EPISODE 009 · PRIVATE SECTOR → HIGHER EDUCATION
Lindsey Wilson on the question she couldn’t answer, and who she hands the megaphone to
Lindsey Wilson spent years in the private sector doing marketing, and doing it well. Then, somewhere around the ten or fifteen year mark, she hit a question she couldn’t answer: what is the point of all this? She was successful by every metric she could name except the one that mattered. So she left, took a deliberate step backwards in title and in pay, and moved into a community college as an experiment, with no guarantee it would work.
What you will learn
- Why a step backwards can be the right direction. Hers cost title and salary, and she’d do it again.
- What “inner knowing” feels like when you have a mortgage. The practical version, not the inspirational one.
- The megaphone rule, and the marketing test underneath it. Bad, good and great marketing, in one line.
- The question she asked her team that they thought was insane. Three words.
- Where AI belongs in creative work, and where she won’t let it near.
- What imposter syndrome looks like when you’re the CMO in a room full of PhDs. It doesn’t stop. She has a way through it.
What was the question she couldn’t answer?
She knew early that she was passionate about marketing and believed she was good at it. That carried her through good organisations and real experience. What it didn’t do was answer the question that arrived about a decade in.
“Maybe I have a decent career. Maybe I feel like I’m successful in some metric. But I didn’t feel successful as a person.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
The specific weight, she says, was showing up every day to work whose whole point was to make somebody else a lot of money. She calls it a midlife crisis and notes she was only in her thirties at the time. The way out wasn’t a better marketing job. It was going back to a more foundational question — what do I actually want to give back — and following it to the mission of community colleges in Phoenix, and a posting at Gateway Community College.
“Use my skills in a way that’s beneficial, not just to a P&L, but actually to somebody’s life.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
How do you step backwards when you have a mortgage?
This is the part most people get stuck on, and Sondra pushes on it directly: the inner knowing is all very well, but there are commitments, and there is a number on the payslip that is about to get smaller.
Lindsey’s answer is not that she found a clever way around it. It’s that the discomfort eventually outgrew the risk.
“Getting to a place where you feel like the unknown is less scary than what you’re doing today — sometimes that makes you jump off and just say, let’s see what happens.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Practically, it meant not going out to eat as much and not driving the nicest car for a while. The reframe that made it possible wasn’t about money at all:
“What is the road I’m driving on? If I’m consistently advancing on the wrong road, then I’m going to be right back at this place, no matter where I go.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
How did she know it was the right call?
Quickly. She started at Gateway in early 2020, weeks before the pandemic. What convinced her wasn’t a result — it was the first week of meeting people.
“If they’re this passionate and they’ve been here ten years, five years, twenty years, then I think I’ve latched on to something that I was seeking.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Then she started interviewing students about their lives, which is the work she had wanted all along.
What is the megaphone rule?
Marketers, she says, have the ability to direct attention. That’s the job. What comes with it is a question about what you point it at.
“It doesn’t matter how big your megaphone is. It matters who you give it to.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
She is careful not to moralise about it — there are talented marketers selling a million units of a widget and that’s a fine living. But for her the test is whether the thing you’re drawing attention to improves a life. And there’s a blunter version of the same idea that works as a craft test:
“Bad marketing talks about you. Good marketing talks about them. Great marketing talks about how you help them.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Clenching onto the megaphone, in her framing, isn’t just selfish. It’s bad marketing at its core.
How do you stop marketing becoming a numbers game?
Every institution has goals and metrics, and it is easy to get fixated on the data and start changing tactics every time it wobbles. When Lindsey came over to lead the system, she started somewhere else entirely, with a question her team found baffling.
“Who are we? My team probably thought I was crazy. Like, of course we know who we are. But I’m like — do we really know who we are?”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
That process of digging into what the brand actually stood for became the same method they now apply to every story they tell. Take a graduate who finished an education degree and is now teaching. The institutional version is that affordable education puts more teachers in classrooms. Keep asking why it matters, and you get somewhere better:
“There’s going to be a child in that classroom who finally believes in themselves because that teacher showed up. And that’s the story.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Her position on the metrics is not that they don’t matter. It’s that they follow.
“The numbers will figure themselves out. If we do it right, the numbers will be there, because we’re actually giving people an option that they can believe in.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Where does AI belong, and where doesn’t it?
Lindsey has spent her career positioning herself as the tech-forward, digital-first one, so this isn’t a reflexive objection. Use it for analytics, for compiling information, for checking things, for workflow and automation. The line she draws is about where the thinking comes from.
