The Essential Elements of Great Teamwork
Building a superteam is not just about getting the best players. You need the essential elements of great teamwork: leadership, chemistry, and complementarity. If any one of those ingredients is missing, you could end up with a disaster on the scale of Star-Lord completely blowing it while the Avengers were seconds away from disarming Thanos.
But with excellent teamwork, even a rag-tag group of misfits can overcome staggering odds, like when Star-Lord distracts Ronan with a dance-off so his team could save the day.
I’m not saying the fate of the universe is at stake, but if you can’t build a marketing superteam, your competitors will.
To spare you that unhappy fate, in this blog post I will cover the fundamentals of teamwork, as well as emphasize why a team approach is so critical to your integrated marketing strategy.
Superteams have a superleaders.
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you have one person with a hammer, another with a saw, and yet another with a screwdriver, you end up with a situation where they can’t agree whether to pound, cut, or screw. That’s not a pretty picture to imagine.
You need someone who can see the big picture, set the strategy, and settle disagreements. Whether you call this person the Account Manger or the Marketing Strategist or anything else, they are ultimately accountable for the performance of the team.
It is only natural for PPC specialists and SEO specialist to disagree over which is more important. The leader’s job is to craft an integrated strategy in which all the marketing channels reinforce each other so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s a reason Superman is the leader of the Justice League. Superteams need superleaders.
Superteams have chemistry.
Sometimes people are just on different wavelengths. Try though they might, they just can’t click. It’s nobody’s fault, but trying to force a working relationship when there’s no chemistry can take a serious toll on productivity and morale.
That is why it’s important, whenever possible, for teams to be voluntary and self-selected. Unfortunately this is rarely the case at agencies where work is assigned based on availability, but in an ideal world people could always choose who they work with.
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| Found family! |
I often describe Ethical Digital as a platform that lets digital marketers form teams and split the revenue they generate. I actually think this is one of its key features – it lets people pick their own teams, rather than assigning projects from the top-down.
Superteams have complementarity.
A good team has balance among its members. Their relative strengths should cover each other’s weaknesses, such that together they have no weakness. Whereas chemistry is about temperament and communication, complementarity is about skills and competencies.
If you want to assemble a superteam, you need to have a clear sense of which skills are necessary for the success of the project. In marketing this can include specialties like PPC, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media Management, and more. You might also want a spreadsheets wiz, someone who is good with words, and someone with the design sense to know how to make a report look attractive.
Rarely will a single individual be truly expert in more than one or two of these areas, so we at Ethical Digital are believers in recruiting marketing specialists rather than generalists.
Superteams On Demand
Ethical Digital is not a digital marketing agency in the traditional sense. Rather it is a platform in which marketers can team up on a project-by-project basis. Our decentralized solution relies on principles of efficiency, accountability, and incentive alignment. The result is a more effective approach to digital marketing.
If you want a marketing superteam of your own, that’s what we’re here for. We don’t have a Star Lord, but our CMO does bear a passing resemblance to Dr. Strange!
