What New Leadership Research Tells Us About Marketing Teams

A wave of leadership research published in late 2025 has reinforced something that experienced operators have quietly known for years: the skills that get people into senior marketing roles are not the same skills that make them effective once they are there. The gap between technical competence and leadership capability is widening, and most organisations are still not measuring it.

What the research points to, across multiple studies and sectors, is a consistent pattern: marketing leaders who drive commercial outcomes tend to share a small cluster of behaviours around clarity, commercial accountability, and the ability to build functioning teams under pressure. The ones who struggle tend to over-index on channel expertise and under-invest in the people side of the role.

Why Leadership Research Keeps Landing on the Same Problems

There is a reason the same themes keep surfacing in leadership research year after year. It is not that organisations are ignoring the findings. It is that the structural incentives inside most businesses actively reward the wrong behaviours at the point of promotion.

The person who gets promoted to head of marketing is usually the best marketer on the team, not the best potential leader of marketers. Those are related skills but they are not the same skill. A strong paid search specialist who becomes a performance marketing director still needs to understand bidding strategy and attribution, but their primary job has changed. They are now responsible for how a team thinks, not just what it executes. Most organisations do not make that transition explicit, and most newly promoted leaders do not make it themselves.

I have seen this play out at close range more times than I can count. When I was building out the leadership layer at iProspect, one of the most common patterns I encountered was technically excellent people who had been given management responsibility without any real preparation for what that meant. They were still trying to be the best individual contributor in the room, which meant they were not doing the actual job. The team beneath them was either duplicating effort or waiting for direction that never came in a useful form.

The 2025 research cohort does not change this diagnosis. What it adds is a more granular picture of where the breakdown happens and what the downstream commercial consequences look like.

What the Research Actually Measures

Leadership research in a marketing context tends to fall into a few categories. There is the organisational psychology work that looks at behaviours and traits. There is the commercial performance work that tries to correlate leadership characteristics with business outcomes. And there is the practitioner survey work, which captures perception and self-assessment rather than observed behaviour.

All three have value, and all three have limitations. The self-assessment surveys are the most abundant and the least reliable. People are not good at accurately rating their own leadership capability, particularly in areas where they have a professional identity invested. Ask a group of marketing directors whether they are commercially oriented and almost all of them will say yes. Observe how they behave when a campaign is underperforming against revenue targets and you get a different picture.

The more useful research from this cycle tends to combine behavioural observation with outcome data. It looks at what leaders actually do in specific situations, not what they say they would do, and then traces whether those behaviours correlate with team performance, retention, and commercial results. That methodology is harder to execute but produces findings that are worth taking seriously.

If you are building or refining a go-to-market approach and want to understand how leadership capability connects to growth execution, the broader thinking at Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy is worth working through alongside this research.

The Commercial Accountability Gap

One of the clearest findings across the 2025 research is the persistence of what I would call the commercial accountability gap. Marketing leaders, more than leaders in most other functions, tend to operate at a distance from the financial consequences of their decisions. This is partly structural: marketing attribution is genuinely difficult, and the relationship between a brand campaign and a revenue outcome is rarely clean. But it has become a convenient excuse for a broader pattern of avoiding commercial accountability altogether.

The leaders who perform best in the research are the ones who have internalised a commercial frame, not as a constraint on creativity but as the actual purpose of the function. They think in terms of margin contribution, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value. They can hold a conversation with a CFO without needing a translator. They have built enough commercial fluency to know when a marketing investment is working and when it is not, and they are willing to make the call either way.

When I turned around a loss-making agency, the single most important thing I did in the first six months was not a creative or strategic intervention. It was rebuilding the commercial architecture of the business: pricing, delivery margins, team structure, and accountability for P&L at every level. The marketing function inside that business had been running campaigns that looked impressive in a deck but were not connected to anything that moved the financial needle. That is a leadership failure before it is a strategy failure.

BCG’s work on pricing and go-to-market strategy makes a related point: the businesses that struggle most with commercial performance tend to have marketing and commercial functions that are operating on different assumptions about value. That gap starts at the leadership level.

The Pressure Test: Where Leadership Breaks Down

Leadership research is at its most useful when it focuses on behaviour under pressure, because that is when the gap between stated values and actual operating style becomes visible. The 2025 studies that focus on this dimension consistently identify a few failure modes that are worth examining in detail.

The first is the reversion to doing. When a campaign is not performing, or a pitch is in trouble, or a key hire falls through, a significant proportion of marketing leaders respond by taking over the execution themselves rather than directing their team through the problem. This feels productive in the short term. It often produces a better immediate output. But it undermines the team’s capability, signals a lack of trust, and leaves the leader with no bandwidth to think strategically. Over time, it creates teams that wait to be rescued rather than teams that solve problems.

I remember being handed the whiteboard pen in a Guinness brainstorm at Cybercom when I had been in the role for less than a week. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and just handed it over. The internal reaction was something close to panic, but the only option was to run the room. That kind of forced exposure to the leadership role, without a safety net, is actually how a lot of people learn what they are made of. The problem is that most organisations do not create those moments intentionally. They either protect people from them or throw them in without any support structure.

