Leading a digital team with positivity and curiosity
Digital marketing changes too fast for any leader to have every answer. The teams that keep up are built on trust, curiosity and room for people to do their best work.
I've always been energized by people — building trust, sparking ideas, and creating space for others to do their best work. The longer I've worked in digital marketing, the more convinced I am that this isn't the soft side of the job. It's the part that makes everything else possible.
Nobody can know everything anymore
Digital marketing now spans web, social, email, paid media, content, search, analytics and, increasingly, AI. No single person is expert in all of it, and the platforms change underneath us every year. A leader who needs to have every answer becomes the bottleneck.
The alternative is to lead with questions. What are you seeing? What would you try? What did we learn? Asking with curiosity gets better ideas on the table and signals that everyone's expertise counts.
Positivity is a practice, not a personality
Leading with positivity doesn't mean pretending everything is fine. It means assuming good intent, focusing on what can be done, and celebrating progress out loud. In a function that often gets asked to do more with less, that tone sets whether people bring energy or just get through the week.
The team's mood is a leadership decision, made a little at a time.
Develop people on purpose
Talent development is one of the parts of leadership I care about most. A few habits help:
- Stretch assignments with support — the project that's slightly beyond someone's current skills.
- Regular, specific feedback, not just at review time.
- Visibility — putting team members in front of leadership to present their own work.
- Learning time protected on the calendar, especially for fast-moving areas like AI and analytics.
Connect the dots for the team
Much of a leader's job is context. Why does this campaign matter? How does this project connect to what the business needs this year? When people understand the larger goal, they make better decisions on their own — and the work gets more creative, not less.
Make it safe to experiment
Digital work improves through testing, and testing means some things won't work. If a team is punished for a campaign that underperformed, they'll stop trying new things and start playing it safe. I'd rather hear "we tried this, here's what we learned" than never hear about the experiment at all. The rule I try to hold to: small, deliberate bets, reviewed honestly, with credit for the learning as well as the wins.
Bring others along
Digital work in a professional-services firm always depends on people outside the marketing team: subject-matter experts, business development leads, executives, HR. Building those relationships — listening first, making it easy to contribute, sharing credit generously — is how a small team ends up with a big impact.
The combination is the point
The most effective leaders I've worked with weren't defined by one strength. They combined strategy, creativity, technical range and the ability to bring people along. That's the combination I keep working to build — in myself and in the people around me.