Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Growth Activated is a podcast for B2B marketing leaders who want to elevate their marketing strategies, lead confidently, and drive real business results. Each episode offers actionable insights and proven frameworks to help you activate growth for your team, your company, and your career.
Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Are You Being Empathetic - or Avoiding the Hard Call? A Leadership Lesson Every B2B Marketing Leader Needs
Welcome to a special summer mini-series on Growth Activated, where we’re keeping things short, actionable, and full of value for marketing leaders looking to elevate their impact.
In this kickoff episode, Mandy Walker shares one of the most memorable leadership lessons she’s ever received - something that changed the way she thinks about empathy, accountability, and what it really means to lead a high-performing team.
If you’ve ever wrestled with whether to keep an underperformer, dealt with a toxic team member, or struggled to let go of someone who “used to be great,” this episode is a must-listen. You’ll walk away with a powerful reframing to help you lead with clarity and confidence.
We cover:
- The leadership mindset shift that changed Mandy’s approach forever
- 4 common team scenarios that undermine morale and growth
- How to balance empathy with performance as a B2B marketing leader
- Reflection questions to help you assess your current team dynamics
Whether you're leading a marketing org or growing your career in B2B, this episode will challenge your thinking and help you become a stronger, more strategic leader.
🎧 Tune in for a quick hit of insight—and get back to enjoying your summer while still investing in your leadership growth.
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00:00 – Welcome to Growth Activated: B2B Marketing Leadership Series Intro
Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Walker, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence and build careers they love.
If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hey everyone. Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandi Walker, your host. And today we're going to be starting off with a new mini series that I'm excited about. So if you're anything like me, it's summertime right now and you just want to be outside. You want to be with your family. You want to be having fun.
00:52 – Why Bite-Sized Episodes? Staying Sharp While You Unplug
And I am right there with you. So what I thought we could try are some weekly bite-sized episodes that are about 10 to 15 minutes max, and that really cover some of the best leadership tips and lessons that I've experienced over the last 15 years of being a marketing leader. And so we'll combine leadership, we'll combine marketing tactics and strategies. It'll be a little bit of everything.
And I'm excited to bring that to you guys here and I hope you enjoy it. And certainly would love your feedback as you're listening to this, if it's helpful. So let's go ahead and jump right in. So today's leadership lesson is something that has been ingrained in my mind for at least the last 10 years. Have you ever been listening to a podcast or reading a book or seen a quote and it's just really stuck with you over the years? Well, today's leadership lesson is exactly like that for me.
01:43 – The Leadership Lesson That Changed My Perspective on Team Performance
And I remember exactly where I was walking down the streets in Boston 10 plus years ago, listening to this book Entrez Leadership by Dave Ramsey, which by the way, I would recommend it's not just for entrepreneurs, but it's for entrepreneurial leaders, which really resonated with me early on in my career. And the leadership lesson that Dave Ramsey talked about was this idea of whether or not you're being empathetic to your entire team.
when you're trying to be empathetic to one particular team member. And so the context that he shared was this idea about how oftentimes as leaders, when we have someone who's underperforming on the team, we want to be as empathetic as possible and hold onto that person and help them and coach them and train them and put them on those performance plans. And oftentimes we hang on to people far too long that we truly in our hearts know just won't work out.
02:38 – The Empathy Blindspot: Are You Hurting the Team by Helping One Person?
And so what he challenged us to think about as leaders was the flip side of that empathy and consider it through the lens of the rest of your team. Are we being empathetic to the rest of the team by having an under performer 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.
And while this stuck with me at the time when I heard it and felt like it made a lot of sense, it has been such a helpful tip for me to refer back to over and over again throughout my career. And so as I was prepping for today's episode, I was reflecting back in terms of what were the types of situations where I was not necessarily being fair and empathetic to the rest of the team because of the under performer on my current team that I was really trying to help. And so I've come up with four different scenarios.
03:33 – 4 Types of Team Members That Undermine Growth
Frankly, there's four different people that come to mind, but really these scenarios, I've had many, many team members over the years fall into a few of these. And so the first one that came to mind for me is the team member who's toxic. Okay. Well, oftentimes I find that a lot of times these toxic team members are also high performers and that's a lot of times how they get by with it. Right. And so when I think about a toxic culture fit,
04:01 – Toxic High Performers: Culture Fit vs. Skill Set in B2B Teams
I think about people who are creating drama or gossiping or talking behind others backs, or honestly, in even more extreme situations, people who are mistreating others or have even had sexual harassment claims. While I've never had that on my team necessarily, I've worked with people in environments on the sales team where it was pretty notable that this person was pretty toxic, but because they were such a high performer, the company turned a blind eye.