The second failure mode is what the research describes as clarity avoidance. Marketing leaders who struggle under pressure tend to become vague. Priorities multiply. Briefs get longer and less actionable. Team members are given direction that sounds comprehensive but does not actually tell them what to do. This is often a confidence issue dressed up as a process issue, and it is corrosive to team performance at exactly the moment when clear direction matters most.

Forrester’s intelligent growth model framework touches on this dynamic at an organisational level, noting that growth initiatives tend to stall when leadership clarity breaks down during execution. The same principle applies at the team level.

What High-Performing Marketing Leaders Do Differently

The positive findings from the 2025 research are worth spending time on, because they are specific enough to be actionable rather than aspirational.

High-performing marketing leaders tend to have a very clear mental model of what their team is for. Not what it does, but what it is for. That distinction matters. A team that knows it exists to drive qualified pipeline behaves differently from a team that knows it exists to produce content. The leader’s job is to make that purpose explicit and to keep it visible when the day-to-day noise of execution starts to obscure it.

They also tend to be better at separating signal from noise in performance data. This is not about being more analytically sophisticated. It is about having enough commercial experience to know which numbers actually matter and which ones are vanity metrics dressed up as KPIs. Tools like market penetration analysis can surface useful signals, but the leader’s job is to interpret that data in a commercial context, not just report it. Analytics tools, as I have said before, are a perspective on reality. They are not reality itself.

The third differentiator is hiring discipline. The research is consistent on this point: leaders who build strong teams tend to hire more slowly, hold a higher bar for senior roles, and are more willing to leave a position open rather than fill it with someone who is almost right. This sounds obvious but it is genuinely hard to practise when you are under delivery pressure. The temptation to fill a gap quickly is enormous, and the cost of getting it wrong tends to land six to twelve months later when it is much harder to fix.

When I was growing a team from twenty to a hundred people, the hires that caused the most damage were not the ones we agonised over. They were the ones we rushed because we needed someone in post. The pattern was almost always the same: a credible CV, a decent interview, and then a gradual realisation that the person’s operating style did not fit the culture or the commercial reality of the business. The cost of those hires, in management time, team morale, and output quality, was significantly higher than the cost of leaving the role open for another two months.

The Development Gap That Organisations Are Not Closing

Perhaps the most consistent finding across the 2025 research is the gap between what organisations say they invest in leadership development and what they actually do. Most businesses have a formal induction process and some form of annual performance review. Very few have a structured approach to developing the specific leadership behaviours that drive marketing team performance.

The distinction matters because leadership capability in a marketing context is not generic. The skills required to lead a performance marketing team are different from the skills required to lead a brand team, which are different again from the skills required to lead an integrated agency account. Generic leadership training, the kind that covers communication styles and conflict resolution and time management, addresses the surface layer but not the domain-specific judgement that makes the difference in practice.

Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market struggles in complex sectors highlights a related issue: when the leadership layer lacks domain-specific commercial judgement, go-to-market execution tends to default to activity rather than strategy. The team is busy but not effective. That pattern is visible across sectors, not just in healthcare or devices.

The organisations that are closing this gap are doing a few things differently. They are building feedback loops that give marketing leaders real-time visibility into how their behaviour is affecting team performance. They are creating structured exposure to commercial decision-making earlier in marketing careers, rather than waiting until someone is in a director role to introduce P&L thinking. And they are treating leadership development as an operational discipline rather than an HR programme.

Understanding how growth strategy connects to team capability is part of the broader picture. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial side of this in more depth, including how to structure marketing teams around revenue outcomes rather than channel activity.

What to Do With This Research

Leadership research is only useful if it changes how you think about a specific decision. So the practical question is: what does this body of work suggest you should do differently?

If you are hiring a senior marketing role, the research is a strong argument for adding a commercial accountability component to your assessment process. Not just asking candidates whether they are commercially oriented, but testing it. Give them a real scenario involving a budget reallocation under pressure and see how they think through it. Ask them to walk you through a time when a campaign they owned was not working and what they actually did, not what they would do in theory.

If you are managing marketing leaders, the research points to the value of creating explicit pressure-test moments as part of development, not just as a response to crisis. The leaders who handle difficult situations well tend to have had structured exposure to those situations earlier in their careers. That exposure can be created deliberately.

Tools that help teams understand how users are actually behaving, like Hotjar, can surface useful signals for marketing leaders who are trying to build a more honest picture of what is working. But the research is clear that data access is not the constraint. The constraint is the leadership capability to interpret data in a commercial context and make decisions from it.

If you are a marketing leader yourself, the most honest application of this research is to ask where your own operating style defaults under pressure. Most people know the answer if they are willing to look at it. The question is whether you have the structure around you to address it, and whether the organisation you are in is willing to create that structure or just reward the outputs and ignore the process.

The research on growth tools and team capability makes a point worth noting here: the organisations that get the most from their marketing technology tend to have leaders who understand what the tools are measuring and what they are not. That is a leadership literacy issue before it is a technology issue.

The growth hacking literature has spent years arguing that the right tactics can compensate for weak strategy. The leadership research from 2025 is a useful corrective to that view. Tactics do not compensate for weak leadership. They just make the failure more expensive.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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