Juliette has spent her whole 30-year career working for VendCo, a U.S. retail company with offices
located throughout the world. A French citizen, Juliette joined VendCo’s Paris office when it was a
small start-up trying to establish a presence in Europe. She began as a sales representative and
helped build their presence in Europe and beyond, earning a reputation as an ambitious, capable,
and hardworking employee. Eight years ago, Juliette was promoted to Regional Head of Marketing
for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region, and the region has performed well under her
leadership. The next step for Juliette is CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) which would make her part of
the senior leadership team working closely with the CEO in New York. However, when the CMO job
became available three years ago, Juliette was not chosen even though she was the most qualified
internal candidate to apply for the position. Instead, VendCo brought in an outside hire for the role –
an American named Tyler who they poached from a U.S. competitor. Across all of VendCo’s offices,
Tyler tried to impose a highly competitive and aggressive organisational culture that is often found in
many U.S. organisations. This culture alienated many of the international employees. When the
COVID-19 pandemic hit, Tyler’s lack of support for exhausted and overworked staff led to the
resignation of many valuable senior managers. The EMEA region was the only one that retained
most of its senior managers, primarily because Juliette insisted on giving her staff flexible work
schedules and extra time off, paying for it out of her own budget. Tyler felt she was coddling her
staff, but when he confronted her, she refused to back down.
After realizing that Tyler was harming performance across the company, VendCo’s Board of Directors
forced the CEO to fire Tyler and offer the job to Juliette. In her new role as CMO, Juliette meets
regularly on Zoom with the other four members of the leadership team: the CEO, CFO, COO, and
CTO.* The other members are North American men based in Toronto, Boston and New York. They
have been working together for the past five years and Juliette feels like an outsider. Not only is she
a newcomer to the leadership team, but she is also not a native English speaker and finds their
constant use of slang words and colloquialisms challenging to decipher and understand, especially
the sports references and analogies. She also senses that they are not happy about the Board’s
insistence on promoting her to CMO. During meetings, they don’t seem interested in what she has
to say, and she found out recently that they are planning a golfing trip and didn’t invite her. She only
found this out when she tried to book a meeting with the CEO and CFO, and both of their personal
assistants said they would be away at Pebble Beach in California where Juliette knows the CEO likes
to play golf. She then asked about the availability of the COO and CTO and found out that they
would also be in Pebble Beach at the same time.
Juliette wonders if the rest of the leadership team might resent her confrontations with Tyler and
blame her for the Board’s decision to get rid of him. She also knows that the Board has been pushing
the CEO to create a more diverse leadership team for many years which he resisted. Nonetheless,
Juliette is determined to make the most of her new role and create positive change at VendCo.
However, she will need to get the rest of the leadership team to treat her as an equal and listen to
her ideas first.
What are the challenges Juliette faces in her new role? Recommend an action plan for Juliette to
help her become a more influential member of the leadership team. Be sure to use materials from
the course (lectures and readings) to support your analysis and recommendations.
*CFO = Chief Financial Officer, COO = Chief Operating Officer, CTO = Chief Technology Officer