Long term support and advisory board member of Little Grey cells Club, Cecilia Weckstrom’s latest paper
The best leaders I’ve watched did less than the ones who struggled. And what they built outlasted them by years.
I sat in on a team meeting eighteen months after a leader I admired had left. Same time, same room, same agenda. The meetings used to crackle. Now it was a status report. Smooth, polite, empty. A new hire told me they did things a certain way because “that’s just how it was set up.” She couldn’t say by whom. The rituals were still running. The thinking behind them had gone.
The leader was brilliant, trusted, self-aware. She’d done everything the books say. And within eighteen months the whole thing had quietly unravelled.
Here’s the trap for any marketing leader running a function through AI adoption. A deeply trusted leader who personally holds the judgement together is a single point of failure. The better they are at it, the more invisible the gap becomes. Everyone feels it working.
Nobody notices it works because of one person.
The full piece is about the leadership that doesn’t fall into this. The kind that builds judgement which reproduces, and survives its own absence.
Read the full piece here
