Is your team full of thinkers or doers? What do you need to fill in your gaps?
It’s important to know the make up of your marketing team to ensure success in building your business. It takes self-reflection, self-awareness, and the courage to discover where your weaknesses lie, and decide what to do about it.
First, let’s look at what we mean by thinkers versus doers.
Thinkers Versus Doers
Thinkers are people on your team who have a strategic or creative mindset. They tend to plan everything before taking action.
Doers are people who get sh!t done. They tend to jump into a task without thinking twice.
The way teams or individuals alternate between these two mindsets is has a major role in efficiency; it can greatly impact success at different points in your journey.
Do I have Thinkers, Doers, or Both?
You may find that one of your team members has the ability to switch from thinker to doer, and on top of that the skill set necessary to execute. In fact the entire team may be able to switch back and forth on some projects.
However, the more complex the task is, the more you’ll need the skills necessary to execute, which means more people will eventually get involved in the process. For example, it’s not hard to find a person with the capacity to think about a simple icon and the skills needed to design it. It is a little bit harder to find a person that can think, design and develop a good landing page on their own.
You don’t want a team full of thinkers who aren’t willing to jump in and test ideas. And you don’t want a team full of doers who ignore the planning process for every project.
If you have an idea but you don’t have the skill set to execute it or you can’t find the right people and pay them to execute it for you, then there is little to no value in your idea. Ideas alone are nothing.
Thinkers need doers with the right skill set and capable of interpreting your ideas. Doers need thinkers who can come up with great ideas and explain them to you.
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Being aware of who you need and how much it will cost you is essential to make the development process efficient. Does your team need a doer or a thinker, which one are you lacking?
Collectively, both skills are needed in any team. Companies must have an appropriate balance so they can be both innovative and efficient. For a project to succeed, there must be people that can define clearly the work to be done and people that can perform it. But what happens if you don’t have a balanced team?
When you know where you have that weakness you can appropriately manage your team’s skills. Then as you see where you need to fill in the gaps, you can strategically outsource the right talent.
For instance, you can partner with an agency to think, then hire internally to execute. An agency can put its experience and tinkers to work, laying out a plan for your doers to execute.
Finding the Right Mix for Your Team
In addition to managing in-house skills with a strategic partner, your team can work on its skills to grow. For instance, each team member can individually get the right balance between their thinker and doer sides.
A great idea that is not done, is not worth anything. And doing things with no previous thinking on the best way to do them, can lead to a great loss of time and even can impede completing them in terms that are acceptable.
To be productive, you must be aware of your weaker side, and either fill in the gap with the right partner or coach it harder. Or you can do both. If you are a thinker, you must structure your ideas into projects and define the first steps required to carry them out. If you are a doer, a busy person having every day a million things to do, you should clarify the origin and purpose of all these tasks in order to handle them effectively.
Want to see how this looks with a marketing team and agency? We offer marketing audits to show you where your team is killing it, and where it can improve. Let’s see how we can help!
Strategy photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
