In a world where new technologies emerge weekly and customer expectations shift daily, marketing leaders face an impossible-sounding mandate: move faster while also moving more meaningfully. The pressure to react, to chase every trend, to simply keep up can easily overwhelm the discipline needed to lead with purpose. But what if speed and intention aren't opposites? What if the key to sustainable performance lies not in choosing between pace and purpose, but in finding the rhythm that honours both?
As part of our Leadership at Speed Challenge series, Georgina Bramall, Marketing Director at giffgaff, explores how purpose-driven leaders balance the 3 Ps, people, planet, and profit, to drive both pace and impact, sharing practical approaches that empower teams and reframe marketing success beyond volume metrics.
Balancing Speed and Focus to Lead with Lasting Impact
As the Marketing Director for a certified B Corp in the UK telecommunications market, I spend a huge chunk of my time navigating where the 3 Ps – people, planet and profit - collide. New technologies emerge almost weekly, regulatory shifts are a constant, and customer expectations move faster today than ever before. In this environment, the temptation is always to lead by frantic reaction: mirroring the pace of the market, exhausting our teams, and ultimately, losing our strategic focus. But for purpose-driven organisations particularly B Corps, speed cannot be the only metric of success, and I’d argue that often our biggest opportunity lies in balancing leading at pace with ensuring lasting and sustainable impact.
When change is constant and demands are conflicting, the key to leading with pace and agility lies in clearly defined principles around what we are ‘up to’ as a brand, as a business and as a leadership team; a clear vision that the whole company can feel a part of and see their role in delivering against. Whilst every project, partnership, and campaign seems urgent and the current most significant opportunity, balancing people, planet and profit is a critical filter and helps us to find the sweet spot where we can affect the greatest outcomes with a confidence that’s rooted in knowing our efforts are creating tangible value, both commercial and societal.
Empowering Teams to Lead with Purpose and Autonomy
A key success factor of purposeful leadership at speed then relies on our teams understanding the ‘why’ (the purpose) so completely that 80% of decisions can be made independently and with confidence, without needing approval at leadership level. Clear, short feedback loops, daily 15-minute stand ups and transparent self-service data dashboards all build momentum, remove bottlenecks and ensure iterative value delivery.
As marketing leaders, we must recognise the power of our roles as the architects of demand and evolve past judging success purely on more, more, more; how many campaigns we get out the door, whether we jumped on that latest viral trend, the numbers of clicks generated, the impressions, and the list goes on. Instead, we have the opportunity to reframe success, linking our marketing velocity directly to our impact metrics, sustainable business growth alongside societal benefit. For example, giffgaff spotted an opportunity to move ahead of the competition at pace building a market leading share in refurbished handsets by promoting the great value, positive alternative to customers and in doing so simultaneously reduce mobile device wastage, the depletion of rare earth minerals and increased awareness of device circularity and its benefits. Purposeful speed driving profitable and sustainable growth.
