I have long believed that if we could run a root cause analysis on every failed campaign or stalled rebrand, we would find that most failures are not caused by a lack of creative talent or budget, but by a lack of openness.
Some still behave as if high performance is built on “good vibes,” late night pizza, and forced loyalty. But anyone who has ever run a demand engine under pressure knows the real culture is revealed in different moments. In the silence after a budget cut. In the pause before telling the CEO their copy edits make no sense. In the quiet calculation when a marketer thinks, “If I push back on this, will it cost me politically or personally?”
Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard shows that the highest performing teams are defined by psychological safety. In marketing, this is not a “nice to have.” It is a commercial necessity. You cannot innovate, challenge assumptions, or kill bad ideas early if people are afraid. And bad ideas that survive early always become expensive later.
Creative teams are rarely asking, “Do we like each other?”. They are asking, “Is it safe to have a bad idea here in order to find a good one?”
When loyalty is valued over candor, marketing does not become stronger. It becomes polite, beige, and commercially fragile.
The fallacy of the “we’re a family” culture.
Toxic leaders often describe their teams as “family.” It sounds warm. It sounds caring. In practice, it often becomes a verbal shield used to demand obedience while offering conditional safety.
In B2B marketing, the “we are a family” label quietly teaches people that:
Critiquing the leader’s idea is disloyal
Working weekends proves commitment, not burnout
Questioning strategy means you are “not a team player”
Asking for budget means you are “not scrappy enough”
It confuses belonging with agreement.
I once coached a highly capable Head of Demand Gen who admitted that she had stayed silent during a roadmap review for a product launch she knew had no product market fit. Later she said, “The CCO keeps saying we’re a family on a mission and that this was her baby. If I raised objections, I knew I would be isolated.”
The launch produced zero qualified pipeline. The warning was never voiced. The cost was real. The silence was cultural.
Safety versus comfort
Most toxic marketing cultures optimize for comfort. High performance cultures optimize for safety.
Comfort is the absence of conflict.
Safety is the presence of truth.
Comfort keeps meetings smooth.
Safety prevents wasted spend.
In those environments, marketers do not need more after work drinks or fancy dress days. They need to know that insight matters more than hierarchy and evidence matters more than ego.
This is why the best marketing leaders do not demand alignment. They demand thinking.
Cognitive diversity and the “vanilla trap”
Research from McKinsey shows that diverse teams make better decisions. In marketing, lack of cognitive diversity creates what I call the Vanilla Trap. Activity that voice no opinion, takes no risks and influences no-one.
Fear drives this. When people feel unsafe, they mimic competitors, defer to the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinon), and copy whatever feels politically safe. That is how entire categories end up sounding identical.
High performance teams build mechanisms that force constructive dissent
Pre mortems where the team writes the future failure story before launch
Red teams whose job is to challenge the value proposition
“Kill your darlings” rituals that reward abandoning weak ideas
Customer voice as the final arbiter, not senior opinion
Reality check
If your values slide says “innovation” but you punish the social media manager for a post that missed while ignoring the VP who has not refreshed strategy in five years, you are not building culture. You are building learned silence.
Map safety to real marketing roles
Different marketers carry different personal risks:
The content lead fears being publicly torn apart for tone
The demand leader fears being blamed for missed revenue they do not control
The brand lead fears being seen as obstructive
The events lead fears one operational miss becoming a character judgement
Safety means making it clear that the cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.
Proxies for safety
When you are not in the room, your systems speak:
Creative reviews that critique the work, not the person
Dashboards that show red numbers without witch hunts
Leaders who say “I was wrong” publicly
Briefs that are firm on outcomes but flexible on how to get there
These are leadership signals, not process details.
The psychology underneath
Several behavioral forces quietly distort marketing decisions
The HiPPO effect where senior opinion overrides evidence
Sunk cost fallacy where bad ideas live on because money was already spent
Groupthink where tired teams convince themselves mediocrity is excellence
High performance leadership designs systems that counter these biases, not reinforce them with “family” language.
How to deliberately build safety
Practical actions that work:
Replace “family” with “high performance team”
Separate brainstorming from decision meetings
Reward the person who brings the uncomfortable data
Protect your team from political bullying from Sales or Product
Define failure as learning and then actually behave that way
This is leadership work. And it is commercial work. Unsafe teams waste budget quietly and repeatedly.
How to tell if you are building a team, not a cult
You will see signals:
“This isn’t working” is said as often as “This is great”
Junior marketers challenge senior leaders
Failed tests are shared openly
Sales and Marketing debate without posturing
You hire for culture add, not culture clone
The simple rule to remember
In complex B2B markets, advantage rarely comes from harmony.
It comes from honesty.
The teams that win are not the politest.
They are the ones that surface the truth earliest and act on it fastest.
Call to action
In your next campaign review, ask one question and then stay quiet.
“If you knew you would not get in trouble, what would you change about this plan right now?”
Listen without defending.
Do not explain.
Do not justify.
Map where silence lives. Decide whether you want to be comfortable or effective.
If you want help building a marketing culture that produces truth, not compliance, and performance, not politeness, contact me and the team at B2B Marketing United and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