Right. And that's really not fair and empathetic to the rest of the team. Now I've experienced this the most when it comes to drama and gossiping. And frankly, for the first few times with that, when I had people on the team like this, I tried to work through it. I tried to let them know that others were uncomfortable by it. But at the end of the day, something that I've learned is that people like that aren't really going to change. They're probably also gossippers in their personal life and I can't change that. And so learning for me has been.
to just acknowledge upfront that that person is likely not going to be a healthy fit for the team and the culture I'm trying to build. The second person on the team or type of person on the team that is not really fair and empathetic to everybody else to keep is the one who just doesn't get it. And so I think back and a lot of times for me, at least the people who don't get it are often so lovely and so charismatic and everybody on the team or the company.
05:26 – When Someone Just Doesn’t Get It (Even if They’re Likable)
really enjoys being around this person, but along those lines, they might struggle to really keep up with what we're rolling out or need three trainings on something instead of the one that everybody else needs. And so again, I think there's times for me where I've just realized that the role that we're looking to fill is just not the right fit for the person that was in that role when they don't get it like that. Unfortunately, there's only so much training you can.
do. And again, if we're being fair and empathetic to the rest of the team, it's not necessarily fair on the rest of the team who's likely in charge of mentoring and training and coaching to have to do 10x the amount of work that they would have to do with other team members. So in my experience, while those people have been great culture fits for the team, Naa was the best high performer on the team and therefore just isn't the best fit.
06:18 – Work Ethic & Accountability: The Friction Within High-Performing Teams
The third type of person I've encountered on the team that has proven not to be a fair and empathetic way to treat the rest of the team is the one who doesn't work very hard. Have you ever worked with someone who shows up late, they leave early, they constantly seem to be on PTO during the peak seasons or when there's really large campaigns being rolled out? Sometimes they're on Instagram in the middle of the day posting about all of the lovely things they're doing. I've seen this to varying levels of extremes and
Let me be clear, I am a huge proponent of work-life balance and just getting your work done. But when someone isn't performing or delivering or contributing equally on the rest of the team and the way they're showing up is directly correlated to that, the rest of your team is going to get very frustrated. I've encountered that as well a few different times. And certainly again, you want to be able to work on it with a person, but if it's not going to change, then what I have found is it's just best to move on.
because their work style is probably not the same as the work style that is expected on the team. And the fourth type of person and scenario that I've run up against this with, which is a little bit harder to discern for me and a little bit harder for me to part ways with these types of people, but it's really the people who can't get on board after a major transition and change. I throughout my career have done a lot of different marketing transformations over the years. I mean, that's naturally going to happen when you...
07:45 – Navigating Change: Leading Marketing Teams Through Transformation
When you work for a company that grows from 50 million to 750 million and in the course of 10 years, right? Every year, it seemed like I had to transition and elevate and evolve the team. And what I noticed was even if someone was a high performer or high contributor in one model, once we transformed the team and had to continue the evolution of where we were going, the people that could not get on board or jump on the train with where we were going, oftentimes.
It wasn't going to work out even if they were high performer in their past days. 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. And so I've recognized it's really hard to keep old mindsets and the friction.
to change when the rest of the team is really trying to evolve and grow. And so I've had to make some really tough decisions there. So while those are just four of the examples and scenarios that I've run into, to be fair and empathetic to the rest of the team, I would encourage each and every one of you to think about the team members that are surrounding you, whether they're your peers or whether they're your direct reports or frankly, whether they're your superiors.
09:05 – Leadership Reflection: Are You Making Fair Decisions for the Whole Team?
And think about which scenarios and which individuals might the organization or you as a leader be trying to be empathetic to and yet disregarding the empathy that the rest of the team deserves and requires. So a few personal reflection questions, I would just encourage you to ask yourself, 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? So while these are hard conversations to have, and I'm certainly a proponent of helping and coaching and mentoring people. mean, creating a business around it, right? I am all about mentoring and coaching and leadership, but this was a really important lesson and light bulb moment for me to think about things through different light and to reverse the perspective that we have and think about it from the perspective of the entire team.
All right, everyone. Well, I promised you short and quick. I hope that this was helpful and I hope there's a takeaway in here that lets you be a better leader and a stronger leader. And I'll let you get back to enjoying your summer. See you next time. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague in B2B marketing.
The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
