INBOX INSIGHTS, December 10, 2025: Why Everyone Hates the CEO, End of Year Purchases - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Why Everyone Hates the CEO, End of Year Purchases (2025-12-10) :: View in browser

👉 Watch Katie Robbert’s MarketingProfs B2B Forum talk, Driving B2B Growth with AI

INBOX INSIGHTS: Why Everyone Hates the CEO, End of Year Purchases (2025-12-10)

Watch this video on YouTube

Why Everyone Hates the CEO

I recently spent some time reading through a compilation of anonymous employee feedback from Reddit regarding CEOs at large, global companies. It was… a lot.

Some of the chief complaints that kept surfacing included:

Financial Mismanagement & Greed: Sacrificing long-term growth and stability for short-term profits or personal bonuses.
Reactionary, Chaotic Decision-Making: Treating every fleeting whim as a top priority, creating organizational whiplash.
Unclear Direction & Lack of Structure: Leaving teams adrift without clear goals, metrics, or instructions.
Undermining Authority: Bypassing established leadership structures based on gossip or favoritism.
Micromanagement & Lack of Trust: Hovering over details and refusing to delegate, signaling deep insecurity.
Incompetence & Politics: Promoting based on charisma rather than skill, while fearing reality and reason.
Tone-Deafness & Disconnection: Ignoring company policies for favorites and failing to understand the operational reality of the workforce.
Imbalance of Workload & Compensation: Demanding unrealistic output without providing necessary resources or fair rewards.

Reading through these, my first reaction wasn’t defensiveness. It was recognition.

I get it.

If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you’ve likely felt the frustration of a leadership team that seems disconnected from reality. You’ve watched a CEO chase a shiny new object while the core business crumbles. You’ve dealt with the “executive priority” of the day that derails weeks of actual work. You aren’t alone, and your frustration is valid.

But here’s the unpopular opinion: while it’s easy to write these leaders off as “bad people” or “ego-driven,” (and this is definitely true for a lot of them) the reality is that the CEO-employee relationship is a two-way street. Yes, the power dynamic is skewed, but silence and resentment from the workforce only fuel the chaos.

So, let’s break down these toxic dynamics and look at what CEOs need to stop doing, and proactively, what employees can do to survive—and maybe even fix—the chaos.

The Strategy Gap: “Everything is a Priority”

One of the loudest complaints is that executive decisions lack coherent strategy. Employees feel like they are constantly pivoting to chase short-term gains or the CEO’s latest whim, introducing chaos and financial stress.

For the CEO: Stop Being a Chaos Agent

Your job isn’t to have every idea; your job is to kill the bad ones. When you chase every shiny object (hello, Generative AI), you aren’t being innovative; you’re being distracting. You need to define a clear Purpose—the “North Star”—and stick to it. If you change the strategy every quarter, you aren’t pivoting; you’re flailing. Before you announce a “new direction,” ask yourself: Does this align with the core problem we solve? If not, shelf it.

For the Employee: Force the Trade-Off

When leadership throws a new “P1” priority on your plate without taking anything off, don’t just say “okay” and burn yourself out trying to do it all. You have to manage up.

Respond with data, not emotion. Say this: “I can absolutely focus on this new initiative. Currently, I have Projects A, B, and C on my plate. To accommodate this new priority, which of these three should I pause?”

Force leadership to acknowledge the trade-off. Often, they don’t realize the capacity constraints until you show them the math.

The Trust Void: Micromanagement vs. Accountability

Another recurring theme is the toxic dynamic of micromanagement. Employees see leaders who gained their positions through charisma but lack the competence to actually do the job. This insecurity breeds a need to control every minor detail.

For the CEO: Delegate Outcomes, Not Tasks

If you are checking font sizes or rewriting email copy, you are failing as a CEO. You are paid to think strategically, not tactically. Micromanagement is a symptom of your own insecurity—you don’t trust the process, so you hover over the people.

Stop it.

Instead, set clear expectations for the outcome (the “what”) and let your team figure out the process (the “how”). If you can’t trust them to do that, you either hired the wrong people or, more likely, you failed to give them clear instructions.

For the Employee: Over-Communicate to Buy Freedom

If you are being micromanaged, it’s usually because your boss is anxious about what you’re doing. The antidote to anxiety is information.

Be proactive. Don’t wait for them to ask “where is this project?” Send a status update before they ask. Document your process. Show your work. When you make your workflow transparent, you remove the mystery. When you remove the mystery, you remove the need for them to hover. You buy your own freedom by flooding the zone with clarity.

The Reality Disconnect: “Do More With Less”

Finally, there is the heartbreaking complaint of tone-deafness. Executives who push teams to do more with less, ignore their own policies for “favorites,” and fail to support the workforce during transitions.

For the CEO: Walk the Walk

You cannot mandate “return to office” while you work from your vacation home. You cannot cut budgets for tools while flying private. Culture isn’t what you put on a poster; it’s what you tolerate and how you behave.

If you are asking the team to “do more with less,” you need to be in the trenches removing obstacles, not adding to them. You need to acknowledge the burnout, not gaslight your team into thinking they just aren’t working hard enough.

For the Employee: Set Boundaries Based on Data

When the workload becomes unrealistic, “trying harder” is a trap. You need to treat your time like a budget.

Track your time. When the request comes to “do more,” show the receipts. “Here is a breakdown of my 40 hours this week: 15 hours went to meetings, 10 to administrative tasks, and 15 to deep work. Where can we cut?”

It’s hard to argue with a timesheet. By protecting your boundaries with data, you aren’t being “difficult”; you’re being professional.

