Empathy is one of the most praised traits in marketing leadership. It can also be the thing holding a team back. In this kickoff to a summer mini-series of bite-sized leadership episodes, Mandy Hornaday revisits a leadership lesson she has carried for more than a decade, one that reframed what being empathetic to a team means, and walks through the four types of team members that put it to the test.
What is the empathy blindspot in marketing leadership?
The empathy blindspot is pouring so much empathy into one struggling team member that we stop being empathetic to everyone else who picks up the slack.
Mandy traces the lesson to a specific moment: walking through Boston more than ten years ago, listening to Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership. Ramsey's challenge to leaders, as she retells it, was to flip the lens. When we hold onto an underperformer, coaching and training and extending performance plans long after our gut has called it, someone else on the team is carrying the extra weight. In her words:
Are we being empathetic to the rest of the team by having an underperformer on the team? How is the rest of the team feeling by likely having to pick up the slack or overperform or over deliver in order to make sure that the team stays whole and that it hits its goals?
That reframe has stayed with her through more than a decade of leading marketing orgs. Prepping this episode, she counted four scenarios where empathy for one person came at the team's expense. Four types, and four real people behind them.
What should a leader do about a toxic high performer?
Name the behavior early and accept that the results a toxic high performer produces rarely offset the trust they erode.
The Toxic High Performer often gets by on the numbers. Mandy has watched a sales organization turn a blind eye to a notably toxic seller because the results were strong, and she has managed her own share of drama and gossip. The first few times, she tried to work through it and let the person know others were uncomfortable. Her learning after those rounds was blunt: "people like that aren't really going to change." They're probably gossipers in their personal lives too, and no manager changes that. What she does now is acknowledge upfront that the person is unlikely to be a healthy fit for the culture she's trying to build.
When is it time to stop coaching a likable underperformer?
When someone needs three trainings where the rest of the team needs one, and it still isn't landing, the role is probably wrong for the person, and more coaching rarely changes that.
Mandy calls this one The Lovable Low Performer. These are often the warmest, most charismatic people in the company, and everyone enjoys being around them. They also struggle to keep up with what the team is rolling out. There's only so much training you can do, and the invisible cost lands on the high performers doing the mentoring, who end up putting in 10x the coaching effort they'd spend on anyone else. In Mandy's experience, these team members were great culture fits and still weren't the right fit for the role. But good intentions don't build pipeline.
None of this makes coaching optional. Mandy has built much of her work around how great marketing leaders enable their teams. The tell is whether the enablement is landing, or whether the same training keeps getting repeated with the same result.
How should leaders handle a team member who isn't pulling their weight?
Work-life balance and accountability can live together, but when one person's showing up means everyone else covers for them, resentment builds fast.
Mandy describes a pattern many of us will recognize: showing up late, leaving early, somehow always on PTO during peak season or a major campaign launch, sometimes posting on Instagram in the middle of the workday. She's quick with the caveat that she is a huge proponent of work-life balance and of just getting your work done. The frustration starts when someone's contribution falls short and the way they're showing up tracks directly to it. Her approach is to work on it with the person first. If it won't change, moving on is usually kinder to the team than another season of covering, because that work style probably doesn't match what the team expects of each other.
What happens when a longtime top performer can't adapt to change?
A high performer in the old model is not automatically a high performer in the new one, and holding on out of loyalty costs the team its momentum.
Mandy calls this the hardest one to discern and the hardest to act on. Her career includes scaling a B2B services company to $750 million over ten years, which meant transitioning and elevating the team nearly every year. Through those transformations, some people who were high contributors in one model could not get on board with where the team was going next.
Some of the best people that I've worked with for eight years, nine years, 10 years, part of what made them so great was their ability to adapt and their ability to remain agile and flex and change and grow as we grew as an organization.
Loyalty matters. But so does forward momentum. And sometimes the honest answer to a fit problem is rethinking how your marketing team is structured rather than swapping one hire for the next.
How do you know if you're being empathetic to your whole team?
Start with one question: does everyone on the team deserve the seat they have?
Mandy closes the episode with three reflection questions she encourages every leader to sit with:
Does everyone on your team deserve the seat that they have? If you were being empathetic to your entire team, would you make the same decisions? Who comes to mind when you think about someone who might be holding the team back?
From there, three moves worth making this week. Take an honest audit of the team, one seat at a time. Talk to the high performers, because they usually know exactly who is covering for whom. And define the culture non-negotiables, the standards no set of results can buy someone out of. Those standards belong in the operating system a marketing leader builds once, so each hard call after that starts from clarity instead of a fresh round of guilt.
These are hard conversations, and Mandy is quick to say she built a business around coaching and mentoring people. The lesson is about widening the lens to the whole team. So the question worth sitting with this week is a simple one. Who comes to mind?