Breaking down silos is more important than ever. We often see departments stay within their team and job description confines. However, by sticking with these job titles, it often creates barriers and can prevent your organisation from coming together in a collaborative effort.
Carla Johnson challenges this by identifying archetypes that exist within a business, rather than job titles. She challenges marketers to see beyond the ‘role’.
Carla says: “Archetypes, on the other hand, are behaviours that are natural to all of us. It’s just how we show up in the world. So a role is a behaviour, based on a specific position, and the other is behaviour that’s very natural to us. Now, this is important as we look at building our B2B marketing teams.”
The strategist
Strategists show up in job titles all the time, such as a digital strategist, demand generation strategist or content strategist, but what’s beyond the job description?
Strategists excel at planning and executing work. They strive to get things done and will readily accept accountability for innovation. What’s great about strategists is that they can see the bigger picture on most projects and initiatives. They understand how important it is to deliver value and that’s what motivates them to follow through.
People go to them because they are effectively the executives within the business. However, they can be susceptible to putting the blinders on when they’re focused on a project, and can end up becoming a bit too rigid in their work. In this case, any miniscule change or mishap might be a major inconvenience to their grand plan.
The culture shaper
Culture shapers are natural at communicating change. They are the people who can architect how the brand shows up and oversees its expression. What’s great about culture shapers is that they can be quite adaptable and keep up with change. They ensure their messages are current and relevant to its climate and customers.
A key component to culture shapers is that they’re natural storytellers. These are people who are able to build a story arc for your company over a long period of time. They understand how to shape the narrative and infuse this into an organisation.
Because culture shapers do this so seamlessly, it elicits trust within the team and can naturally bring out people’s courage to speak up as well.
However, sometimes they can get so focused on communicating the change, that they lose sight of what the change is all about. And that’s where the psychologist comes in.
The psychologist
The psychologist is natural at bringing empathy into the equation, especially for more traditional approaches to innovation that are more rational in problem solving. Because they can look beyond data and models, they truly have an understanding of the role that trust and emotional connection can bring to the business world today.
They understand the idea of more unstructured innovation because they like to look at how everybody perceives ideas from every angle. Because they can tune into the emotions of the B2B world, a phrase they despise is ‘it’s not personal, it’s just business.’ And they can sometimes get so hooked on this divide between the two, that they need a bit more help getting ideas executed.
The orchestrator
Orchestrators have an innate tendency to lead fearlessly. They are able to choreograph processes from a customer’s point of view and are always advocating from that perspective. More importantly, however, they’re always the ones to keep things moving and get things done.
Early in processes, they establish relationships both internally and externally because they realise this is key in driving innovation. Because they navigate relationships well, they can manoeuvre political stepping stones in multiple departments of the company.
Orchestrators focus so much on spearheading fearless leadership, however, that they don’t realise that it really is about bringing these relationships together. This is where the collaborator comes in.
The collaborator
Collaborators know how to integrate different parts of their work, which is why they love getting involved in the process and, more importantly, improving it to be more cohesive.
They often are cheerleaders who can get behind other people’s ideas, and champion them to demonstrate the value and potential.
What’s wonderful about collaborators is that they know how to capture the attention of other groups and can account for any blind spots. They do that because they nurture relationships and can get people to open up and share their opinions. Now, this naturally will allow the company to generate twice as powerful ideas, which can lead to success. They don’t need to get personal credit because they’re more focused on aligning the company together.
However, because they can get caught up with team alignment, their work can fall flat in its innovation. They’ll need someone to challenge them constantly and that’s where the provocateur comes into play.
The provocateur
These are people who are constantly challenging the status quo. They are non-conformist thinkers and are constantly thinking critically about processes. They’re prolific at generating highly original ideas and looking at how the business can be transformed in all areas, not just marketing.
They often question: “Why are we doing this? What change is this inciting? And what are the benefits here?”
Their ability to solve problems unconventionally helps prevent organisational inertia, and they can push past obvious things and continually ideate things to solve problems. They often hate hearing the words: ‘that’s good enough.’ Simply put, they know there’s always room for improvement, and that’s why their wheels are always turning.
This is where things become full circle, because it’s the strategist who can help all these ideas actually come to fruition.
Now what?
Carla often has marketers ask if there’s more than one archetype role that they might fit, and she explains that everyone has one primary archetype. If anything, they might have a secondary one that might be close, and even a third one that might be present.
To find out which archetype you are, take her quiz here: https://www.carlajohnson.co/innovation-quiz/
Carla has three top tips to rethinking your team
- Benchmark: Understand the makeup of your team and see who fits which archetype.
- Identify: Who might you need in your corner to succeed?
- Partner: Look at where and how to partner with these identified allies.
