There is a specific kind of LinkedIn post that makes me close the app and go for a walk.

You have seen it. A marketing leader, usually titled CMO or VP, posting at length about how thankless the job is. How the CEO does not get it. How sales blames marketing for the pipeline. How finance keeps cutting the budget. How the board only cares about leads. How nobody understands the strategic value of brand.

The comments roll in. Hundreds of nodding heads. A solidarity parade. The same five names every time, telling each other how unfair the world is.

I am not unsympathetic (honestly). The job is genuinely hard. The expectations are often unreasonable. The structural issues are real.

But I have been doing this gig for over eighteen years, and I can say with some confidence that the ‘woe is me’ narrative is making the function smaller, not bigger. It is the opposite of what marketing leadership should look like.

Before you point at the CEO, the CFO, the board or the market, there are some uncomfortable questions worth asking yourself.

Did you qualify the role properly?

Before you signed the contract, did you sit down and stress-test the brief? Did you ask what the previous CMO actually achieved, and what they were measured against, and why they left? Did you check whether the CEO had a coherent view of what marketing is for, or were you just relieved someone wanted to pay you?

Did you ask the CFO how marketing investment was treated, cost line or growth lever? Did you ask the head of sales whether they thought marketing was a partner or a service desk? Did you ask the board what they expected, and in what timeframe?

If you did not ask, that is on you.

If you asked and did not like the answers but took the job anyway because the salary was good, that is also on you.

Did you align on what success looks like?

In the first thirty days, did you sit down with the CEO and define what good looks like at six, twelve and twenty-four months? In writing. With numbers. With trade-offs.

Did you push back when the targets were nonsense? Did you point out that the pipeline goal could not coexist with the budget cut, or did you nod, smile and tell yourself you would figure it out?

Did you make sure the board understood the difference between a lead and an opportunity? Did you educate them on the gap between marketing-sourced revenue and marketing-influenced revenue? Did you explain what brand investment does over eighteen months, before the budget conversation, or only after it had been cut?

Alignment is not a workshop you run once. It is a conversation you have continuously. If the goalposts moved and you did not flag it the first time it happened, you allowed it to happen.

Did you push back on the impossible brief?

This one is the giveaway. Did you, at any point, sit across the desk from your CEO and say the budget does not match the goal? Not in a passive-aggressive deck. Not in a slide buried on page thirty-four. Directly. With the numbers in front of you.

Did you walk them through what happens to demand generation when the team is cut in half? Did you show them the maths on what each pipeline point costs to build? Did you make them choose between the goal and the resource?

If you did, and they ignored you, fair enough. That is a fundamental leadership problem above you. But did you write it down, file it, and follow up?

If you did not, you became part of the problem the day you accepted the impossible brief without challenge.

Did you do the political work?

Marketing does not operate in a vacuum. The CRO, the CFO, the CPO and the CEO all have a view of what marketing is for, and they are often contradictory.

It is your job to navigate that. To understand who needs what, when, in what format, and how to position your function as a contributor to their goals rather than a cost on their balance sheet.

If the CRO thinks marketing is an SDR lead factory, that is partly because no marketing leader before you has shown them anything else. If the CFO thinks marketing is the first line item to cut, that is partly because no marketing leader before you has built a credible commercial case.

Yes, it is exhausting. Yes, it is unfair that the function needs constant defending. Welcome to senior leadership. Every function has its version of this.

Why this matters beyond your career

Every time a marketing leader posts a pity piece on LinkedIn, the perception of the function takes a small hit.

In my experience, the CFO scrolling past the post does not think, poor souls. They think, no wonder we keep replacing them.

The CEO scrolling past it does not think, we should listen more. They think, marketing keeps complaining instead of contributing.

The graduate scrolling past it does not think, what a noble profession to enter. They think, I should probably look at another profession.

Marketing has a credibility problem. It is not entirely of our making. But we are not helping ourselves by treating LinkedIn as group therapy.

What the job actually looks like

It looks like getting the alignment right at the front end, then having the difficult conversations at the right moments throughout.

It looks like saying no to bad briefs, with the data to back it up.

It looks like educating up rather than complaining sideways.

It looks like making sure that when the function is measured, it is measured on something that bears a relationship to reality.

It looks like building a case for marketing as a commercial function, in language the rest of the C-suite uses, without losing the parts of the craft that matter most.

It looks like accepting that some of this is on you, even when most of it is not.

That is harder than posting about how nobody understands you. It is also considerably more useful.

Godspeed.