Category: Skill Up

Marketing leader reviewing performance dashboards and team connections to show why marketing success depends on people leadership

Why The Best Marketing Leaders Know the Hardest Part Of Marketing Leadership Isn’t Strategy & Execution 一 It’s The People.

If your marketing isn’t working, there’s a good chance it’s a people problem.

Modern work rewards visible activity. If you look busy, people assume you’re a top performer — even when that activity doesn’t move anything forward.

So it’s not surprising that leadership, particularly in marketing, has fallen into this same trap where activity gets mistaken for leadership.

Today, many marketing leaders believe leadership is pointing to others and saying, “Do.”

Then they get to work on the business of said “real” leadership: emails, edits, pings and “Just checking in 一 done yet?” messages on Slack.

But emails and edits aren’t leadership.

It can look like leadership from the outside, but it’s performance. And performance is demanding. It leaves little room for actual leadership — establishing clarity, aligning teams, providing context and lining people up to deliver on projects and hit goals.

When you’re stuck performing, things like empathy, curiosity, patience and investment in others are the first things to go because they start to feel like annoying “delays.”

And that’s no bueno in a big way because those are the very things that make leadership and collaboration work at all.

Here’s what this all looks like in real life.

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Marketing laptop displaying an abstract AI visualization representing generative AI and intelligent search in a modern B2B workspace

Generative AI in Marketing Isn’t Just About “Free” Blog Posts — It’s Actually Fueling a Next Generation Customer Search Experience For B2B Buyers

“Marketing is a one-way street. Public relations, however, is a two-way street that allows communication back and forth with audiences.”

This quote echoes a message that bounced around the walls of the PR agencies I worked at early in my career.

The sentiment is accurate, but its spread fell short, likely because its arbiters were PR practitioners (LOL).

But all these years later, as a result of generative AI use in marketing — particularly its application in customer experience and engagement efforts — the idea has experienced a resurgence of sorts.

Of course these days most conversations focused on applications of generative AI in marketing revolve around marketers coping by calling themselves “prompt engineers” and CEOs exploring ways to gut content creation budgets. 

But lurking underneath these developments is the message those old PR sages relayed to me so many years ago: the best way to engage prospects and create customers is via two-way conversation.

A give and take — a dialogue instead of a monologue. 

Because for too long, organizations have have been standing on a ledge shouting in one direction, never considering any other way of doing things.

And unless we change course, it’s easy to imagine the nightmare ahead of us: short-sighted marketers forever shouting one-way messages into the void without ever considering that customers are actually seeking a “two-way street” exchange of information.

Oh, and that void? It’s now expanded to infinity in size due to the ever-growing, endless amount of garbage generative AI produces.

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