“AI is not human and therefore doesn’t understand the human experience. And it does feel like it’s soulless.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
She instructs her team not to let the tools supply their own thoughts. Humans bring experience to the work and it is valid experience — and the students’ experience needs listening to, which takes blocking out noise rather than generating more of it. Storytelling, she points out, has been how humans transmit experience since the beginning, and a good story still lands today for reasons that have nothing to do with the tooling.
“If you’re letting it dictate your strategy and your vision — and what the story should be — I think you might miss it a little bit.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
How do you protect someone else’s story?
By treating the relationship as the actual work. She doesn’t arrive with the story pre-written and look for someone to fit it.
“I don’t need you to regurgitate talking points. I don’t need to craft questions before I meet you. I need to know who you are as a person.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Find their story first, she says, then work out how it meets the organisation’s goals — not the other way round. And when anything is edited afterwards, it goes back to the person to confirm it still represents them. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t run, however many times it has to be redone.
“It’s easy to look at a project list and think, tell ten student stories. Those are ten lives. Those are ten individuals.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
“If we’re going to take someone else’s experience and shine a spotlight on it, then we owe it to them. We owe it to the community to do it right.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Does a CMO still get imposter syndrome?
Yes, and she says so without hedging — all the time, even today. Higher education is full of people with PhDs who are, in her words, incredibly smart, and it is normal to walk into a room like that and quietly discount what you brought with you.
What gets her over it is going back to why she’s there in the first place. She also makes a distinction worth keeping: reflecting on how you showed up is healthy, because that’s how you do it better next time. Shrinking is not the same thing as reflecting.
“You’ve got to be a little louder than the voices inside that are saying maybe you shouldn’t be here.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
What would she tell a younger woman?
Stop leading with the career trajectory. Start with what you’re actually passionate about, then work the pragmatic pieces — the training, the certificate, the extra degree — around that, rather than the reverse.
“I would have never in my wildest dreams said I’ll be leading a higher education marketing communications team. But I had never really had an honest conversation about what I’m really passionate about. It was always just what’s the next career step.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
And the switch is survivable at any point, she adds, having made one herself. It just costs you a few years you didn’t need to spend.
The one thing to do this week
“Remind yourself that you’re good enough no matter where you are in your career and what you’re doing. Even if it’s a tough season of life, it will figure itself out.”
Lindsey Wilson, Women IN episode 9
Where to find Lindsey Wilson
- Maricopa Community Colleges — Chief Marketing and Communications Officer.
- LinkedIn — Lindsey Wilson. Her own recommendation, and the best place to reach her. She has made a habit of answering young women who write to her with questions.
- Her professional website — where she keeps a portfolio of the work.
Where to listen
Listen to Women IN episode 9 with Lindsey Wilson wherever you get your podcasts.
Frequently asked questions
Is taking a pay cut to change industries worth it?
In Lindsey Wilson's case, yes, but her reasoning is worth more than the verdict. She reframed it from 'why would I step backwards' to 'which road am I on', on the grounds that advancing quickly along the wrong road just delivers you back to the same question later. In practice it meant not going out to eat as much and not driving the nicest car for a while.
How do you know when it is time to leave a job you are good at?
Her marker was not a bad job or a bad boss. It was that the question of what the work was for had worn her down to the point where the unknown felt less frightening than staying. She describes it as getting to a place where the unknown is less scary than what you are doing today.
What is the megaphone rule?
Lindsey Wilson's line is that it does not matter how big your megaphone is, it matters who you give it to. Marketers can direct attention, and her test is whether the thing you are drawing attention to improves a life. The craft version of the same idea: bad marketing talks about you, good marketing talks about them, great marketing talks about how you help them.
Should marketers use AI to write content?
Her position is to use it for analytics, research, compiling information and workflow automation, but not to let it supply your thinking, your strategy or the story itself. She says AI is not human and therefore does not understand the human experience, and that if you let it dictate what the story should be, you might miss it.
What makes a story worth telling in higher education marketing?
Keep asking why it matters until you get past the institutional talking points. Not 'affordable education produces teachers', but the child in that classroom who finally believes in themselves because that teacher showed up.
Who is Lindsey Wilson?
Lindsey Wilson is Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Maricopa Community Colleges, a system serving more than 140,000 students. She spent two decades across the private and public sectors, including marketing and sales at a health and wellness company that was later acquired, and the City of Tempe, before moving into higher education at Gateway Community College in early 2020.