Kelly Esten has held onto two C-suite titles at Toast by becoming comfortable giving other things away, a habit that helps define her leadership style.
Over nine years at the restaurant technology giant, Esten has run product launches, led partnerships, and helped grow its business with larger restaurant groups. Today, she is both CMO and chief operating officer, a combination that spans two functions and pushes her to think about the digital ordering and payments company as a whole.
Making room for that remit has meant regularly deciding which parts of her old jobs should no longer be hers and which tasks to offload. “I get to supervise, but I don’t get to do the work anymore,” she concedes.
With two C-suite roles—first the marketing chief title and then the COO role—Esten says the operator side “certainly dominates,” making her increasingly deliberate about where she puts her “time and, more importantly, energy and attention.”
Her threshold for getting into the details has risen accordingly. Esten still weighs in on work she once owned, though she tries to reserve that involvement for moments when she believes her opinion could truly change the business outcome. If decisions routinely depend on her input, she sees that as a sign that she needs to give her team more authority to make them on their own. Otherwise, she becomes the bottleneck.
But giving people more authority only works if they have enough context to use it. As Esten began managing managers and eventually executives, she became more deliberate about sharing what she knew so they could make decisions without waiting for her.
She first saw the need for this while running product marketing, when leadership decisions and discussions didn’t always reach her team and her team’s insights didn’t always make their way back up.
Esten began writing weekly updates, sharing what she was thinking about, working on, and prioritizing. She still sends two every week, one to marketing and another to the enterprise organization, giving both teams more of the information they need to operate without her direct involvement.
In the latest episode of Fortune Next to Lead, Esten talks about what she’s learned from moving between marketing and operations, how holding both roles shapes how she runs them, why AI could further blur the lines between functions across the C-suite, and what that means for leaders taking on more than one remit.
Watch the full conversation here.
Ruth Umoh [email protected]
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