales team should be spending 80% of their time on their top 20% of clients, with marketing servicing the rest. This means homing in on how the impact of different touch points is tracked and linking this to revenues and flows.

“The CMO role is not just traditional marketing anymore,” she says.