Note: listen to this song while you’re reading the post.
I have a ritual at our Saint Paul office. Most afternoons, when my head is full and I need to think out loud, I’ll ask Zac if he wants to play a quick game of ping-pong. Somewhere mid-rally, the connection I missed in the last meeting shows up. This eureka moment or insight rarely arrives while I’m in presentation-mode, translating analytics dashboard, or rereading the same email thread. It arrives during a game where no one is keeping score…at least of who said what.
For a long time I treated the ping-pong table as a stress release or a chance to talk, stretch, and get away from the desk for a second. After years of running the ritual now, the actual function clicked in my head: the ping-pong table is a strategic de-orbit.
I’m “in orbit” when I’m managing team dynamics, monitoring client relationships, writing and reading comments across day-to-day communication channels: project management, chat, email, calendar. Projecting a persona in Google Meets that I tweak based on what is needed: calm, confidence, maybe some self-deprecation, a strategic amount of nerd during my analysis and depending on the audience. Exhausting but necessary. De-orbiting is setting that self-editing instinct aside and reacting in the moment. It’s a great way to be mindful and reset midday (almost like my own style of meditation). This same de-orbiting maneuver explains why some specialist-turned-leaders thrive, others struggle but manage, and some burn out.
Agency life trains a specific kind of person. You learn to read data quickly, scale what works, process large amounts of input, switch between projects on a dime, and talk fast before your audience tunes out before the big reveal. I can already see some of you hovering over that X button as you read. The reward loop for high performance and eloquent ideation shapes managers who are skilled at problem-solving in the moment. Yet, my contention is that this same reward loop creates a quiet trap. The parallel-processing skill that makes someone a fluent client lead or conference speaker trains away active listening. Thought leaders get cursed with knowledge and stop seeing where or how their team is struggling. Client leads build larger portfolios, strategic complexity compounds with scale, and spontaneity starts to feel expensive. The same skill that earned them the seat at the table becomes the liability that loses it.
In typical marketer fashion there’s a counter-argument to this worth naming too. A specialist-turned-leader who no longer needs to analyze the data daily, yet, is still able to recognize trends at a glance or can spot when someone else’s analysis draws the wrong conclusion is more valuable to an organization than the generalist-MBA who never learned to spot the difference. The reason the specialist got promoted is force multiplication: their judgment scales other people, which scales the work. The best leaders I’ve worked for kept their expertise active. They converted their own personal output into a standard everyone on their team gets measured against. Be aware though, this is tough to do successfully – especially as an effective specialist turned first-time manager. Both for the force multiplier and the employee working on achieving said standard. It’s rewarding for both of them when it happens but it’s rarely easy.
In The Diplomat (Netflix), the US Ambassador’s deputy tells her, “Ma’am, I think you should try to rely on us. We are doing the part of the job you like, you’re great at it, but it is a big job. You can’t handle both.” The line works because the Ambassador is still highly skilled at the work she came up doing but we also see how it’s not realistic for anyone to do it all for too long. The deputy is asking her to stop performing the work and start setting the standard for it. I could write an essay on things I liked about this (albeit, unrealistic) show about diplomats but the main point is that proximity to your craft is the value. Keeping with the metaphor, proximity to your craft is also a gravity well. Specialist-turned-leaders feel a constant pull back into that type of “doing” because their reward loop, learned identity, or their expectation to the standard all point in the same direction. Just like gravity is physics, we shouldn’t treat this “pull” like it’s a character flaw. We need to be steering it strategically.
Two points of failure.
#1. The leader who stays in permanent high orbit loses feel for the atmosphere: the work standard drifts toward abstraction, viability of tactics goes unverified, strategic execution fails, the team struggles to learn from problems left undefined or may become adept at building exculpatory subtext the leader struggles to detect. Outside influence and transparency can help but only for so long. The atrophied-specialist-leader becomes a strategist who doesn’t understand why the tactics aren’t working. The drift isn’t overt, doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and never arrives all at once. It’s a cascading failure you can’t locate until it’s already structural. Less circuit breaker, more dry rot.
#2. The opposite failure looks like getting pulled all the way down: the leader keeps doing the work personally, the delegation never compounds, the calendar fills with execution, and the strategic work waits until 9pm or ends up becoming an after thought. This second path ends in burnout. The first path ends in cuts. The reason that specialists are given the opportunity to lead in the first place is to multiply themselves. If you don’t multiply then every significant thing you do is multiplied by a factor of one.
The fix for high-orbit abstraction.
This is the de-orbiting maneuver itself: momentum helps to maintain your altitude allowing the occasional deliberate dip when the situation demands it. It’s short, targeted, and reversible. Here are a few examples of how this deliberate de-orbit could look:
- Sitting in on a team member while they’re performing an account audit and asking them to trace the logic out loud while steering them towards identifying the pattern themselves.
- Notice a client’s KPIs seem off a half an hour before a meeting? Dive in yourself, while again, treating it like a usability test. Explain aloud why you think or know the data isn’t calculating correctly, redo the calculation, and frame it as a teaching experience with teeth.
- Timing or PTO schedules require you to handle it yourself? Good. Do a piece of work you would normally assign and QA yourself or have your own employee check your work. Identify where your standards lost specificity. Allow yourself to see your weaknesses, especially if that’s something you would call out if it was someone else. Side note: this keeps you grounded for more than one reason. I recently did this with a Google Ads build for an SMB and noticed quite a few things in Editor that I hadn’t needed to think about for a while.
The descent ends when the standard is rewritten, the numbers are verified, or the lesson is learned. Then climb back into orbit, resist the unintentional micromanaging and trust your ground crew.
Knowing how to spot when you’re in the wrong altitude.
Here are a few examples I’ve seen:
- Your standards drift toward abstract big-ideas. You may believe you see a pattern on the macro scale but it doesn’t translate into reality that can be executed on. The team starts interpreting where they used to operationalize.
- You approve work you could not reproduce from scratch. One caveat to this is surrounding yourself with a team that actively shares learning and is able to challenge strategic deficiencies. This requires two-way trust in your relationship. Your team needs to know they’re safe, challenging your assumptions. And you need to trust that your team understands the expectation, and is able to execute – not just on the assignment, but the overall objective.
- Lastly, your team stops asking for your advice. The silence may read as others accommodating for your busyness until you realize they have stopped expecting (or wanting) you to weigh in at all. When your team asks for advice or just wants to run something by you, that’s them bridging the gap between what went into the strategy or shape of a project scope and then executing on it. If this isn’t happening then you have become a barrier that’s easier to work around than working through.
If any one of those examples rings true then it may be time to schedule a de-orbit. For me, ping-pong worked because when the performative posture drops, the stakes drop.
When I was forced to rely on instinct and muscle memory it changed how I thought about what I was saying. My half-baked ideas said aloud only had to survive long enough for my colleague to return it — the quip and the serve. A different version of this same de-orbiting maneuver lives at every altitude, from the analytics dashboard you re-pull yourself to the campaign brief you redline by hand.
Permanent high orbit looks like leadership and may feel like control, right up until the day the standards have drifted so far from where they were, external momentum is needed to either right the course or force a descent. The trick is to keep the thrust on and dip when the situation demands it. The pattern is climb, descend, climb again. A leader who treats the craft like a maneuver, tactical and specific and useful, keeps the altitude that lets them lead.
