12 ways teamwork spells success

Marketing departments can be funny creatures. The breadth of the discipline means creative people comingle with data geeks and wordsmiths adjoin coders. The touchy-feely branding whisperers stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the email marketing specialists. Is there little wonder that members of this group may have difficulties relating to one another? That there may be walls separating the free flow of knowledge, discovery and innovation?

This weekend I spent 12 hours camped out on unforgiving bleachers in a stuffy gym at Simpson College watching sixty teams compete in a state 8th grade AAU volleyball tournament. The girls on my daughter’s team have played together for 2 years in both regular and club seasons. While technically a team, they have a ways to go before they function as a fluid assembly of skilled, synchronized, trustful, and creative players.

They’re still a group of girls with a love for the sport, position assignments, and a narrow world view of the game.  They struggle trying to understand how their personal mindsets, performance, and choices fit in, nay, shape, the achievements of the whole.  Scanning the huge all-purpose gym to see 6 courts of simultaneous play, I was struck by the myriad differences between the teams.

There were differences in height and physical fitness (giraffe legs in abundance). Differences in focus and attitude, mental readiness. They reacted differently to disadvantages or competition. Some worked the court with pre-coordinated plays while others were clearly reacting to the ball during active play.

Nothing Gets Accomplished Inside A Vacuum

And wow, if all this didn’t strike me as an analogy for marketing departments.  Members deal with disjointed “coworker stuff” (lots of egos in marketing, I tell you) as well as the business projects at hand. And surprise – the degree to which the business projects get tackled is often determined by how much cloudy coworker stuff is blocking the way. The stuff that’s commonly ignored or swept under the rug (“Most of the time we overlook Johnny because he’s the only one who knows the system, and it would be hard to replace him.”) – the chronically late, unapproachable designer, the sanctimonious  developer, the contentious analyst – actually impacts time to launch. It also affects how effective we are at our jobs and the personal satisfaction we get from our work.

I think marketing teams can be especially vulnerable to this type of pitfall. Combine Old Guard traditionalists with New Media risk takers and there’s great potential for misunderstanding or even prejudicial behavior.

The Cheese Stands Alone

Leaders, here’s a challenge. Stop trying to hire stand-alone, perfect employees with all the requisite skills and experiences you’d want if you could build the perfect robot. Instead, focus on piecing together a group of promising individuals with a passion for working with others; problem solvers with a creative, resourceful nature. Look for those with high ego strength to withstand the bumps and bruises of work, and the empathy necessary to communicate effectively with others and respect their strengths. Find ways to help valuable members with differing perspectives understand and appreciate one another’s institutional knowledge and the ways that together they can make a difference in your market.

Hire people that want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Those people will take your company’s marketing and your business to great heights.

12 Ways Teamwork Spells Success

• A bunch of talented (or skilled) people in a building does not a team make.
• Talent and skill don’t necessarily make magic happen. There has to be driving purpose and group cohesiveness.
• A commonly held priority – wining, selling more widgets, generating more renewals, etc. – has to bind people to take action and accountability.
• Personal agendas only work when the motivation is improving the quality of one’s own contributions to achieve the goals held by the whole.
• Trust – an earned emotion – is a critical building block to collective success.
• What you bring to the game less important than what you’re willing to put into it.
• Open, immediate communication obliterates ambiguity and opens up options. If the baby is ugly, call it. Then overcome it.
• Acknowledge weaknesses and develop counter balances. Spend more time developing what works well and fill in the weak gaps.
• Every event, every project, provides opportunity to stretch and grow. There’s no perfection, only incremental progress.
• Defensive people don’t learn. They shut down. When they shut down, they impede the development of the group.
• Reaction and response are two different things. One lets circumstances else lead you. The other lets you choose a path.
• When you’ve shared sweat with someone, it’s easier to see them as fallible humans. It becomes harder to make quick, harsh judgments.

What’s missing from the list? In what other ways does the energy put into team building and personal development help departments and organizations get ahead?

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