I’ve been in my fair share of ineffective marketing teams. And, if I’m being honest, I’ve even led one for a period of time. It wasn’t intentional. I wanted to be a great leader, but juggling getting results, creating a plan, and managing a team felt overwhelming at times. I often defaulted to a very transactional style of leadership, which in hindsight, was exactly what made my team ineffective.
My leadership background started in the Marine Corps, where the leadership style is most certainly not democratic. It’s highly transactional. Orders are given, orders are followed. While there’s certainly a place for that kind of structure, it doesn’t translate well into a marketing team. The Marine Corps has its reasons for operating that way, but in a creative, fast-moving environment, that kind of leadership kills collaboration, trust, and effectiveness.
It took me time to recognize what actually makes a great team. I had plenty of bad examples to learn from (those are always the easiest to spot), but defining what a truly effective team looks like was a longer journey.
Trust is The Foundation of Everything
I worked at a company where one particular lesson stood out: trust isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the core ingredient. If a team doesn’t trust each other, everything falls apart. People hesitate to share ideas. Feedback becomes sugarcoated or, worse, nonexistent. And when mistakes happen (because they always do), they get hidden instead of fixed.
A solid marketing team needs trust on multiple levels:
- Trust that leadership is guiding the team in the right direction. If the team doesn’t believe the marketing lead understands the real problems, they won’t buy in.
- Trust that each person will deliver on their role. The content team needs to trust that SEO isn’t just throwing keywords at them for the sake of it. Designers need to believe that the devs will build things correctly.
- Trust that mistakes won’t be punished, but learned from. If people feel like they’ll be thrown under the bus for a failed experiment, they’ll play it safe. And “safe” marketing isn’t effective marketing.
This isn’t just my opinion. The research backs it up. Google’s study analyzed 180 teams and found five key factors that determine effectiveness:
- Psychological safety: People need to feel safe to take risks and voice opinions.
- Dependability: Everyone does their job and does it well.
- Structure & clarity: The team knows what success looks like and how to get there.
- Meaning: People care about their work.
- Impact: Everyone can see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
Of these, psychological safety was the biggest factor. If people don’t feel comfortable speaking up, the team is dead in the water.
Keeping Leadership Simple
When I was preparing for my first big marketing leadership role, I was deep into reading The Leadership Challenge. The book was packed with insights about defining personal leadership values, creating team values, and embedding those values into everything you do. I took it all seriously, so seriously that I started coming up with acronyms for my personal and soon to be team team values. The problem? I couldn’t remember half of them.
I found myself overcomplicating something that needed to be simple. The more I tried to create structured, elaborate value systems, the more I realized that the best leadership boiled down to three things: trust, respect, and words of affirmation. That’s it. No complex frameworks. No confusing acronyms. Just these three foundational principles. When these exist in a team, people feel valued, work better together, and are generally happier. And honestly, keeping it simple made it easier for me to actually apply in my leadership style.
The Trust Equation
There’s a simple equation I found for trust that I feel applies to marketing teams:
Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation
Let’s break that down:
- Credibility: Do you know what you’re talking about? When you propose a strategy, does it actually help the business, or is it just another SEO/content/social media task?
- Reliability: Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Are you the person who always delivers, or the one who makes excuses?
- Intimacy: How comfortable do people feel around you? Can they tell you when they’ve messed up without fear of judgment?
- Self-orientation: Are you only looking out for yourself, or do you actually care about helping the team win?
If your self-orientation is too high, meaning you’re more focused on your own success than the team’s, your trust level takes a hit. Nobody wants to work with someone who’s only in it for themselves.
Marketing Teams Need Less Ego and More Trust
I’ve seen teams that look great on paper fall apart because trust wasn’t there. I’ve also seen (and proudly led) scrappy, underfunded teams outperform massive organizations simply because they trusted each other and moved fast.
So if you want a truly effective marketing team, forget about hiring a “rockstar” who thinks they have all the answers. Build a team that trusts each other, and the results will follow.
