What Teaching Taught Me About Leadership

Teaching Online Marketing and sharing professional experience with MBA learners has influenced the way I think about leadership.

In daily business, we often rely on shorthand.

We say we need better conversion, higher-quality leads, or more effective targeting.

But explaining these ideas to someone else forces a different discipline.

What exactly do we mean? What assumptions are hidden in the metric? How does the concept connect to a decision someone must make at work?

A framework that sounds impressive is not especially useful if people cannot apply it.

I try to bring real marketing and commercial situations into teaching because practical decisions make abstract concepts easier to examine.

The experience has also influenced how I work with teams.

I only realised how much when two people from my team wrote to me. One, after almost two years together, called me their “teacher”: they now tell recruiters with confidence that they understand conversion and behavioural psychology. The other wrote when I left a company, remembering that they had felt listened to and respected from the very first interview.

Two notes from members of my team, in Vietnamese. Company names are blurred.

The lesson: Knowledge becomes much more valuable when it can be transferred.

And the ability to explain a complex problem clearly is an important part of helping other people execute.