The Critical Need for Creative Headspace

Last week I had a conversation with a former colleague, a fellow senior marketer, talking about how to best prepare your marketing team to succeed in the face of disruption, and a theme came up again and again: time. Or rather the glaring lack of it.

I would imagine most CMO’s these days would agree that marketing teams operate in a world of scarcity. Scare budget, scarce headcount, but most of all, scarce time to handle all the endless inbound tasks, execute planned campaigns and initiatives, talk to customers and partners, collaborate with sales and so on. But when it comes to change and disruption, time is especially important. Your team needs time to learn, to experiment, to brainstorm, to get creative and flex their strategic muscle. To often, that time is the first sacrificed in order to simply “get stuff done” against the immediate (and of course, always critical to someone) workload.

Every team I have led has heard some variation of this:

One of the main jobs of the CMO is to ensure you have the headspace needed to be creative, strategic, and innovative.

That’s the fun part of marketing. The cool stuff. It’s the crazy brainstorm that somehow spits out a workable idea or two. The deep dive into some new AI tool or process that ends up saving the team vast amounts of production time. The team stand down for a day of learning to build up skills around some new tech. Even just the time in the schedule to respond to inbound requests from Sales with “let’s talk through what you’re trying to accomplish here and see what ideas we can come up with” rather than simply “fine, I’ll put yet another collateral ask on the team to-do list.”

You can’t find that headspace if every waking moment of your workday is spinning through an Asana wordlist just trying to keep up. As a leader, your job is to create that headspace for your team. Be intentional about it. Create the cultural pillars that support it. Lay out the processes, and learning time, the down time (etc) to provide your team the breathing room to do the stuff they signed up to work in marketing for in the first place.

This is even more important in the Age of AI we’re living through right now, where the dominant CEO expectation seems to be that AI is the magical elixir to reducing marketing costs and increasing productivity. Perhaps it is, but unless we as CMO’s provide the breathing room for our teams to learn AI, to experiment, to stay on top of the changing (pretty much daily) platform landscape, all those savings will remain illusory and your teams will simply feel more and more behind on AI knowledge and adoption.

But remember, it’s not just about carving out time to analyze tech or processes. It’s about enabling marketers to tap into the creative energy that led them into marketing in the first place, and not just be some order-taking production drone on the fast path to burnout.

So what can you do?

• Be Intentional: As mentioned above, creating team headspace for creativity, innovation, and strategic thinking isn’t something you can just delegate to your team or add as Bullet #4 “Personal Development” to their annual performance review template. It has to come from the top down, and has to be intentional from the outset. In my view, it’s one of the most critical jobs of the CMO. You hired great talent right? Do everything you can to give them the space to be great.
• Prioritize & Run Interference: That starts with helping them prioritize and, where needed, being the “face of no” to the rest of the company. The CMO should be saying “no” a lot (diplomatically of course) to their peers in other groups who are asking for marketing support, time, and resources. Help your team keep laser-focused on the top priorities that will move the needle on the business and marketing strategy, and not get overwhelmed with churn. Over the year’s I’ve used the phrase “Do fewer things, with greater focus, for maximum impact” repeatedly - it’s aspirational, as you can never really escape the marketing churn, but it’s a helpful marker.
• Establish the Culture: To build on the above, “finding headspace” has to be part of the team culture. It must be baked into your team plans, marketing strategy, project management and capacity planning, regular all-hands or standups, and so on. Set up “Days of Learning” on a regular basis and clear the calendars for your teams (ANA has always done a nice job of promoting this ideas, and has some great resources to tap).