When You're Opportunity Rich, Where Do You Start?

There's a kind of leadership challenge that doesn't get talked about enough. It's what happens when you join an organization and realize there are more opportunities to improve, grow, and innovate than you and your new team could possibly tackle at once.

I've come to think of this as being opportunity rich.

Like the picture (which is in the Rocky Mountain National Park), you ask yourself "which mountain do I climb first?"

It's an exciting position to be in. You step into a new role at a new place and you see potential everywhere. It's happened to almost every change in my career. There are processes that could be improved, technologies that could be introduced, relationships that could be strengthened, and ideas that have been waiting for someone to give them a little attention or even a chance.

And if you're anything like me, your mind immediately starts connecting the dots and wanting to tackle everything! You can see how one improvement might enable another, how a relatively small investment could solve a longstanding problem, or how something the organization has been doing for years could be approached differently.

Before long, you've mentally developed about three years of work that need immediate attention, but you've been on the job for two weeks.

The temptation is to start doing everything. After all, you were hired to lead, bring fresh thinking, and make things better. To do! You want to demonstrate progress, support your team, and show the organization what's possible and prove yourself.

But there's a difference between recognizing opportunity and having the organizational capacity to pursue it.

And learning to manage that difference might be one of the most important things I've learned in my career.

First, Understand What You're Actually Trying to Accomplish

When stepping into a new leadership role, I think there's tremendous value in resisting the urge to immediately develop a long list of initiatives.

That's easier said than done, particularly when people are eager to share what needs fixing. And they will share. Sometimes enthusiastically.

But before deciding what to do, we need to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish. To REALLY learn a new organization.

Most institutions already have some form of strategic plan, even if it's sitting on a shelf somewhere collecting dust. Or a framework of a plan. Ideally, it's a living document that guides institutional decisions and investments. Either way, it's an easy place to start to understand the place.

What are the organization's broad priorities? Where does leadership want to see meaningful progress? What commitments have already been made to the people the organization serves? And maybe, you can understand what they've tried, what worked, and what really didn't.

From there, I like the idea of developing a relatively set of broad objectives for the function I'm leading. These should directly support the organization's goals, while providing enough flexibility to accommodate other opportunities that emerge along the way.

For a marketing organization, those objectives might involve strengthening institutional reputation, improving audience engagement, building more sophisticated marketing operations, or developing a more coordinated approach to brand management. And culture. Team culture. Working across silos. How we approach people with disagree with.

The objectives provide direction without prematurely setting concrete projects.

This connection to institutional strategy matters. In my doctoral research examining public university presidents' perceptions of marketing effectiveness, strategic alignment emerged as an important theme in how presidents understood marketing's contribution to their institutions.

Figure Out Where You Are Before Deciding Where You're Going

One of the more useful approaches I've found is developing a maturity model, which I've touched on previously.

I know. Another model. Just what every organization needs.

But hear me out. I'd previously used simliar models in building business functions in previous roles, but I heard a podcast a few years ago on maturity models for marketing in higher ed. It was like connecting two dots that were just meant to find each other.

And the beautiful thing is that a helpful maturity model doesn't have to be a complicated exercise involving a hundred-page report and a color-coded spreadsheet that requires its own instruction manual.

At its simplest, it's a structured way to evaluate where an organization stands across the capabilities that matter to its success. It's unique to the organization, the department, or even down to the function.

For a marketing operation, those capabilities might include market research, brand management, digital infrastructure, marketing technology, analytics, creative operations, governance, and collaboration with partners.

The idea is to establish a baseline. And importantly, what does a more mature version of each capability actually look like? Because, you might be opportunity rich, but do you have the capability and capacity to implement anything?

Give Yourself a Year. Then Three. Then Five.

Once there's a reasonable understanding of where things stand, I like looking at development across one-, three-, and five-year horizons. Some capabilities take considerably longer to build than others.

In the first year, the emphasis might be on establishing foundational processes, strengthening relationships, addressing immediate operational barriers, and creating a more consistent approach to measurement.

By year three, the organization might be integrating systems, developing more sophisticated audience insights, or coordinating work across departments in ways that weren't previously possible.

