How To Support Better CMO Decision-Making Under Pressure

Marketing leaders are often urged to let data drive their decisions, particularly when budgets are tight and the stakes are high. But a new Journal of Business Research paper suggests there’s another variable that dashboards can’t capture: What’s happening in a CMO’s personal life may affect the way they approach marketing strategy, from planning and product development to communications and channel management.

That doesn’t make data-driven leadership less valuable. It does, however, underscore its limits. Data still has to be interpreted, trade-offs still have to be weighed and decisions still have to be made by people whose judgment, energy and perspective don’t exist separately from the rest of their lives. Stress combined with time pressure can impair decision-making, affecting attention and making people more likely to overlook beneficial options. That makes the support surrounding senior leaders more than a matter of workplace well-being. 

What should companies be doing to help CMOs make sound decisions when personal pressures inevitably arise? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share their perspectives on the human limits of data-driven leadership, how organizations can build stronger support around the people making high-stakes marketing decisions, and how a variety of life experiences can actually expand a marketing leader’s creativity and impact.

“Strong executive assistance, flexible work practices, thoughtful use of technology and a culture that permits leaders to step away when needed can materially improve decision quality.”

– Jeff Chancellor, CMO of Oversight

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Treat Executive Attention as a Strategic Asset

For Jeff Chancellor, CMO of Oversight, recognizing the human element in executive decision-making doesn’t mean questioning a leader’s discipline or capabilities.

“It’s unrealistic to assume that executives somehow become less human in the C-suite,” he says. “CMOs are data-driven, commercially minded, curious and disciplined in how they make decisions. Those qualities do not disappear when personal pressures arise, but attention, patience, receptiveness, energy and cognitive capacity can be affected.”

Chancellor explains that this doesn’t represent a failure of data-driven leadership. Rather, he says, it reflects the reality that data must be interpreted by people, and people make better decisions when they can think clearly. He stresses the importance of a supportive culture.

“Companies should view executive time and attention as strategic assets,” Chancellor says. “Strong executive assistance, flexible work practices, thoughtful use of technology and a culture that permits leaders to step away when needed can materially improve decision quality. Organizations that respect both realities are more likely to sustain stronger leadership over time.”

Build Fail-Safes Into High-Stakes Decisions

“Early in my career I was deputy to a leader running on no sleep with newborns at home,” says Kathleen Lucente, Founder and CEO of Red Fan Communications. “He was not a bad executive. He was depleted, and the organization kept handing him decisions anyway.”

That firsthand experience shaped how Lucente built her team when she took over.   

“What protected the work was a second person in the room,” she explains. “When I moved into his role I made it structural: two direct reports whose job included pressure-testing my thinking and a written record of what we decided and why.”

That defined support system, Lucente says, is the part companies too often skip.

“Support for leaders gets treated as a benefits question. It is a standard operating procedure question—fail-safes, a deputy or a standing committee, documented reasoning,” she says. “It only works if the leader wants it. But do not build a system that depends on that. Build it so the next CMO inherits it.”

Support the Person Behind the Data

Hastimal Jangid, Co-Founder of Coozmoo Digital Solutions, notes that while data can tell you what happened, it can’t tell you why a leader chose one risk over another.

“CMOs aren’t algorithms—stress, personal upheaval and even confidence levels bleed into judgment calls that dashboards can’t capture,” he says. “That’s not a flaw to engineer away; it’s a reason to build real support systems around decision-makers, not just better data models.”

Jangid shares practical steps for ensuring CMOs have the personal and professional resources they need.

“In practice, that means normalizing check-ins that go beyond performance metrics, giving CMOs access to coaching or peer networks where they can process pressure honestly, and building leadership teams that can absorb a bad week without the whole strategy wobbling,” he says. “Boards and CEOs also need to stop treating marketing leaders as purely rational actors and start asking what support they actually need to make sound calls under stress.

“The companies that get this right aren’t removing the human element from marketing leadership—they’re protecting it,” Jangid concludes.

Build Decisions That Can Withstand Pressure

Boris Dzhingarov, CEO of ESBO Ltd., explains that even “data-driven” organizations are anchored by human judgment.

“Data does not make decisions. Somebody has to read the dashboard and decide what the numbers mean, and that somebody has a life,” he says. 

