5 Tips for Work Teams: Lessons from Ethel the Dog

It was only a matter of time before Ethel infiltrated this blog.

We adopted Ethel, a black lab mix, as a 7-month old pup this past summer from the Alcona Humane Society up near our cabin in Northern Michigan.  

Before she came into our lives, Ethel spent her entire life in the shelter, lovingly cared for by the dedicated staff and volunteers at that well-run organization.

Ethel is a wonderful office-mate.  She listens when things get tough, and she shares her wisdom to keep me focused and on task each day.

Although still a puppy, Ethel knows a thing or two about the business world,  with specific wisdom for work teams.  

5 Lessons 

To be effective, any team - whether a department, a project team, or even a team of volunteers --  must set and maintain shared goals.

For marketing teams, one shared goal might be to expand market awareness for the product/service. Another shared goal might be to deliver quality leads to the sales team.  Yet it’s easy to get off course. 

Thus, here are five lessons from Ethel about being effective in our work lives.

1) Keep your focus – Nowhere is focus more clearly displayed than right before Ethel receives a bone or treat, or during a game of fetch with her ratty Frisbee.   Work teams must cultivate and maintain this same quality of focus to be effective.  Ignore those daily distractions, and keep a consistent focus on overall business goals.

2) Run, romp, and play daily – Ethel is a lot easier to be around when she gets to have 'fun time' each day.  Work teams are wise to keep those countless projects humming along, but don’t forget to insert some fun into each day.  There’s a lot of value in making fun a priority for a high performing work team.

3) Never pretend to be something you’re not – With Ethel, what you see is what you get. Not sure of how to perform a task or meet the next project benchmark?  Come clean, do the work needed to get up and running, and be authentic with your teammates.

4) Avoid biting when a simple growl will do – We encourage Ethel to think before she acts. When things get stressful, keep your cool!  Certainly speak up for yourself and be assertive, but tone down the aggression.

5) If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it – Ethel is a tireless digger when she’s exploring the sandy beach on the big lake. Sometimes teams can get off course; a project goes awry due to an underlying issue.  Work hard to dig into a solution, discover the underlying cause, and remedy whatever process issues there are in order to work more effectively.

The Upside to Group Juggling

It's a fast pace in the typical business-to-business marketing department.

New projects and fresh ideas for innovative programs can often fall between the cracks especially when the team is going a million miles a minute juggling regular, monthly marketing programs.

A complicating factor is when the team is large (8 plus people), with some team members working remotely or part time.

A recent HBR blog post entitled “The Secret to Ensuring Follow Through” offers a helpful look at how to help ensure follow-through in this kind of setting.

When a marketing team is juggling a million ideas, as noted in the post, “there is a higher risk of someone, somewhere, dropping a ball."

The post goes onto say:

“… there's another, more positive, side to group juggling: the more people juggling, the more likely someone, somewhere will be able to catch a ball that an otherwise busy, overwhelmed individual would have dropped.”

A New Mindset

The HBR blog author proposes a new tool and "culture" to help a big marketing team manage tasks -- nothing overly formal, but a new mindset and vocabulary as a style of communicating.   

The tool is essentially a list of 7 questions to work through as new projects are delegated.  It stems from a work known as “The Checklist Manifesto” by Dr. Atoll Gawande.

This approach is incredibly valuable for the projects so many of us in marketing manage as a team – keeping websites updated; special event management; direct marketing campaigns; online advertising; sales support; etc.

Here’s the list from HBR, modified here for a business-to-business marketing team.

The (Marketing) Handoff Checklist

1. What do you understand the overall marketing goals of this project to be? (Lead generation?  Generating attendance at a sales event?  Gathering a certain number of attendees at an online webinar?)
2. Do you have any issues or concerns with this idea that have not already been mentioned?
3. What are the key next steps – creative, content development, project management, etc. -  and by when do you plan to accomplish them?
4. What do you need from the team in order to be successful?
5. Are there any key contingencies we should plan for now?
6. When will we next check-in on progress/issues?
7. Who else in the organization (Creative Team, Sales, HR, Admin?) needs to know our plans, and how will we communicate them?

Coordination Wanted

There is definitely an upside to group juggling. 

Indeed there’s a better chance of success when the team can work together to catch the ball that an overwhelmed individual might drop – but that effort takes coordination.  

Next time your marketing team juggles a new program or project, give the Handoff Checklist a try and let us know how it went.