How Mastercard's Chief People Officer Builds Bridges Between Marketing and HR

What is a Chief People Officer? According to Mastercard’s Michael Fraccaro, the role encapsulates everything to do with people. The brand intentionally made a change a few years prior to move it away from the human resources (HR) function to the people and capability function. He is responsible for all HR functions globally, including driving cultural transformation, building leadership capability and creating a company that is “most valued to work for.” When the pandemic began last year, Michael and his team pivoted quickly to focus on people working remotely, but also ensure that Mastercard had the technology and, more importantly, the employee experiences that reflected their culture and brand. On a recent episode of The Business of Marketing podcast, Michael shared his advice to CMOs on how to communicate and work within the C-Suite while balancing ownership and influence. Tune in to hear more from Michael alongside Raja Rajamannar, President, Healthcare Business and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and be sure to subscribe to podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Anchor. (Adweek) How did Mastercard react to COVID-19? In the very beginning, it was about job security. ... Our CEO upfront publicly said there will be no COVID-related job layoffs in 2020 and that just took a whole weight of anxiety and pressure from the whole employee base. That was almost a foundational step that we took–every other action that followed, at least from an employee and family perspective, demonstrated Mastercard was going to support them through that really difficult period of time. From then on, there was a whole lot of work that we partnered together. We had one initiative that we worked with Raja Rajamannar's team from Communications around tales from the new normal. This was a way for employees to express what they were doing, what they were experiencing, where they are living, what they were doing with their families. And it really brought the human side into the organization, as well as our leaders being human, not just a figure on a hierarchy, but actually at home with their pets and kids running behind them. When we did a quick poll of our CMO community, 84% believe that the role of the CMO and the role of marketing elevated through last year in so many ways. How do you see your CMO balance ownership and influence? Does it matter who owns what or do all of you just work together for the right outcome? We try to move away from just thinking about the hierarchy. A lot more effective work is done through influence and collaboration. There are obvious roles and control functions where you must have some line of sight in terms of accountability, but quite often, if you start getting stuck in silo mentality, things start to break down and start to swirl. We talk about people taking ownership and about simplification. There are four leadership principles that go all the way through the organization. We call it “The Mastercard Way.” The focus in the center is our customer. And the customer, for some of the internal functions, is our employees and potential candidates that come in or former employees that are part of an alumni. In fact, we partnered with Raja's team to leverage a lot of the data and insights about what's happening. What are some of the consumer trends? What does that mean for the employees of the future? We started building models around what an operating model would look like in the future. We started adopting agile ways of working. And we started looking and playing around with the kinds of office space that allowed for flexibility and collaboration. We invested in tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, but we were leading at the front with a lot of those kinds of initiatives early on. A few years ago, Mastercard created a new marketing finance team so that everybody had visibility into marketing. How important is it for the different functions to speak the same language? The feature that Raja has brought into the marketing function is that commercial sense. Marketing is viewed in some organizations as the function that comes up with all the fancy campaigns. ... But I think what's really resonated the last few years is marketing is brought into the sales process or in deepening relationships with existing customers or is that last mile where we're trying to win a deal. Raja personally will be asked to come in and help in closing the deal and it's sometimes that's the differentiator. It's not the product necessarily. The product is obviously important, but it's that differentiator of what we can add. Quite often it's that marketing and that communication piece that really is that final piece, which makes the clients go “wow, we don't see that in any other businesses.” What has happened beautifully is Raja has done amazing things where once he's gone and done these kinds of pitches at the end that the client will say, “Raja, can you come back and share more with our marketing function? So, it's almost a way of demonstrating thought leadership, not just on our innovative technology and products that we have, but also the way that we're thinking about using brand, sponsorship, and marketing as real force multipliers for our organization. What advice would you give to a CMO today on how to work well with the C-suite? Embrace the new and different. Have a point of view and build those bridges with your colleagues and with your finance department. I think for the Chief Marketing Officers around the world, it's such a privileged position that has so much influence and power, not in terms of structural power, but power to really make a difference in the world and in people's lives. Just embrace that opportunity and work together. Just embrace that opportunity and work together. The other thing I would say is, there are disciplines within marketing that should be transported into people, functions, HR, the whole data analytics. This is the future vision. There are parallels in marketing that should be part of a feature within the people function. CMOs can really help HR functions. Think about the future and partner together.

Business of Marketing

How Mastercard's Chief People Officer Builds Bridges Between Marketing and HR

Michael Fraccaro encourages CMOs to have a point of view and embrace the new and different

Al Mannarino

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Al Mannarino