Dzhingarov’s 10-plus years running an agency have given him an innate sense of when someone he’s working with is under added pressure. 

“I can often tell something has shifted before a client says a word. The numbers have not moved, but the appetite has,” he says. “That is the limit of data-driven leadership: The final call is made by a person under pressure, and pressure commutes between home and the office.”

Rather than expecting executives to be unaffected by that pressure, Dzhingarov favors decision processes built to accommodate it.

“Build decisions that survive a bad month,” he says. “Agree on criteria for big spends in advance, add a second signature above a set threshold, and review how a call was made, not only how it landed. Then treat support for senior marketers as risk control rather than a perk. A rested decision maker is the cheapest insurance a company can buy.”

“In today’s world, the CMO, COO and CPO should never be far from each other in strategy and in how they drive outcomes.”

– Cerys Goodall, Founder and Fractional COO/CMO of The Goods

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Create an Executive Support Ecosystem

Cerys Goodall, Founder and Fractional COO/CMO of The Goods, argues that the organizational structure around executives deserves as much scrutiny as the individual leader.

“The data points out a flaw in our system—not in the CMO,” she says. “Leaders are expected to lead, manage, coach and support their teams while carrying accountability for the results. Yet, too few executives have an ecosystem of support themselves. It’s no wonder this shows up in the work.”

For Goodall, strengthening that ecosystem starts with closer alignment across the executive team rather than leaving one leader to carry the weight alone.

“To minimize the potential impact of this very human implication is to focus on building a strong, aligned executive team that provides support, motivation and momentum together for each other,” she says. “In today’s world, the CMO, COO and CPO should never be far from each other in strategy and in how they drive outcomes. Together, this ecosystem of support minimizes the negative effects when life throws someone a curveball, ensuring it doesn’t come out in the work.”

Give Leaders Room to Make Brave Calls

Cynthia Ferngren, Fractional CMO, Brand Strategist and Founder of Brandsol Agency, sees the Journal of Business Research paper less as an indictment of executive judgment than as a challenge to established assumptions about what data can do.

“I’d flip the premise. The study isn’t exposing a flaw in CMOs; it’s exposing a fantasy about data,” she says. “Data can tell you what’s moving in culture. It can’t tell you what your brand believes, and every strong marketing decision sits at the intersection of the two.”

Acknowledging the individual perspective a leader brings to a decision, she argues, is preferable to pretending it doesn’t exist.

“There’s no such thing as a neutral, fully data-driven leader; only leaders who are honest about what they bring into the room and leaders who aren’t,” Ferngren says. “What should worry companies isn’t a CMO shaped by their life. It’s a CMO under pressure, because pressured leaders reach for the safest, most defensible option, and safe choices are how brands go generic.”

She urges companies to acknowledge the stress and provide psychological safety.

“Build real support: longer runways, air cover from the CEO and permission to make the brave call and be wrong occasionally,” Ferngren says. “You can’t get distinctive work out of someone who’s operating scared.”

Keep Human Judgment in the Loop

Andrew Faridani, President and CEO of BreezeMaxWeb, asserts that data should guide decisions but never replace human judgment.

“Our gut reaction to the decisions we as CMOs make most of the time isn’t driven solely by data or stats, but by human experience and past decisions,” he says. “CMOs bring their own experiences, stress and perspective into the role, whether they realize it or not.”

The goal, in Faridani’s view, isn’t to isolate the executive from those influences but to ensure consequential decisions don’t rest entirely with one person.

“The answer isn’t to remove the human element; it’s to support it,” he says. “The best companies create an environment where marketing leaders have people they trust to bounce ideas off, can have honest conversations, and aren’t expected to make every big decision themselves. That’s how better decisions are made.”

Let Customers Challenge Executive Conviction

Amber Brown, Senior Vice President of Product and Marketing at Clario, focuses on a different risk.

“The danger is not that executives have personal bias. It is that they mistake personal conviction for customer truth,” she says. “And that risk applies to every executive, not just the CMO.”

For marketing leaders in particular, Brown sees the customer as an essential check on assumptions that might otherwise make their way into strategy unchallenged.

