Case Study
Marketing leadership can be messy. Teams are under pressure. Expectations keep rising. And the answers aren’t always obvious.
This is where Kirsten shares opinions and lessons from the field and perspectives on marketing leadership, capability, strategy and performance – designed to help marketers, teams and businesses. Practical thinking, honest observations and ideas you can put to work immediately.
Kirsten Craven, Founder and Senior Marketing Partner, Flock Effect
You’ve hired someone capable. You can see their potential. You’re genuinely invested in their growth.
And then something happens. A moment so small it barely registers on paper. And you find yourself genuinely wondering if this person understands the environment they’re operating in. It’s rarely about the marketing.
None of these things are catastrophic in isolation. But each one plants a quiet question that’s very hard to unplant.
Can I trust this person to represent the team without me in the room?
My first real exposure to this lesson came before I even had my first proper marketing job. In my final year of university, I worked on reception at an advertising agency. My desk sat right beside the Head of Production. He was loud, blunt, expletive-heavy, and larger than life. He scared a lot of people because he wouldn’t suffer fools and would tell you straight if you didn’t stack up. Tell you to “Go away and come back when you’ve sorted yourself out”.
Confronting.
But under all of that, he had a very big soft heart. And he was extraordinarily honest. Because of where my desk was, I got to listen. Hallway conversations. Foyer exchanges. Him venting, loudly, when someone had done something that fell short. Not the work, usually. The behaviour. The judgment. The way someone had handled themselves in a moment that mattered. Over time, he took me under his wing. Explained things in his way. Helped me see the world through his frame of reference and, subsequently, through the frames of others. He taught me, without ever using the words, to actively consider how I was perceived. How I needed to show up. How prepared I should be before I walk into a room.
When I landed my first proper role in account service at that same agency, I like to think I wasn’t starting so far behind because of that education. It wasn’t formal. Nobody scheduled it. It happened because I was paying attention, and because someone who was harsh but fair chose to invest in me.
The second moment of realisation came early in my career, from a boss who gave me permission I didn’t know I needed.
He made it clear: if I was at my desk all day, I wasn’t doing my job well. He actively encouraged the team to be out of the office, meeting clients, walking the halls, deepening relationships and becoming a genuine extension of the client’s team. Being reliable. Earning trust. Being a good person.
What a privilege that was. To have someone in a position of authority tell you, at the start of your career, that relationships aren’t a distraction from the work. They are the work. Most people don’t get that framing early. They have to figure it out after a few hard lessons, or, in some cases, they never quite get there.
There are a few reasons this gap rarely gets addressed directly.
Sometimes it feels awkward to raise. Leaders worry the conversation will land as criticism of character rather than coaching on craft. Sometimes there’s an assumption that these things are common sense, that surely anyone operating at this level already understands the unwritten rules. That assumption is wrong more often than most people realise.
And sometimes the person on the receiving end of that feedback will hear it as nitpicking. As micromanagement. As a leader who can’t let go. That response, when it happens, makes leaders less likely to raise these things the next time. So the gap quietly widens, and nobody names it.
The result is that a whole layer of professional intelligence, the kind that actually determines who gets trusted with more, goes largely undiscussed. It lives in performance reviews as vague language about ‘stakeholder management’ or ‘presence’. It shows up in conversations between leaders that the marketer in question never gets to hear.
A mid-level marketer isn’t just doing a job. They’re carrying a signal about the standard and culture of the entire marketing function every time they interact with a stakeholder, agency partner, colleague, supplier, or anyone outside their immediate
team.
The CMO’s credibility travels with them, whether they know it or not.
I’ve seen this play out in concrete, commercial ways. How a poorly delivered brief or an ill-considered request can be genuinely offensive to an agency team. Dismissive. Disrespectful.
And once that relationship is strained, it is very hard to repair. You stop getting the A team. People in other departments become less willing to give up their time. The CMO becomes an unintentional bottleneck, because the people in their team can’t be trusted to hold a commercially astute, constructive conversation without them present.
That is not a small consequence. That function becomes quietly limited by its own people.
I’ve seen genuinely talented marketers, people whose work is strong, who don’t progress the way they expect to. And it’s hard, because they often don’t understand why.
They’ve been at the organisation long enough. They’ve delivered results. They expect the next step to be a natural progression. But at a certain point, what’s being assessed isn’t the work anymore. It’s the aptitude for leadership. The commercial astuteness. The ability to read a room without being told what’s in it. To understand, without it being said, what the play is and how to show up for best impact.
When that recognition doesn’t come, the frustration is real. Some people start to become resentful. Less generous with their time. Cynical. Less of a team player. And that compounds the very problem that was holding them back in the first place.
The tragedy is that for most of them, nobody ever clearly named the gap. So they couldn’t close it.
One of the people I’ve most enjoyed managing was a Marketing Manager I inherited when I joined an organisation. I didn’t hire her. We had to learn how to work together from scratch.
Early on, she challenged me. She felt I was too involved, checking too much, not giving her enough room to run. And I’m glad she said it, because it opened a conversation I still think about.
I explained that my involvement in the early days wasn’t about distrust. It was about responsibility. I couldn’t have her back until I understood where she was: her strengths, her gaps, the work, and the soft skills. As I learned to trust her, I’d back off. That’s the deal.
She took it as a challenge. And she worked. She was curious about everything. She asked ‘why’ constantly, but she was clever about the moments she chose: cabs, planes, walking to meetings, the cafe line. Always respectful, never onerous. She wanted to understand the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves.
She was watching how I went about my days. Noticing patterns. Picking and choosing what she admired and what she’d do differently, and building her own version of it. That is exactly the work. And it made her an absolute joy to manage, because I could trust her in the room without me. I knew the signal she’d carry.
Careers don’t usually stall because of the work. They stall because of the moments between the work. The ones nobody ever thought to teach, nobody ever thinks to ask about, and when they do get raised, are too easy to brush off as not that important.
But they are important. How you show up when nobody’s formally evaluating you. How you treat the people around you. Whether you understand that you’re a representative of something bigger than your own to-do list.
The leaders who get that early are the ones who stop being managed and start being trusted. And the ones who get there fastest are almost always the ones who were curious enough to ask why, and self-aware enough to act on what they heard.
That’s the gap that costs more than most people realise. And it’s almost never the gap anyone talks about.
Kirsten Craven is the Founder and Senior Marketing Partner of Flock Effect, a fractional marketing leadership practice based in Melbourne. She works with CMOs, Heads of Marketing and business owners who want experienced, senior marketing support without the overhead of a permanent hire.
