The modern CMO is expected to be a poet with a spreadsheet, a diplomat with a dashboard and, on difficult mornings, an air-traffic controller for every promise a company makes. Emily Kehinde arrived at that job by learning the less glamorous craft beneath it: how people hear a message, how organizations process change and how sprawling teams turn intention into work.
In November 2024, Cushman & Wakefield promoted Kehinde to Chief Marketing Officer. The announcement gave her responsibility for the commercial real estate firm's global Marketing, Communications and Research functions. Three capitalized nouns; one formidable brief. The company operates with roughly 52,000 people in nearly 400 offices across 60 countries. A global message, in that setting, must travel farther than a campaign line. It has to survive handoffs, markets, technologies and the natural human instinct to interpret every memo in one's own dialect.
Kehinde's career had prepared her for precisely this mess. She studied interpersonal communication at Wheaton College, then organizational communication at Northern Illinois University. One field looks at the space between people; the other studies the space between people and institutions. Put them together and you have a rather useful map for a company that wants to move.
The apprenticeship was the point
Before Cushman & Wakefield, Kehinde held marketing, communications and change-management roles at ABN AMRO, Bank of America and JLL. She also worked for a boutique advisory firm, helping corporate clients including AbbVie, CF Industries, Eli Lilly, Frito-Lay, General Dynamics and W.W. Grainger implement transformation initiatives. The industries changed. The recurring problem did not: a strategy is only as real as the people who can understand it, trust it and act on it.
Her LinkedIn introduction adds a small, revealing prelude: “Former public speaking teacher.” Teaching someone to stand up, order a thought and deliver it to a room is excellent training for corporate life, where the rooms grow larger but the fear of being misunderstood remains. It also explains the plainness of the identity she chooses for herself online: creative problem solver, builder, connector of dots. There is no decorative fog in that list. Each phrase is a verb wearing office clothes.
Kehinde joined Cushman & Wakefield in 2019. Her early work there centered on global employee communication and change management, first as a director and later as a vice president. She eventually became Senior Vice President of Marketing Operations. In that position, she was responsible for operational efficiency, strategic initiatives and the global Marketing, Communication and Research operating budget. She also led centers of excellence spanning digital marketing, property data and insights, corporate marketing, corporate communications and change management.
This was not a detour on the way to the big creative job. It was the education for it. Marketing operations is where ambition meets invoices, where a global idea confronts a local workflow and where a new platform discovers that employees already have six passwords. Running the operating budget and the centers that produce data, digital work and communication gave Kehinde a view of the whole machine. When the CMO remit opened, she already knew which gears were ornamental and which ones drove the clock.
A campaign is an organization speaking
The visible proof arrived in the company's first global advertising campaign. In a 2026 ChicagoCMO profile, Kehinde described a brand repositioning carried out both internally and externally. The campaign moved across out-of-home placements, digital channels, television, podcasts and media platforms. She said it reached more impressions than the firm's previous campaigns, drove website clicks and generated thousands of leads.
Those are the tidy outcomes, ready for a dashboard. Her more interesting observation concerned ownership. The work refreshed the company's purpose and values, visually separated it from competitors and allowed the firm to take greater control of its own narrative. A campaign, in this reading, is not paint applied to the business. It is the business deciding how it wishes to be recognized - then assembling enough evidence to make the recognition stick.
Out-of-home · digital · television · podcasts · media
Commercial real estate makes this especially demanding. The company serves property owners and occupiers through leasing, capital markets, valuation, project management and other advisory work. The audience includes people making expensive, durable decisions about where organizations and assets belong. A glossy phrase may open the door; market intelligence, service delivery and trust keep anyone in the room.
Kehinde's remit joins brand and marketing with research because the three disciplines need one another. Research gives a global firm something useful to say. Communications makes it legible. Marketing finds the audience and asks for action. Separate them too cleanly and they become three departments trading attachments. Connect them and a market report can become a conversation, a campaign can become demand and an employee can understand how the promise relates to the work.
The quiet skill: making consensus move
Colleagues' public recommendations make the operating style more concrete. One former teammate recalled Kehinde joining a large ERP implementation midway through several overlapping projects. She quickly learned the culture, strengthened the communications plan and built relationships with internal and external participants. Another described her as pragmatic, able to accommodate different points of view and draw consensus rapidly.
Consensus has a bad reputation because it can resemble a meeting that has misplaced its ending. Rapid consensus is different. It means discovering what people actually disagree about, giving the disagreement useful language and moving the decision forward before everyone begins discussing lunch. That ability is valuable in any enterprise. In a global brand organization, it is infrastructure.
Kehinde also served from 2023 through 2024 as national chair of PACT, Cushman & Wakefield's Parents & Caregivers Together employee resource group. It fits the pattern of a career concerned with the human experience inside the system. Employee engagement appears alongside marketing technology and demand generation in her listed areas of expertise. She does not treat internal understanding as the soft cousin of external performance. The people delivering a brand are part of its media plan, whether the spreadsheet admits it or not.
The useful lesson in the route
Executive profiles often smooth careers into inevitability. This one is more useful when read as accumulation. Interpersonal communication taught attention to the audience. Organizational communication widened the frame. Banking and real estate added complex institutions. Advisory work introduced transformation across different corporate cultures. Change management supplied method. Marketing operations added systems, budgets and measurement. The CMO role did not replace those layers. It made them visible at once.
There is a practical lesson here for anyone chasing a larger title. Kehinde's path suggests that the route to broader creative authority can run through operational responsibility. Learn the budget. Understand the platform. Notice where data stalls. Find out why the elegant process confuses the person expected to use it. Become the person who can connect those dots without pretending the dots enjoy being connected.
Her Prosci change-management certification, earned in 2016, is a modest line on a résumé but a clue to the larger philosophy. Change is not complete when leadership announces it. A message has to cross the distance between decision and behavior. The same is true of marketing. Attention is only the opening move; belief, action and memory are the rest of the game.
The Chicago setting adds an apt bit of texture. Kehinde studied in Illinois, built much of her career around its large institutions and now works from the city where Cushman & Wakefield is headquartered. Chicago understands that a handsome façade is only as convincing as the structure behind it. Marketing has the same building code. The promise can be elegant, but it still needs research underneath, operations behind the walls and people who know where the doors lead. Her career has moved steadily through each of those layers, from the close-range work of interpersonal communication to a brand that must function across continents.
That breadth also guards against a common executive temptation: confusing visibility with importance. The campaign gets the billboard. The budget, governance model and employee explanation do not. Yet a global launch can only move as fast as its slowest unresolved dependency. Kehinde's record is largely a record of taking responsibility for those dependencies before stepping onto the larger stage.
By 2026, Kehinde had more than two decades of experience and a place among the Super Global finalists in the inaugural ChicagoCMO ORBIE Awards. The recognition followed a year in which her team gave Cushman & Wakefield a new global campaign and a more deliberate public narrative. She credited the team. That, too, belongs in the pattern: the connector of dots does not claim to have invented the dots.
A century-old real estate company must speak to markets being reshaped by data, workplace change and new expectations from owners and occupiers. Kehinde's job is to make that voice coherent without sanding away its usefulness. Her career offers a steady answer to the modern CMO's expansive brief. Build before broadcasting. Translate before insisting. Leave the system better, and the story has a chance to travel.