Wag’n Tails / Leadership + team building
Creating the
Conditions for
Good Work
how can I help?
When I joined Wag’n Tails, I came into a newly created Digital Marketing Manager role inside a marketing function that was itself still being defined.
There were talented people, plenty of work, and no shortage of ideas. What was missing was clarity.
As my role grew, one of the things I became most passionate about was creating the structure, confidence and ownership that allowed the people around me to do better work.
Before you can lead the work, you have to understand the friction.
The challenge was not that people were incapable. The function had grown without enough structure.
Ownership was fuzzy. Priorities competed with each other. Work arrived from everywhere. Roles overlapped. Process was thin. Strategy and execution were not yet in the same conversation.
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Unclear ownership
It was hard to tell who was supposed to move a piece of work forward.
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Priority overload
Too many things felt urgent for any of them to have a real place in line.
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Work entering from everywhere
Requests arrived from every direction, with no shared way in.
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Overlapping roles
People were covering the same ground, or leaving a gap between them.
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Limited process
The next step often lived in someone’s memory.
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Strategy vs. execution
There was plenty of doing, and not enough shared agreement about why.
The problem wasn’t effort. It was clarity.
How can I help?
My instinct was not to tell everyone how to do their jobs.
I wanted to know where people were stuck. What was unclear. What fell through the cracks. What someone was good at, but had not been allowed to own. What they actually needed from me.
I was not a flawless manager. I cared, and I worked at it.
As my responsibilities expanded, those questions became the way I led.
I don’t believe leadership is about becoming the person everyone needs for every answer. I think good leadership creates more people who feel confident answering for themselves.
The goal was never to become the system.
I have worked in places where the important processes lived in one person’s head. That can make someone look indispensable. I think it is terrible for a team.
The priority became systems that continue whether I am in the room or not.
- Request
- Prioritize
- Assign
- Create
- Review
- Deliver
- Measure / learn
Good systems should reduce dependence on memory, hierarchy and heroics.
At Wag’n Tails that looked like ordinary things. A shared task list, so the work had a status and a next place to go. Campaign planning in one sheet, so a launch did not depend on whoever remembered it. A marketing hub on SharePoint, so people knew where to look. Priorities the team could see together.
When the work had a place to live, people did not have to wait for me to remember it.
Clarity is kindness.
There is a particular frustration in being accountable for something when you are not sure whether you own it.
As Marketing grew, I defined roles, responsibilities, and decision rights across the work we were actually doing.
- Digital experience
- Campaigns
- Content
- Segment marketing
- Creative production
- Events
- Internal communications
- Salesforce / marketing technology
- Reporting
- Customer journey
- Partnerships
- Product launches
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Owner
Moves the work forward.
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Contributors
Expertise improves it.
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Approver
Final decision when needed.
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Informed
Visibility without being in every decision.
Clear ownership did not mean people stayed in narrow boxes. It meant people could collaborate without constantly wondering who was supposed to move something forward.
Helping someone else become the leader.
One of the most meaningful parts of this work was managing someone who was herself already in a management-level position. That changed how I thought about leadership.
My job was not to make every decision for her. It was to help her trust her judgment enough to make more of them herself.
I wanted her to know where she had authority. I wanted her to challenge me. I wanted her to understand the strategy behind a decision, and to own the work that played to her strengths.
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Ask before answering
“What do you think we should do?”
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Give context
Share the reason behind a decision, so the next decision has something to stand on.
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Hand over ownership
Authority, not just a longer list of tasks.
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Back people publicly
When someone owns a call, stand with it where other people can see.
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Let people be better than you
Leave room for someone else’s judgment to be the better one.
My favorite leadership moments were the ones where someone stopped needing my answer.
Leadership does not belong to an org chart.
A title can give someone authority. It cannot make them thoughtful, accountable, curious, or willing to help.
Some of the people who influenced the work most did not report to me. A lot of what we were trying to do depended on engineering, sales, customer care, production, technology, operations, and the people leading those teams.