“The strongest counterweight is proximity to the customer: real relationships, behavioral data, direct feedback and continuous testing,” she says. “Companies should build those disciplines into how decisions are made so no executive’s worldview becomes strategy by default. Leaders may shape the hypothesis, but the customer should get the final vote.”

Design Better Decision Environments

“Data can inform a decision, but it cannot remove the human being making it,” says Magda Paslaru, Founder and CEO of THE RAINBOWIDEA. “A CMO’s stress, confidence, loss or major life change can influence appetite for risk, creativity and judgment.”

She argues that companies should not respond by monitoring executives’ private lives but by designing better decision environments.

“Foster strong leadership teams, constructive challenge, trusted deputies and space to recover,” Paslaru says. “High-stakes decisions become safer when no single person, however senior, carries all the cognitive and emotional weight.”

“What we call an ‘aha’ moment is usually the mind assembling thousands of observations into something new.”

– Bob Pearson, Chair of Pearson Advisory Group

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Let Experiences Feed Creative Thinking

Bob Pearson, Chair of Pearson Advisory Group, points to the other side of the equation: Life experience can also supply the raw material for creative insight.

“Creative people are students of life,” Pearson says. “An artist takes a photo of a scene before putting brush to canvas. A songwriter hears a sound that becomes a beat in a future song. An advertiser observes an everyday frustration that sparks a breakthrough campaign.

“The most creative people I’ve worked with are constantly gathering inputs,” he continues. “They read research, ask questions, listen carefully, travel, observe and remain curious about the world around them. Every conversation, article and experience becomes another piece of a much larger puzzle.”

For Pearson, the ongoing accumulation of life experiences is often precisely what makes an unexpected idea possible.

“The breakthrough idea rarely appears out of nowhere,” he says. “More often, it emerges when seemingly unrelated experiences suddenly connect. What we call an ‘aha’ moment is usually the mind assembling thousands of observations into something new. So, yeah, life does impact our marketing strategy. Trust your brain to make connections you could never have planned.”

Supporting Better Judgment Under Pressure

• Treat executive attention as a strategic resource. Give marketing leaders enough time, flexibility and operational support to think clearly when personal or professional pressures are high.
• Build fail-safes into major decisions. Use trusted deputies, defined review processes and written decision records so high-stakes calls don’t depend entirely on one executive’s capacity in the moment.
• Support leaders beyond performance metrics. Regular check-ins, coaching and peer networks can give CMOs space to process pressure before it affects strategic judgment.
• Establish decision criteria before pressure hits. Predefined thresholds, second-level approvals and reviews of how decisions were made can reduce the influence of temporary stress on major commitments.
• Create a stronger executive support network. Close alignment among marketing, operations, product and other senior leaders can help distribute pressure and keep strategy steady when one executive is stretched thin.
• Give leaders enough psychological safety to take thoughtful risks. Clear executive support and room to make occasional mistakes can help prevent pressure from pushing marketing teams toward overly cautious, generic choices.
• Keep trusted colleagues in the decision loop. Encourage CMOs to test important ideas with people who can offer candid feedback rather than expecting them to make every consequential call alone.
• Use customers as a check on executive assumptions. Behavioral data, direct feedback, relationships and testing can help distinguish a leader’s personal conviction from what customers actually want.
• Design decision environments that allow constructive challenge. Trusted deputies, candid debate and opportunities to step away can strengthen judgment without requiring companies to intrude into executives’ personal lives.
• Recognize life experience as a source of creative insight. Encourage leaders to remain curious and draw from experiences beyond the workplace, since unexpected connections can help spark distinctive ideas.

Strong Marketing Leadership Takes More Than Data

Data can sharpen marketing decisions, but those decisions will always be influenced by the knowledge, experience and understanding of the human being who makes them. Companies can reduce the risks that come with stress, bias and limited capacity by designing stronger systems around their leaders—sharing responsibility, encouraging challenge, keeping customers close and giving executives enough support to exercise sound judgment.

At the same time, the human element isn’t simply a variable to control. Experience, intuition and curiosity can contribute insights that no dashboard can supply. As marketing becomes increasingly data-rich and AI-supported, strong organizations will need to both build safeguards around human judgment and preserve the perspective and creativity that make that judgment valuable.