When leading a function outside your expertise (e.g., a comms leader managing BDRs), success depends on hiring a great functional leader. Your role becomes asking them to explain concepts simply until you understand, trusting their expertise, and advocating for their needs, rather than trying to become the expert yourself.

Contrary to the popular advice to 'hire great people and get out of their way,' a CEO's job is to identify the three most critical company initiatives. They must then dive deep into the weeds to guarantee their success, as only the CEO has the unique context and authority to unblock them.

Marketing leaders often fail when hiring for functions they don't deeply understand. Success comes when you've done the job yourself first, like Capsule's marketing lead who ran events before hiring a specialist. This first-hand experience allows you to know precisely what "good" looks like and evaluate candidates effectively.

Marketers trained as perfectionists must abandon micromanaging every interaction in an AI-driven world. True leadership means letting go of the illusion of control to gain the reality of scale. The new role is to govern the system by defining ethical boundaries, tone, and data rules—managing the game, not the player.

A common leadership trap is feeling the need to be the smartest person with all the answers. The more leveraged skill is ensuring the organization focuses on solving the right problem. As Einstein noted, defining the question correctly is the majority of the work toward the solution.

Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.

Many leaders focus on having the correct analysis. However, true leadership requires understanding that being right is useless if you can't persuade and influence others. The most successful leaders shift their focus from proving their correctness to finding the most effective way to communicate and achieve their goals.

Marketers can feel frustrated by the constant need to educate the company on their work. However, effective leaders reframe this perspective, understanding that internal communication and building trust are not distractions from the 'real work'. Instead, they are a core, essential part of the leadership role itself.

Stop defining a manager's job by tasks like meetings or feedback. Instead, define it by the goal: getting better outcomes from a group. Your only tools to achieve this are three levers: getting the right People, defining the right Process, and aligning everyone on a clear Purpose.