Sherry Grote

People have always found their way to me in the middle of the storm. Not after it. Not once things settled. In the middle of it. And for a long time, I wondered why that was, because my circumstances were just as chaotic as theirs.

What I've come to understand is that stability is not the absence of chaos. It is something you carry inside it. My faith has been the anchor that kept me from being swept away when everything around me was moving. That groundedness, that deep inner calm, is not something I manufactured. It was given to me, and I have chosen every day to tend to it.

Success, to me, has never been about surviving the waves. I have weathered a lot of them. A husband's brain stem stroke. Three parents in their final seasons. A career that kept climbing while life kept demanding. I survived all of it. But survival was never the goal. The goal was to bring someone with me. To be steady enough in my own footing that someone else could hold onto me while they found theirs. That is what I measure my success by. Not the titles I earned or the stages I have stood on, but the people who are still standing because something in my steadiness gave them permission to believe they could weather it too.

Progress over perfection. Three words that rewired the way I lead.

I am a recovering perfectionist. I will always be a recovering perfectionist. And for a long time, that perfectionism felt like a strength. It looked like high standards. It felt like excellence. What it actually was, more often than I care to admit, was a brake pedal disguised as a virtue.

A leader I deeply respected called it out. He told me plainly: if you want to get where you want to go, people need to see you moving. Not polished. Moving. In a world where a digital campaign can be updated in ten seconds, waiting for perfect is not discipline. It is delay. The cost of inaction in a digital environment is almost always higher than the cost of a fixable mistake.

That reframe unlocked something in me. It also unlocked something in every team I led afterward, because I passed it on. When leaders give their people permission to ship something good and improve it in motion, the whole team accelerates. Confidence builds. Momentum compounds. And the perfectionism that once strangled progress quietly loosens its grip.

That leader went on to champion my path from marketing director to vice president, and eventually toward the CMO seat. I do not think that was a coincidence. He saw something in me that I could not see yet, and the first thing he did was teach me to get out of my own way.

Marketing sits at the intersection of art and science, and women who learn to move fluently between those two worlds become irreplaceable.

Do not let anyone convince you that you have to choose between being creative and being analytical. The most powerful marketers I have encountered are the ones who can feel what a brand needs and then prove it with data. Both matter. Both belong to you. Do not let the culture of any organization shrink you into one lane when you were built to move across all of them.

Get comfortable being the person in the room who asks the question nobody else will ask. Marketing is fundamentally about understanding people, and the willingness to dig deeper, to question an assumption, to challenge a brief that does not quite ring true, that instinct is a gift. Do not train yourself out of it to seem more agreeable.

Your life experience informs your marketing mind in ways that cannot be replicated by someone who has only studied it in a classroom. The seasons that stretched you, the complexity you have navigated, the moments where you had to lead without a roadmap. All of it sharpens your ability to connect with an audience, because connection comes from having lived something real.

Bring all of it. Every room you walk into is better because you are in it. Act like you know that.

Every generation of marketers has faced a disruption that changed the rules. Digital ended the print monopoly. Social media dismantled the broadcast model. Mobile rewrote the customer journey. Each time, the marketers who thrived were not the ones who resisted the change, but the ones who understood what the change could not replace.

AI is this generation's disruption. And what it cannot replace is the same thing that has always mattered most: the human being on the other side of the message.

We are living in an artificial everything world. AI writes the copy, generates the images, schedules the posts, scores the leads, and predicts the next move. And all of that capability is genuinely useful. But there is a cost accumulating quietly beneath the efficiency. The cost is sameness. When everyone is using the same tools trained on the same data to reach the same audiences, the output starts to converge. The edges disappear. The personality flattens. And the audience, who came to marketing to feel something, feels nothing.

The human advantage is not a sentiment. It is a strategy.

It is the leader who can read a room and redirect a campaign that the data said was performing but the culture said was tone-deaf. It is the creative director who pushes back on a brief because something about it feels wrong before the numbers confirm it. It is the CMO who understands that a brand is not a set of assets. It is a living relationship with real people who have real lives and are paying attention to whether you see them.

Empathy is not soft. Curiosity is not inefficient. Ethical judgment cannot be automated. These are your competitive edges in a world where the machine can produce anything but cannot stand for something.

The marketers who will define the next decade are the ones who lean into their humanity with the same discipline they bring to their data. Who treat presence as a skill worth developing, perspective as a differentiator worth protecting, and genuine connection as the highest-leverage investment a brand can make.

In an artificial everything world, be something real. That is not a tagline. It is the whole strategy.

I have been asked what I value, and the honest answer is that I learned my values the hard way. Not in a classroom or a leadership retreat, though those have their place. I learned them in the gap between who I needed to be professionally and what was happening personally, and discovering those two things did not have to be in opposition.

Here is what that journey taught me:

People before polish. The most important thing in any interaction is the human being in front of you. Not the deliverable. Not the metric. The person. When you lead with that, everything else tends to fall into alignment.

Faith as a foundation, not a footnote. My belief system is not separate from my work. It informs my ethics, my patience, my capacity to hold space for others in their hardest moments. It is woven into everything.

Truth-telling as a form of respect. Comfortable lies are not kindness. Honest, caring, direct conversation is. I would rather have a hard conversation that moves someone forward than an easy one that leaves them stuck.

Progress as a practice. Perfection is a destination that keeps moving. Progress is something you can measure, celebrate, and build on. I choose progress, in my work and in my growth as a human being, every single time.

Legacy over achievement. I am not interested in what I have accomplished alone. I am interested in who I helped get somewhere they could not have reached without someone believing in them first. That is the only ledger that matters to me at the end of the day.