By year five, the aspiration could be an operation capable of more advanced predictive analysis and contributing more consistently to institutional strategy.

The point is to create a reasonable picture of what progress could look like over time so you don't get stuck in a culture of NOW, NOW, NOW.

And I think there's something psychologically helpful about this approach, too.

When you're surrounded by opportunity, everything can feel urgent. A maturity plan gives you permission to recognize that something is important without pretending it must be accomplished immediately.

Not Everything Worth Improving Has a Convenient KPI

I'm a big believer in measurement. If we're investing institutional resources, we should be able to explain what we're trying to accomplish and whether we're making progress.

But I've also seen how easily organizations can become overly focused on what they can count.

Campaign performance, applications, revenue, conversion rates, and awareness are all important measures. They tell us something about outcomes. But what about the work required to make those outcomes possible?

How do you measure progress in building trust between departments? Establishing a functional governance structure? Improving the quality of strategic conversations? Developing a team that's more capable of handling increasingly complex work?

You can certainly identify indicators for these things, but assigning an arbitrary percentage improvement doesn't necessarily make the measurement meaningful.

This is another reason I find maturity models useful.

Instead of pretending every improvement can be expressed as a conventional KPI, we can establish observable characteristics of progress. The return on objectives.

Maybe today, project requests arrive through emails or hallway conversations. Six months from now, there's a shared intake process. A year from now, the organization has agreed on prioritization criteria and can make more informed decisions about capacity.

Of course, a maturity model shouldn't become an excuse to avoid accountability. If we're claiming progress, we should be able to point to evidence that something has actually changed.

Sometimes that's a number. Sometimes it's a demonstrated capability, an adopted process, or a decision the organization can now make with greater confidence. Sometimes its laughter in the hallway, a sign of improved culture.

The important thing is knowing the difference.

You Still Have to Decide What Comes First

Some opportunities will have an immediate connection to institutional priorities. Others will address a significant operational risk. Some will create the foundation for several future improvements.

And occasionally, something will simply need to wait because the team is already carrying more than it reasonably should. When we arrive with fresh energy and a head full of ideas, it's easy to forget that our teams have been doing the work long before we got there. They have existing responsibilities, commitments, and institutional knowledge that deserves consideration. They have successes, and those should be celebrated.

What looks like an exciting new initiative to a leader might look like another thirty hours of work to someone who's already stretched thin.

That's why prioritization needs to be a conversation.

I also think it's important to identify a few opportunities for early progress. Meaningful improvements that address genuine needs and demonstrate the value of a more deliberate approach. Not another quick campaign.

Sometimes those early successes create the confidence and organizational support needed to pursue more difficult work later.

And sometimes the best early decision is to stop doing something that no longer serves the organization. The doing it because we've always done in syndrome. We don't always talk enough about that option.

Remember That the Plan Is Supposed to Help You Lead, Not Get in the Way

There's a risk in all of this. We can spend so much time developing objectives, assessing maturity, and building roadmaps that planning becomes another thing competing for time. We have all heard the jokes about project management taking more time than the projects. This work should help a function focus, not be the focus.

It should help leaders explain priorities, make resource decisions, establish reasonable expectations, and have more productive conversations with their teams and institutional partners.

It should also change when circumstances change. A five-year maturity plan isn't a five-year contract with yourself. CHANGE IT WHEN YOU NEED TO! New technology will emerge. Institutional priorities will evolve. People will change. Budgets will change. Some initiatives will fail.

That's ok. The purpose is to give your work a direction and a way to evaluate progress, not to predict the future with remarkable precision.

Being opportunity rich is a good problem to have. It means there's potential, room to grow, and meaningful work ahead. But opportunity without prioritization can quickly become exhaustion, even for the most enthusiastic leader and capable team. Trust me. I've lived that. You don't have to accomplish everything in your first year. You probably shouldn't even try or you'll get burned out. I've lived that, too.

The goal is to make thoughtful decisions about what matters, build the capacity to pursue it, and create a way to recognize progress along the way.

And perhaps (definitely speaking to myself here), maybe even enjoy the satisfaction of finishing something before adding another twelve ideas to the list.