What you need to know:

• The Marketing Academy scholarship is an exclusive, 30-person course run each year.
• Four alumni – BWS’ An Le, KFC’s Warren Mo, Edelman’s Fern Canning-Brook and former Broadsheet director Skye Rugless – share their key lessons, challenges, and tips on getting in.
• CanningBrook was crushed not to get in on her first attempt, but it ultimately worked out for good, she says.
• Le says a TED talk about chickens and a pecking order taught her a lot about overachievement.
• The alumni say the TMA’s course works because it takes people unknown to each other and puts them through an emotional furnace. Corporate leadership programs can be challenging because everyone brings their baggage – and impressions of each other.
• Listen to the TMA fan club podcast here

Learning curve

Even the application process for The Marketing Academy’s notoriously exclusive scholarship program taught Edelman APAC EVP Fern Canning-Brook a tough life lesson. In 2020, she poured her raw emotions into a video submission, including deep vulnerabilities about being an imposter – about not being up to scratch for her role. She was rejected.

“So you can imagine when I didn't get in at first, it was like, 'you're not good enough’,” Canning-Brook says. Luckily, she was encouraged to apply again, and was accepted. But the 2021 alumna was not alone in uncovering deep scars of imposter syndrome as part of the nine-month course. As it turns out, just about everyone else has the same feelings, as Canning-Brook, Warren Mo – KFC South Pacific Digital Marketing Manager, An Le – BWS’ Head of Brand Marketing, and Skye Rugless – former director of Reader Revenue at Broadsheet Media, discovered.

Each of TMA’s scholars meets up to eight luminaries of the local marketing landscape, attends three intensive bootcamps, and undergoes months of executive coaching, diving deep into self-discovery, vulnerability, self-doubt and leadership styles.

Mo had just moved from financial services to quick service restaurants – emphasis on the “quick” – and was “learning a whole new language” when he decided to apply. “We we're coming out of Covid and a year where you've been locked up at home - you can feel a bit lonely,” he says. “So the chance to kind of get a sense of belonging and reconnect with others, that was definitely an extra incentive.”

Le says TMA was a mystery to her. “When you’re applying, you have a lot of people tell you how amazing it is. But they all say, ‘but I can't explain why, you just have to do it’,” she says. “I went in thinking it would be like this typical kind of leadership development course, which I thought we've all done plenty of, but it really is so much more.”

Rugless says the scholarship was described as transformational by anyone who did it. “I just knew I had to be a part of it,” she says.  

Key learnings… and super chickens

Through the nine months of lessons, talks and mentoring, two takeaways that stood out to Le were a) her insecurities were normal, and b) a TED talk on super chickens.

“It's all about the fact that you can't be a super chicken and be a great leader. And this TED talk is all about an experiment where someone was putting together a group of really overproducing chickens to lay eggs. And it's an experiment, super producing what happens versus average chickens. What they found over the years is the group of average chickens actually produced more eggs than the super chickens, and it was because some of the super chickens killed each other,” Le says.

“Now, the moral of the story is if you are in a group of just a bunch of overachievers, you actually don't drive the right productivity and the right growth. And it was really interesting because it was like, you can't be a super chicken and be a great leader… once you get to a leadership role, it's not about you anymore. And if you're all trying to be super chickens, no one's getting anywhere. Hopefully, no one dies.”

Both Rugless and Mo learned to be more comfortable with their natural way of leading, rather than trying to fit into a pre-existing mould.

“For me personally, I've found that I'm more composed and more mature as a leader but I'm not going to be the loudest person in the room,” he says. “But when I speak I'll have a calm command and I've learned to lead from the back… it's being comfortable in who you want to be as a leader and who you are as a person.”

For Rugless, it was merging two halves of herself. “There was a professional Skye and a personal Skye,” she says. “And coming out of the program I became more one person. So yeah, that was the biggest change for me.”

