When everything is a priority, nothing is

You're months into the role. The inbox and demands never let up. Every function has a case for why their issue is urgent. The board wants results. The team wants direction. And somewhere in the middle of it all, you're still finding your way as the new CEO leading the business toward growth.

So you do what capable, conscientious leaders do under pressure: you try to address everything. That's the trap.

Not because the issues aren't real, but because treating everything as a priority is functionally the same as having no priorities at all. Of course you’re an experienced leader and know how to prioritise, but the noise can be deafening and the list keeps growing.

The noise is deafening… by design

Why? Because every stakeholder has a version of the truth. The data tells different stories depending on who cuts it. And the squeaky wheel still often gets the grease. But the areas where new leaders tend to have the least prior experience, such as marketing, are often overlooked or misunderstood, making the risk of a bad early call high.

McKinsey research is unambiguous on the upside of making the right marketing calls: CEOs who put marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely as their peers to achieve revenue growth of more than 5% annually. The flip side of that stat is the cost of getting it wrong, or of not engaging with it at all.

Yet most new CEOs step in without deep hands-on experience in modern marketing and may not know how to productively engage with their CMO. As we've written about before, only 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing experience. Which means that for the majority of newly appointed leaders, brand and demand are areas where they're being asked to make high-stakes calls with limited personal reference points, while under the pressure to decide fast.

You can't prioritise what you can't see clearly

Most new leaders try to find clarity from the inside. They do listening tours. They sit in on team meetings. They absorb the board papers. All useful. None of it neutral.

Internal information arrives pre-filtered. It comes loaded with the interests, anxieties and agendas of the people delivering it. Teams tell new CEOs what they think the new CEO needs to hear. So who tells them the unvarnished truth?

In marketing and brand especially, where measurement is contested and everyone has an opinion, that distortion can be significant. In fact, the same McKinsey report talks about the proliferation of C-level marketing-like roles, ranging from Chief Brand Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Demand Officer, among others, in addition to the CMO. The report says, ‘As a result, when CEOs ask themselves who to turn to, it isn’t always clear who’s responsible for what… strategies can be more financially and analytically driven versus consumer led.”

The result is a picture that's accurate in parts but skewed overall. Structural problems hide behind symptom-level fixes. Urgent things get treated as important. The "noisy" issues crowd out the ones that may actually move the needle on commercial performance.

And here's the particular danger with brand and marketing: the consequences of a wrong early call aren't always immediately visible. Whether it’s a misdirected campaign, a brand repositioning that doesn't land, a decision to cut marketing spend at the wrong moment, these don't always show up in the numbers until months later, by which point reversing course is both expensive and politically complicated.

Sequencing is as important as selection

The right question isn't "what are my priorities?" It's "what needs to happen in what order, and why?"

New leaders who pick the right priorities, but execute them in the wrong order, can still lose ground fast. A brand repositioning before the commercial model is fixed. A big customer acquisition push before the product story is clear. An efficiency drive that cuts into the capabilities needed for growth.

These aren't hypothetical mistakes. They're common ones. And in the brand and marketing space, they're almost always avoidable with a clearer view of what's actually going on at the start.

What good looks like

Newly appointed CEOs who navigate this well share a few traits. They resist the pressure to declare everything important. They create a short, defensible list of priorities and protect it. They're explicit about what they're not doing and why. The strongest leaders treat early-tenure prioritisation not as an internal exercise, but as one that genuinely benefits from outside-in clarity by subject matter experts who can see the full picture without the politics and aren’t afraid to call out the elephant in the room early.

That last part matters more than people admit. Early thinking solidifies fast and can set the tone and direction for your leadership.

That's exactly the conversation Paceworks was created to have with you.

Learn more at paceworks.co

Source: McKinsey & Company, "The Power of Partnership: How the CEO-CMO Relationship Can Drive Outsize Growth," 2023.