The Bottom Line

The complaints about CEOs usually boil down to a lack of strategy, understanding of how we work, and trust and respect.

CEOs: You need to stop treating your employees like cogs in a machine and start treating them like the engine that drives the business. Get clear, get organized, and get out of their way.

Employees: You can’t control who sits in the corner office, but you can control how you engage with them. Stop waiting for permission to organize your work, set boundaries, and demand clarity.

It’s a relationship. And like any relationship, it only works if both sides show up, communicate clearly, and respect the other person’s reality.

You can do this.

How are you managing expectations? Reply to this email or join the conversation in our free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

Weekly Check-In Poll

Please click/tap on just one answer – this is our weekly survey to see how we’re doing, so please do take it. There are no forms to fill out, this is the entire thing. One click/tap and you’re done, with our thanks.

How likely are you to recommend Trust Insights as a consulting firm to someone in the next 90 days?

Do you have a colleague or friend who needs this newsletter? Send them this link to help them get their own copy:

https://www.trustinsights.ai/newsletter

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss small language models (SLMs) and how they differ from large language models (LLMs).

You will understand the crucial differences between massive large language models and efficient small language models. You’ll discover how combining SLMs with your internal data delivers superior, faster results than using the biggest AI tools. You will learn strategic methods to deploy these faster, cheaper models for mission-critical tasks in your organization. You will identify key strategies to protect sensitive business information using private models that never touch the internet. Watch now to future-proof your AI strategy and start leveraging the power of small, fast models today!

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we reviewed what’s new in Google NotebookLM. Catch the episode replay here!

This week on So What? we’ll be digging into Small Language Models. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed. If you read something and enjoy it, please share it with a friend or colleague!

The 12 Days of AI Use Cases

Our annual series returns!

Take your skills to the next level with our premium courses.

Get skilled up with an assortment of our free, on-demand classes.

You could be reaching 37,000+ marketers, analysts, data scientists, and executives directly with your ad. Want to learn more? Reach out and contact us.

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about using generative AI to make smart end-of-year budget decisions.

As we head towards the end of the year, one of the most common pitches you’re going to get – even from us at Trust Insights – is: you’ve got some end-of-year budget that’s use it or lose it, so here are some things to spend it on. While we’d love to tell you to just buy our courses, books, and consulting services, there’s a far more strategic approach to take.

A better idea is to use generative AI to help you make those budget decisions strategically and thoughtfully.

Chances are, back in September and October, you did your annual planning for 2026. You looked at our past episodes about scenario planning and developed some scenarios for how the world might look and function next year. Maybe you grabbed a beverage of choice – mulled cider, sparkling apple cider – and thought through your goals and current performance.

Going back to the Trust Insights 5P Framework, think about what you want to accomplish.

This is a great time of year to do human capital inventory. Who are the people on your team? What skills do they have? Where are the gaps in your capabilities? What skills do you need to hire for, or need to develop internally?

You can conduct end-of-year performance reviews to evaluate – not to punish or be punitive, but to help people grow and develop professionally. Generative AI can assist with this entire process. You can review your processes, identify where things are most broken, discuss the frustrations you had over the year and what things really made you unhappy, celebrate what made you happy, recognize what worked well, and inventory your tools. What’s in your marketing tech stack? What’s in your AI tech stack? What are you paying for? How much? What are the capabilities of each tool?

Now you have the information you need. You capture all of this information with a voice memo app on your phone, recording your thoughts and observations as they come. Or use one of my personal favorite methods: grab your company credit card bill and see exactly what you’re paying for each tool and service. Put all that information into generative AI and ask a strategic question:

I have X dollars left in my budget, and here’s a menu of different options and things I could do based on the purpose, people, process, platform, and performance of this year and all the data I’ve supplied. Based on this menu of services from Trust Insights that covers all these different things, what should I invest in with this budget remnant to address the biggest problems we have in the most cost-efficient manner?

The AI might suggest several options. It could recommend getting a copy of my book for everyone to read. It might recommend buying 5 seats of Katie’s AI Strategist course for the 5 MVP players on your team. Or it could suggest bringing Trust Insights in for a half-day workshop to help your organization level up its capabilities.

Next, have generative AI score all these solutions in descending order – ranking the solutions that best fit your budget and address your priorities. You might have champagne problems but a beer budget, as the saying goes. The goal is straightforward: make sure your budget remnant actually addresses the real problems you’re facing.

The key takeaway here is this: don’t just accept vendor pitches at face value, including ours. Use generative AI to analyze your actual needs, your actual capabilities, your actual budget constraints, and make thoughtful, data-driven decisions about where to invest those final dollars of the year. Strategic budget allocation ensures you get maximum value from your budget remnant and set yourself up for success in the coming year.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our new course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

👉 Take this course now to become an AI leader

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 4000+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!

Where can you find Trust Insights face-to-face?

Social Media Marketing World, Anaheim, April 2026

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

Want some private training at your company? Ask us!

First and most obvious – if you want to talk to us about something specific, especially something we can help with, hit up our contact form.

Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?

Read our disclosures statement for more details, but we’re also compensated by our partners if you buy something through us.

Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our workshop offering, Generative AI for Marketers.

Workshops: Offer the Generative AI for Marketers half and full day workshops at your company. These hands-on sessions are packed with exercises, resources and practical tips that you can implement immediately.

👉 Click/tap here to book a workshop

Some events and partners have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them. Read our full disclosures statement on our website .

Thanks for subscribing and supporting us. Let us know if you want to see something different or have any feedback for us!

Need help with your marketing AI and analytics?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Pin It on Pinterest

Watch This Newsletter