What Comes After the CMO? The Leadership Pathway Question

After collecting and reviewing nearly 100 higher education marketing and communications organizational charts this year, I found myself asking a question that had little to do with reporting lines: Where does the senior leader at the top of the chart go from here?

Leadership turnover has become a defining feature of higher education. The steady decline in length of presidential tenures often ripples through the cabinet, and senior marketing and communications leaders are not exempt from that pattern. The reasons are real and varied. Less examined is what those departures reveal about the role itself.

A recent Spencer Stuart analysis of S&P 500 chief marketing officers offers an interesting contrast. Corporate CMOs also move frequently, with an average tenure of 4.1 years. But many of those moves are upward—to enterprise leadership roles such as divisional president, chief operating officer and chief executive officer. In that context, shorter-than-average tenure isn’t necessarily evidence of instability. It can also be evidence of a leadership pipeline working.

Higher education has the turnover. It doesn’t yet have the pipeline.

That distinction matters, because it points to a deeper organizational question: When we design a senior leadership role, what are we preparing that leader to become? For marketing and communications leaders, the answer is often surprisingly narrow.

When vice presidents for marketing and communications leave, they most often move to a similar leadership role at another institution, into consulting or outside the sector. Moves into broader enterprise leadership positions are comparatively rare. That can include senior or executive vice president roles overseeing institutional strategy or operations, or, even more rarely, the presidency.

That pattern says less about the leaders themselves than about the role. While many institutions have expanded the scope of the position—adding responsibilities ranging from licensing and events to digital strategy and constituent experience—the role itself has rarely been designed with broader enterprise leadership development in mind.

Several years ago, I suggested that the higher education CMO’s influence would continue expanding across the institution. In some respects, it has. But expanding the role is not the same as designing a leadership pathway beyond it.

Portfolio breadth is not the same as a leadership pathway.

Expanding a marketing leader’s responsibilities can strengthen the role considerably. Many senior marketing and communications leaders already contribute meaningfully to institutional strategy and enterprise decision-making. But broader portfolios alone do not automatically prepare and position leaders for broader enterprise leadership opportunities. That requires designing the role to advance both organizational effectiveness and leadership development. Done well, organization design encompasses more than how work gets done. It also shapes how leaders develop, the experiences they gain and the opportunities they’re prepared to pursue.

In that sense, organization design is also leadership design.

Every senior leadership role is developmental, whether intentionally or not. Over time, leaders become better at the work their roles repeatedly ask them to do. Some roles create greater opportunities to exercise enterprise judgment and lead across the institution. Organizations should be intentional about designing roles that cultivate those experiences—and, ultimately, the leaders they hope to develop.

Perhaps that’s the more important question for your institution to ask. Not simply, “How do we retain our CMO?” but, “What kind of leader is this role designed to develop?” After all, organizations are always developing leaders. The question is whether they’re doing so by design or by default.