When Your Best Marketer Becomes a Project Manager
A boss of mine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used to talk about the highest and best use of your time. He borrowed the phrase from real estate, where it names the most valuable thing a piece of land could become. Applied to a person, it points at the work only they can do well.
I've thought about that phrase a lot while watching how in-house marketing teams spend their days.
I’ve worked with companies where a single marketing project can carry a dozen handoffs. None of them are wasteful. Each one has a reason. But everyone needs a hand on it, someone tracking the status, chasing the approval, moving it to the next person. And that hand usually belongs to whoever is most capable, which is often the same person who should be writing or designing.
What gets absorbed first
Here is what I've noticed. When a marketer spends half the week on coordination, the first thing to disappear isn't a task with a number attached to it. Most marketing skills come with a metric. SEO has rankings, paid has its cost per acquisition. When those slip, a dashboard turns red and someone asks why.
Storytelling has no dashboard. When the person who can find the real story is busy managing a calendar, the brand voice doesn't break. It slowly flattens into something competent and forgettable, and nobody flags it, because there's no number that went down.
The cost shows up later and somewhere else. A prospect reads the site and feels nothing in particular. A pitch sounds like every other pitch in the category. By the time anyone connects that back to a writer who got pulled into status meetings eight months earlier, the trail has gone cold.
I've written before about how easy it is to overwrite an authentic voice without noticing. This is the quiet version of the same problem. The voice erodes under the weight of good people spending their best hours on necessary work that was never their highest and best use.
Where the effort goes
The companies where I see this most clearly are not the ones cutting corners. They're the ones putting in the effort and not seeing it in the results. They've hired good people. They're shipping work. And still the marketing doesn't reflect the quality of the business behind it.
Often the reason is structural. Three or four genuinely talented people are each stretched one skillset too thin, and their best hours go to keeping projects on track rather than building the things that would grow the business. Everyone is busy. Nobody is doing their highest and best use.
It compounds quietly. The coordination doesn't get lighter as the team grows, it gets heavier, because more people means more handoffs to manage. So the most senior creative keeps absorbing it, and the gap between what the company can do and how it sounds keeps widening.
The answer isn't always to hire more people. Sometimes it's looking honestly at where your most talented person spends Tuesday morning, and whether that's what you hired them to do.