Hiring
Don't hand the keys to the wrong person
Deciding and doing are two different jobs. Most companies write them as one and hope.
The Job Posting
Now Hiring
Marketing Manager
Full-time · Responsibilities
That first list is a real job. A good marketing manager runs the calendar, executes a chunk of it, and directs the people handling the rest. Plenty of them are excellent at exactly this.
Same person. Same salary. Same one calendar.
The last three are the ones that should worry you.
The Split
What happened there is two jobs got written as one.
Hover or tap either side.
Job One
Deciding
- What are we trying to achieve this year
- Which two things matter and which eight don't
- Where the budget goes and what gets cut
- What we're willing to be known for
- Whether the agency is worth keeping
Job Two
Doing and directing
- Running the calendar
- Writing and building the campaigns
- Briefing the agency and the freelancers
- Keeping the site current
- Pulling the reports
Both are real work. Both take skill. They're not the same skill and they don't take the same kind of experience.
Somebody who's excellent at the right-hand column has usually never been given the left-hand one.
That's not a knock on them. Nobody gets good at deciding by being handed tasks.
The Pattern
Here's how it plays out, and it's remarkably consistent.
The strategic work is the part with no deadline. Nobody's chasing you for the annual plan on a Tuesday. But the newsletter goes out Thursday and somebody will notice if it doesn't.
So the doing wins. Every week.
Not because anyone chose that, but because urgent beats important when one person holds both.
A year in, there's a lot of activity and no direction. Leadership decides marketing isn't working. Sometimes the person gets replaced, and the next one inherits the identical job.
Nothing changes, because the job was the problem.
The Real Cost
The execution gap is expensive. The decision gap is worse.
When you hand someone the keys to strategy who's never had them, you don't get bad decisions. You get defaults. The channel they already know. The thing the last company did. Whatever the agency recommended, because who else is going to say otherwise.
None of that looks like a mistake in the moment. It looks like a plan.
You find out eighteen months later, when the numbers haven't moved and nobody can explain why.
The Fix
What to do instead.
Split the role honestly.
Hire for execution and be clear that's what it is. Then put the strategic decisions somewhere they can actually be made.
Give the strategic seat to someone who's held it.
Full time if you can justify it, fractional if you can't. The point isn't the arrangement, it's that the person has done it before.
If you're not going to do either, own the decisions yourself.
That's a real option. Not a great one, but it beats handing them to someone and then being disappointed.
What doesn't work is writing one job description with both in it and hoping.
Most marketing hires that fail didn't fail at their job.
They failed at a job that was never possible, and nobody said so out loud when it was written.