Here is a pattern I see constantly.
A marketing team is underperforming. Pipeline is flat. Campaigns feel scattered. The CEO is asking hard questions. So leadership does what leadership always does — they blame the team.
The content marketer isn’t creative enough. The demand gen person doesn’t understand the funnel. The team isn’t moving fast enough. Sometimes they reshuffle roles. Sometimes they hire a new head of marketing. Sometimes they bring in an agency.
Six months later, the same problems persist.
This happens because most marketing team problems are not people problems. They are structural problems that manifest as people problems. And until you learn to tell the difference, you will keep solving the wrong thing.
The waterline model
Molly Graham learned the waterline model as a 22-year-old wilderness instructor at NOLS, leading 75-day expeditions in Patagonia and Alaska. She later applied it at Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to diagnose team dysfunction.
The model has four layers, ordered from the surface down.
1. Structure — the shared systems that help people understand their work. Goals, roles, ownership, expectations, and what success looks like.
2. Dynamics — how the team actually functions day-to-day. Decision-making norms, information flow, and the signals leadership sends about what gets rewarded, punished, tolerated, or ignored.
3. Interpersonal — direct relationship issues between two people. Trust breakdowns, unresolved conflict, style clashes.
4. Individual — what happens inside a single person. Skill gaps, confidence, motivation, personal circumstances.
The rule is simple: snorkel before you scuba. Always start at the surface — structure — and work your way down. Only diagnose individuals after you have ruled out everything above them.
“Blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.”
— Molly Graham, former VP Operations at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Structure: where most marketing problems actually live
Structural problems are behind most marketing dysfunction. And the single biggest structural failure is unclear goals.
Consider how many marketing teams are still measured on traffic, email subscribers, social followers, or content output. These are activity metrics. They feel productive. Dashboards go up and to the right. But they have no direct relationship to the outcomes the business actually cares about — pipeline, revenue, customers.
When a marketing team is targeting traffic and the CEO is expecting pipeline, you do not have a performance problem. You have an alignment problem. The team is executing exactly what they have been asked to execute. The structure is wrong.
This is what W. Edwards Deming meant when he said a bad system will beat a good person every time. People behave rationally inside the system they are given. If the system rewards volume over impact, you will get volume.
Other common structural failures in marketing teams:
- No clear ownership. Ask five people on your marketing team what they own and you will get seven different answers. Who owns the website? Who owns the funnel? Who owns the number? When ownership is ambiguous, everything becomes somebody else’s problem.
- Too many priorities. A team with ten priorities has no priorities. Marketing teams are particularly susceptible to this because every channel and every campaign feels important. But focus is a strategic choice, not a capacity problem.
- Misaligned success metrics. Marketing measures campaign performance. Sales measures closed revenue. The CEO measures growth rate. If these are not explicitly connected, every team is optimising in a different direction and nobody understands why things feel broken.
- No shared process. Without a clear process for how ideas become campaigns, how campaigns are evaluated, and how learnings feed back into the next cycle, you get random acts of marketing. Everyone is busy. Nobody is effective.
If any of this sounds familiar, you are not looking at a team problem. You are looking at a strategy problem.
Dynamics: your team is adapting to you
The second layer is about the signals leadership sends through their behaviour — often without realising it.
Graham describes a founder who constantly second-guessed team decisions and reversed calls made by staff. The team responded rationally. They slowed down. They added layers of alignment. They escalated decisions upward unnecessarily. They optimised for safety, not speed.
The founder’s complaint? The team was too slow and lacked initiative.
This pattern is everywhere in marketing. A VP of Marketing says they want experimentation and bold bets, but then publicly criticises the first campaign that fails to hit targets. The team learns the real rule: do not take risks. The stated values and the actual values are different, and teams always adapt to the actual values.
Common dynamics problems in marketing teams:
- Saying you want experimentation but punishing failure. If post-mortems feel like blame sessions, nobody will run ambitious experiments. You will get small, safe, predictable work — the kind that never produces 10x results.
- Making decisions by committee. When every campaign needs approval from six stakeholders, you are not being collaborative. You are being slow. And your best people will leave because they cannot get anything done.
- Rewarding activity over impact. If the person who launches the most campaigns gets the most recognition — regardless of whether those campaigns moved a number — you are training your team to optimise for output, not outcomes.
- The HiPPO problem. When the highest-paid person’s opinion routinely overrides data, you have undermined every investment you have made in analytics and experimentation. Teams will learn to pitch ideas that match the boss’s gut, not ideas backed by evidence.
Dynamics problems are almost always leadership problems. The team is not dysfunctional. The team is adapting to dysfunction.
Interpersonal: usually a symptom, not the cause
When two people on a marketing team are not working well together, the instinct is to treat it as a personality clash. Sometimes it is. But more often, interpersonal friction is caused or amplified by structural problems above it.
When roles are unclear, people step on each other’s toes. When ownership is ambiguous, people argue about territory. When goals are misaligned, people pull in different directions and resent each other for it.
Before you mediate the conflict between your content lead and your demand gen lead, ask yourself: do they actually know who owns what? Are they measured on the same outcomes? Do they have a shared process for working together?
Fix the structure, and many interpersonal issues resolve themselves.
Individual: the last place to look
Only after you have ruled out structure, dynamics, and interpersonal issues should you evaluate individual performance.
Individual problems do exist — sometimes someone genuinely lacks the skills, motivation, or fit for a role. But arriving at this conclusion without first checking the layers above it is how you lose good people and keep bad systems.
Graham’s advice here is direct: once you have confirmed the system is sound, make clear decisions about individual fit. Do not drag things out. Clarity and decisiveness are kinder than ambiguity.
How to diagnose your marketing team
Next time your marketing team is underperforming, resist the instinct to jump to personnel changes. Instead, work through these questions in order.
Structure
- If you asked every team member what the team’s top goal is, would you get the same answer?
- Are your marketing metrics explicitly tied to business outcomes (pipeline, revenue, customers) rather than activity metrics (traffic, followers, content published)?
- Does every person know exactly what they own and what success looks like in their role?
- Is there a clear, shared process for how ideas become campaigns and how results feed back into planning?
Dynamics
- When a campaign fails, does the team treat it as a learning opportunity or a blame event?
- Do decisions happen at the right level, or does everything get escalated?
- Are you rewarding the behaviours you actually want, or just the ones that are most visible?
- Does the team feel safe proposing bold ideas, or do they default to what is proven?
Interpersonal
- Are the conflicts between people really about personalities, or about unclear boundaries and competing goals?
- Would better role clarity or shared metrics reduce the friction?
Individual
- Once the system is sound, is this person still struggling?
- Have they been given clear expectations and the support to meet them?
The order matters. Jumping to layer four when the real problem is at layer one is how you cycle through marketers without ever fixing what is actually wrong.
Systems thinking for marketing leaders
The waterline model is not just a diagnostic tool. It is a way of thinking about marketing leadership that shifts the default assumption from “who is failing?” to “what is failing?”
This matters because the instinct to blame individuals is deeply embedded in how most organisations operate. It feels decisive. It feels like action. But replacing a person without fixing the structure that caused them to fail is just setting up their replacement to fail in exactly the same way.
The best marketing leaders I have worked with think in systems. They obsess over process before tactics. They align on metrics that matter before they argue about channels. They build environments where speed and experimentation are structurally supported, not just talked about.
If your marketing team is struggling, the waterline model offers a simple discipline: start at the top. Fix what is shared before you fix who is hired.
Most marketing problems are leadership problems. The good news is that leadership problems are the ones you can actually fix.