How CMOs Can Model Adaptive Leadership

If you've been in a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or head of marketing role for any length of time, you've likely noticed something: the chaos and disruptions keep coming. AI transformation, privacy regulations, economic volatility, platform algorithm changes, CFO/Board ROI pressures, organizational restructuring; the list doesn't get shorter. It compounds.

I once heard someone describe adulthood as simply “sprinting from one crisis to the next. Forever.” I’d imagine that sounds familiar to most CMOs.

In this environment, one of the most powerful things you can do as a senior marketing leader isn't developing the “perfect” response to each disruption. It's modeling the kind of leadership that helps your team navigate them all and maintain positive, forward momentum along the way.

What “Adaptive Leadership” Actually Means

In the Disruption-Fluent Marketing framework, adaptive leadership is defined as the emergent, creative problem-solving that occurs when teams confront novel challenges. It's not a title or a position. It's a fluid dynamic state that emerges (or doesn’t) based on the organization’s culture and how it operates.

This is a critical distinction. Adaptive leadership isn't something you get to simply declare or mandate. It's something you cultivate through how you show up, what behaviors you reward, and what space you create for your team to experiment, learn, and grow.

Research on Complexity Leadership Theory tells us that adaptive leadership thrives on productive tension within psychologically safe cultures, something I have written about previously. It should be nurtured, cultivated, empowered - not controlled. The moment you find yourself to bureaucratize innovation or mandate creativity, you’re already on the fast path to stagnation.

So what does modeling adaptive leadership as a CMO actually look like in practice?

Show Your (Messy) Work

One of the most powerful things a CMO can do is make their own adaptive process visible. When you're facing a novel or unexpected challenge, and let's be honest that's pretty much a constant now, be transparent about sharing how you're thinking through it.

This doesn't mean performing uncertainty for its own sake. It means narrating your reasoning: "We don't have a playbook for this. Here's what I'm considering. Here are the trade-offs I see. Here's what I think we should test first." And then encourage your team to challenge your thinking constructively. Back when I was agency-side as a Chief Strategy Officer at Pace Communications, one of our larger clients had an internal “challenge culture” that they worked with us to adopt in all our work on their brand. At first it was wild to witness, with team members at all levels interjecting with “I want to challenge your thinking on that last point” and doing so without fear, knowing the interruption would be received by all positively as part of their adaptive process.

When you demonstrate that thoughtful experimentation is how you personally approach ambiguity, you give your team permission to do the same. When you do so and then actively invite constructive criticism and open debate, you’re fostering psychological safety. You're showing them that adaptive leadership isn't about having all the answers or confidently knowing what’s next. It's about having a rigorous process and a hefty dose of open humility for discovering the path forward with them.

Protect Space for Experimentation

Adaptive work needs room to breathe. If every hour of your team's capacity is consumed by operational demands - the relentless churn of campaigns, requests, and deadlines - there's no bandwidth left for the creative and strategic problem-solving that disruption requires.

As CMOs, we have unique leverage here. We can designate a portion of resources (even 10-15%) for experimental initiatives with different governance rules - an homage back to the old “20% Rule” at Google. You can shield teams from premature scrutiny when they're exploring new approaches, ensuring that the stifling world of corporate beauracracy doesn’t kills creative ideas before they can be fully formed. You can push back when well-meaning internal stakeholders want to impose standard approval processes on work that's inherently exploratory, or inject judgment that shuts down ideation. Most CMO’s spend a good portion of their time building relationships and managing expectations with their peers in the C-suite and their CEO/Board bosses for this specific purpose.

This is where adaptive leadership intersects with what the Disruption-Fluency Framework calls enabling leadership: creating the conditions where innovation can flourish while managing the inevitable tension with administrative demands. For executive leaders, these two functions are inseparable; it’s impossible to set an adaptive culture if the underlying conditions don’t support it.

Celebrate Failure, Especially Your Own

Nothing kills adaptive leadership faster than punishing well-considered and well-intentioned failure. If your team believes that unsuccessful experiments will damage their careers or standing with the team or with leadership, they'll default to safe, incremental, uninspiring work. They'll stop taking the bold risks that disruption-fluent teams require to maintain momentum.

Don’t just acknowledge failure, but find ways to recognize and celebrate it. Smart failure leads to the insights the team needs to design a successful solution. When an experiment doesn't work, treat it as valuable insight rather than evidence of poor judgment or careless execution. Perhaps most importantly, transparently share your own failed experiments, both from your previously experience and live as they happen with your current team: the ideas that flopped, the strategic bets that didn't pay off, the assumptions that turned out to be wrong, and of course, what did you learn from them.

The goal isn't to be cavalier about results; at some point the underlying numbers do in fact matter (I can feel my old CFO leaning over my shoulder nodding vigorously). The point is to distinguish between failure that comes from carelessness or sloppy execution and failure that comes from thoughtful experimentation in uncertain conditions, and champion the latter.

Ask Questions, Don't Just Provide Answers

The default temptation of too many marketers when they ascend into senior leadership roles is to assume their job is still to be the expert, the one with the answers. After all, that’s probably what got them promoted in the first place right? Technical and domain expertise?

Senior leaders in any function, but certainly marketers facing a disrupted environment, often feel pressure to project certainty, expertise, and authority. Your team is looking to you for direction or reassurance, the CEO wants to know the path forward, the Sales team wants to know this next campaign will be the one. There's a natural temptation to lean on your established experience and try to have an answer for everyone.

It’s the biggest point of failure for any leader, in my opinion.

Adaptive leadership, and adaptive team culture, emerges from enabling diverse perspectives, collaboration, and problem-solving, not from any kind of hierarchical directive. When you encounter a disruptive challenge, avoid the temptation to lean solely on your own experience and start pushing out answers. Focus instead on asking the right questions.

Perhaps Paradoxically: Stay in the Arena

Transformational leadership research emphasizes the power of idealized influence, also known as leading by example and demonstrating the behaviors you want to see in your team. In the context of disruption, this means staying actively engaged with the adaptive work, not just try to orchestrate it from a distance.

While my prior point stands, that as a leader you should focus less on your own expertise or technical competence to find the answers and more on drawing them out of your team, you still need to be actively "in the arena" as a marketer with your team, wrestly with problems, collaborating on solutions, failing publicly and sharing what you learned. Its a tension you have to navigate.

In my own career, this is where I failed the most. With good intentions I would focus on enabling my team to find solutions, and try to avoid telling them what to do. But in the process, too often I would step too far back and find myself outside of the work, and my ability to understand, contribute, and ultimately lead suffered.

So attend sprint stand-ups. Participate in after-action reviews. Join brainstorms as an active participant and not the lead. Own risky deliverables. When your team sees you wrestling with the same uncertainties they face, taking the same risks, failing publicly and learning from it, it fundamentally changes the culture. And that is adaptive leadership.

This post is part of the Disruption-Fluent Marketing series exploring how marketing leaders can build organizations designed to thrive through constant change.