Corporate culture hard to crack

The corporate world is not known for rewarding vulnerability. Canning-Brook says the program made it easier – the leadership team of Edelman did an exercise called ‘taking off the mask’ together after she returned, which is the first step in one of the boot camps. But others speculated that showing weakness in front of others is more difficult when those others are everyday colleagues. TMA scholarship is unique precisely because everyone is more or less unknown. It’s like university, Le says – new friends didn’t know the awkward high-schooler.

“You're thrown in with 29 other people who are relatively anonymous to you - or you're anonymous to them. There's no baggage. They don't know what junior burger you were when you first started working. They don't know you a year ago when you thought you failed at something,” she says. “You get to go in new and go in fresh and almost redefine and rewrite who you are.”

Per Canning Brook: “It's interesting, because more and more we would counsel CEOs to be themselves, to share anecdotes, to speak up, to show their vulnerabilities. It's what people actually want to see. But it's hard to live that yourself in a corporate culture.”

Doing an intensive course like TMA can be “seen as a self-indulgence”, she says, but Canning-Brook was near burnout when she joined.

“I will always just give. It doesn't matter where I work, it's just what I do, [but] burned-out leaders or depleted leaders create depleted teams, it was just a moment of looking in the mirror and seeing exactly what I'm doing,” she says. “If you just keep on that treadmill and keep on going, you're not showing up as your best self.”

At Rugless’ first bootcamp, Sherilyn Shackell, the founder of The Marketing Academy, divided the budding scholars up and asked them to solve a problem. No instructions were provided – it was a test.

“What we didn't know is Sherilyn was secretly recording our language behaviours,” Rugless says. “I was mortified to see that I was overtalking people saying a lot of ‘yep, yep yep’ – as if I was listening, and then going on with my own idea. Yeah, that was really eye opening for me.”

Where does marketing fit in?

Despite the name, The Marketing Academy focuses less on hardcore marketing theory and more on how marketers can become stronger, more integral parts of the C-suite.

“I see it as a leadership course rather than a marketing course, but you definitely get exposure to marketing,” Rugless says. “I think one of my favourite speakers was [Coles CMO] Lisa Ronson talking about how creativity drives the bottom line. I got a lot of tangible, tactical information that I could use to put forward a campaign and put forward an idea.”

Canning-Brook can still hear Telstra CMO Brent Smart’s voice echoing in her mind – specifically after his talk, ‘How not to be a shit CMO’.

“It's interesting because despite the fact that I'm on the agency side, I can use some of that to talk to my teams while I'm looking at maybe some of their work or some of the creative and being able to give feedback to that. I hear Brent's voice in my head,” she says.

Mo recalls it being a leadership-driven program that takes a group of marketers and runs them through a rigorous array of talks, exercises and deep dives into personality.

“I do believe there are opportunities where you can build on areas of capability,” Mo says. “there's the mentors. Like, there was one example where I was looking to be sharper at strategy… One of the mentors that I was luckily to be paired with was a CEO who had a strategic background and I wanted to ask about where her strengths were in strategy. And I learned things like creating a learning agenda. Tips like carving out time during a week to drill deeper into a particular topic, to break away from the day-to-day detail that you could be caught up in. And even a quote that she gave me that still sticks with me today is, ‘give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four hours sharpening my axe’.”

Le recalls the scholarship course being pitched at “how to get marketing leaders into the C-suite”, rather than straight marketing skills. It’s how to lead in the marketing, media and advertising landscape. “For me, it came through in the framing of everything, but it wasn't necessarily a technical marketing course,” she says.

How to get into The Marketing Academy

The four shared their top tip for applying for TMA’s scholarship program. Canning-Brook says: “Just be ready to be yourself and let go of any pretense, persona and ego.”

Rugless says it’s crucial to be clear on “why now is the right time for you to do this course”. Mo, meanwhile, reckons that while one’s achievements can help get into the course, “humility and growth mindset will get you to stand out”. Lastly, Le says not to treat the process like a job interview. Yes, there are interviews – but it’s not to share how great you are. “It’s actually about telling the story of you and why you would benefit.”