There is a time, in every marketing story, when the things you are working on do not deliver the expected results. Perhaps you have overpromised, perhaps the campaign is not effective as you imagined, perhaps a pandemic unexpectedly changed the rules of the game, perhaps your team is not as good as it should be, perhaps your leadership is not as good as it should be. One way or the other, pressure mounts, your job is on the line, your team is on the line, and people around you start to question everything you say.

I believe this is the single most important moment.

Because what is easy to do in such cases is to start blurring the boundaries between urgent and important, following shiny objects that can deliver short term results, draining your team to exhaustion and demotivation, putting more weight on opinions and less on facts, limit communication to a restricted circle of trusted people.

And the difficult thing to do is stay the course, spread your message wide, understand what is happening and involving people in finding solutions, expand beyond your team to tap into new knowledge, measure, defuse the situation, learn from the whole process and repeat.

Nobody forces you one way or the other. It is a choice.