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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