What’s your secret sauce? Whether you’re making websites, rallying a sales team, or really any other sphere where work and ideas matter, striking a balance between the different creative fires of your team is where magic comes from. It’s key to think on what your team and your processes look like, what are the unique skills that your people bring to the table, and how technology is can lighten the load and enable the team to do more. Value Talent without tech and your team can spin its gears unnecessarily; elevating tech over talent, and the purpose behind what you do can be neglected. As a marketing agency in Orange County, this can’t be truer for us; still, any and every team needs to strike this balance in some way to achieve their highest potential.
Tech
The right tech to use is an exceedingly subjective and flexible area. No matter what it is you do, you have no shortage of options for tech that assists in workflow, communication, and countless other tasks, like:
- Workflow Management — See where tasks are across multiple teams, and help people work together better.
- Digital Asset Management — If you work with digital files, and your team works with the same files, a digital asset manager can enable you to better share them.
- Countless others — The odds are that there is a piece of software designed to help you with the areas of your business that you most struggle with. Keep in mind that apps and software are tools, and tools are designed to make jobs easier and less time-consuming. The deciding factor on whether or not to implement a bit of technology is, does it make my team’s job easier?
Talent
There are no two ways about it—you’ve got to hire the right people. It doesn’t matter how perfect and expansive your technology is. If your talent doesn’t support your business, then you will be held back. Abilities are one metric for your candidate’s fit, but at least as important is the culture fit. Does the candidate fit the core values of your company? Additional skills can always be learned, and experience is easy to gain: training and development is part of team building anyway. Acquiring a value that the person didn’t have before is extremely difficult. If you hire someone whose values already match your company, you’ll be able to trust them right away, which opens up the potential to do more.
Team
This is where the majority of the magic comes from. Embracing and unleashing the creativity of your team takes a variety of things, most notably, a team you can trust. In addition to trust, your team members have to be empowered to do their job, and, if applicable, more. Google’s beautiful, mythical management practice, the “20% time,” which encourages creativity outside of set projects for 20% of the time, is the perfect example to highlight the power of encouraging people to grow and nurture ideas, and work together. The policy may or may not exist in practice anymore across all of Google, but the fact that it is still unofficially enshrined in the company’s culture, I’d argue, still influences the way managers view and interact with their team.
You don’t have to create something so dynamic (or specific) as 20% time to show your company that you value the team. There are many ways to encourage creativity and assure employees that their contributions matter. Make a reward system for creative suggestions, or simply ask for input on certain decisions. When you value the team, even if the outcome isn’t favorable, you’ve strengthened the team to grow.
Whether you’re looking for a marketing agency in Orange County that can work like a team, or you want to strengthen your own team through training and development to be more creative, find power in the balance between tech, the talent behind it, and the team that is making it all happen.