FEATURE15 August 2024

Small wins: The rise of fractional leadership

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Fractional leadership is becoming well established in marketing, and could offer the answer to ‘brain drain’ and budget squeezes. By Katie McQuater.

graphic of a brain with half of it being dispersed into pixels

Journalists are acutely aware of new terms. Too often, these are buzzwords – meaningless concepts with limited staying power or that don’t withstand scrutiny. Every now and then, however, a new concept comes across the desk and just seems to make sense.

‘Fractional’ working is a model of leadership, prevalent within finance and law, that is now making its way into marketing, with the rise of the fractional chief marketing officer (CMO). Definitions differ, but one common characteristic of fractional roles is that they are embedded within an organisation, unlike consultancy. They work part-time, rather than full-time, but, like consultancy, they may work with more than one business at a time.

By engaging highly experienced executives on a fractional basis, companies can access strategic senior expertise at a lower cost than employing a full-time leader or team, and may take this approach to steer them through periods of transformation or to access a particular specialism.

Ben Leet, former chief executive at Delineate, who left in 2023 to set up his own consultancy, works across several research technology (restech) businesses on a fractional basis.

“I’ve got email IDs, Slack IDs and Teams accounts. I’m operating like I’m part of the client’s business, but part-time,” says Leet. “The old-fashioned language would be part-timer. Fractional sounds sexier. Effectively, I work part-time for four or five different companies.”

Rachel Forde, co-founder, The Zoo.London, says a fractional executive has historically been more akin to a non-executive director – someone with their corporate career behind them, employed for a couple of days a month or a quarter – but this is now changing.

She explains: “What we see now is the rise of the fractional consultant across senior people in the marketplace who are not necessarily looking for a portfolio career just yet – more that they are looking for fractional opportunities and projects on a short- to medium-term basis as they work out their next full-time permanent role. Or, what we are seeing more of, the ‘serial fractional CMO’.”

Forde, a former media industry executive, co-founded The Zoo.London as a network to link senior talent with businesses. She expects to see more companies using what she calls “agile and fluid talent” when they need it. “Most businesses are in need of heavyweight expertise or a specialism, but don’t necessarily want to pay for it on a full-time basis; the fractional consultant is the solution for this,” says Forde.

Leet’s approach to his new career was driven by his skill set: “I’m one of life’s generalists – I’m good at a lot of things, I’m not an expert at any one thing. I realised there are a lot of tech businesses – start-ups – that need a bit of many different things, and those things change over time depending on where the business is in its life-cycle. I can fill those gaps quite easily.”

Valued insight

Corporate insight functions are becoming more attuned to the importance of learning from past experience. Companies including PepsiCo and Carlsberg Group have built repositories of insight to avoid starting from scratch at every opportunity and to derive continued learning from existing data, for example. Could fractional insight leadership offer the same benefit from the perspective of drawing on rich individual knowledge?

Leet thinks fractional working could benefit companies in the research industry, and predicts that artificial intelligence (AI) will bring a raft of new technology-led start-ups to the sector, integrating restech in the same way martech and adtech (marketing and advertising technology) have each become part of one unified ecosystem. With this shift, he expects that insights start-ups will increasingly need fractional executives to help them.

“There’s a huge opportunity for people to work as I do within this next wave of technology businesses that’s going to hit our industry pretty hard,” he says.

“Every data business is separated – there are no common data standards; no data-transfer mechanisms. We’re all operating in silos and AI is going to change that; create a more connected ecosystem. You’ve got old sages like me who have been around for 20 years and gone through the hype of online panels and self-serve. We can add value to these businesses that are going to be founded by 25- to 30-year-olds, who are technically brilliant, but haven’t got that back-catalogue of experience.”

Forde can see the value in brands employing fractional consultants in the insight function, helping to address the issue of senior ‘brain drain’, where experienced leaders leave the industry. She says: “When it comes to customer insight, there’s a lot to be said for knowledge and wisdom of what’s come before and may come again, and that helps to save a lot of time reinventing the wheel and wasting resources.”

Today’s uncertain times could mean boom or bust for fractional working. In the US, there has been a large number of redundancies across several sectors, but particularly technology, where the past year has seen a wave of lay-offs. Karina Mikhli, founder of Fractionals United, a network of senior leaders working as ‘fractionals’, or aspiring to, says there has been an increase in fractional executives on the supply side, as people are let go. This, however, has not yet been matched by businesses’ demand.

“There is a smaller increase on the demand side and we’re hoping this will escalate as awareness continues to expand. It’s happening, because it’s a win-win and makes sense, but too few know we exist yet.”

The lack of awareness may be compounded by a close-minded view of work. Part-time is still a rarity in the research industry. A recent salary survey by research-focused recruitment agency Elizabeth Norman International (ENI) found that only 2% of respondents in permanent employment (across all seniority levels) are in part-time roles.

Liz Norman, chief executive at ENI, says: “We very rarely get briefed for part-time roles. We often get asked by candidates for part-time roles, so there is demand for them, but employers argue that employees need to be there when clients or marketing departments demand things, making it difficult to be that flexible.”

Acceptance of remote working is also key to the success of fractional work, says Mikhli. “Needing to be on site hampers our effectiveness and ability to do this across several clients,” she adds.

But companies could be missing a trick by failing to engage leaders on a fractional basis. Mikhli name-checks small- to medium-sized businesses, start-ups and scale-ups as types of businesses likely to use fractional roles, but adds that all leadership functions can be helped by fractional support. “It’s less about the business area and more about the area needing a leader rather than an individual contributor.”

A little bit of support can go a long way.

This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of Impact

1 Comment

3 months ago

Brilliant article thanks Katie, right on the nose. We're drawing on this kind of approach all the time and benefiting greatly. What's not emphasised enough is how fun it is being able to work with all these super cool people!

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