- Marketing
- Engineering
- Quality
- Production
- Sales
- Customer care
- Technology
- Operations
- Leadership
Cross-functional leadership often meant connecting people who had pieces of the same problem but were not yet working from the same picture.
One example is The Next Mile.
Sometimes leadership means creating a boundary.
As Marketing was pulled into more of the company, I could see the difference between being helpful and becoming responsible for everything.
A capable team attracts more work. Without priorities, helpful people become overloaded because they are willing.
My responsibility was the structure that let people focus on the work they actually owned.
Being capable of doing something does not automatically mean your team should own it.
That is what intake, shared priorities, a visible workload, and clearer roles were for. A way to stay useful without quietly taking on all of it.
From a collection of tasks to a function.
the same thing
- Brand + story
- Digital experience
- Demand generation
- Content
- Campaigns
- Customer journey
- Salesforce + martech
- Analytics + reporting
- Events
- Internal communications
My role increasingly became less about personally executing every piece of marketing and more about making sure these pieces were working toward the same thing.
Strategy created the why. Systems created the how. People made it real.
Leadership sometimes arrives before the title does.
When the senior marketing leadership structure changed, I stepped into a much broader functional leadership role.
- Leading the team
- Setting marketing strategy
- Coordinating priorities
- Owning planning and execution
- Overseeing tradeshows
- Partnerships and ambassador work
- Executive reporting
- Marketing accountability
- Cross-functional decisions
- Campaign leadership
- Digital strategy
- Internal communications
There was no dramatic moment where the job suddenly changed. The work simply needed someone to own it. So I did.
The part that mattered most.
I am proud of the campaigns, the websites, the systems, and the strategies.
The hardest part to walk away from was the team.
Watching someone become more confident in their own judgment. Watching people take ownership. Watching an idea stop belonging to you because someone else made it better. Watching a team function less like job titles and more like people who trust each other to carry the work.
That is the part of leadership I want more of.
What I believe about leadership.
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Clarity before accountability
People should know what they own before they are asked to answer for it.
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Context before control
If someone understands why a decision was made, they can make the next one.
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Ownership over dependence
The point is more people who can move the work, not one person holding all of it.
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Systems over heroics
A process should keep going when the person who built it leaves the room.
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Curiosity over ego
Ask what someone else sees before you decide you already know.
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Public support, private feedback
Stand with people where others can hear it. Save the harder notes for a quieter room.
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Care is not a weakness
Paying attention to how people are doing is part of how the work gets better.
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Leadership is everywhere
Some of the people who shaped the work most did not report to me.
My job as a leader is not to be the center of the work. It is to help create the conditions where good work can happen.
The unglamorous things that make the good stuff possible.
Campaigns are the part people remember. These are the parts that made the work shareable: a place to look, a list with a status, a plan that did not live in one person’s head.
The kind of leader I want to keep becoming.
I am still learning how to leave enough room.
I can move fast, and I can hold a lot of the plan in my head. Both are useful, until they crowd out someone who was ready to carry more of it.
I want to keep getting better at asking before I answer. At writing the process down so it can outlast my memory. At noticing when helpful is about to become responsible for everything.
I do not have this finished. I know what I want the work to feel like for the people inside it. Clear enough to own. Supported enough to try. Built so it does not fall apart when one person steps out.
The best thing I can build is not something people need me to maintain.
It is something they know how to carry forward.
Details
- Company
- Wag’n Tails
- Focus
- Marketing leadership, team development, marketing operations, cross-functional leadership, organizational design
- Role evolution
- Digital Marketing Manager → broader marketing leadership
- Team
- Small multidisciplinary marketing team working across marketing management, creative/production, digital, content and external partners.
- Responsibilities
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- Leading the team
- Setting marketing strategy
- Coordinating priorities
- Owning planning and execution
- Overseeing tradeshows
- Partnerships and ambassador work
- Executive reporting
- Marketing accountability
- Cross-functional decisions
- Campaign leadership
- Digital strategy
- Internal communications
Good work needs room to happen.
I want to keep building the ideas. I also want to keep building teams where other people get to build theirs.