Strategies to Build a Stronger Remote Marketing Team

Learn how using a personality strength assessment tool may help you uncover team members’ strengths and promote better performance.

Many organizations have been functioning fully remotely or in a hybrid setting for four years or more. However, many hurdles remain, including:

• A lack of face-to-face interaction and the incapacity to interpret body language.
• Overreliance on communication platforms such as Slack.
• Being unable to meet your employer or team colleagues in person for months, years, or perhaps never.

These and other issues might cause misunderstanding and make it difficult to create team cohesion.

This can be exacerbated in matrixed teams, where an account head may or may not be the person’s immediate supervisor.  

However, tools like CliftonStrengths and the Enneagram can assist in the development and optimization of remote agency teams. Identifying your team’s strengths is helpful:

• Encourage improved communication.
• Enhance team cohesiveness.
• Develop understanding between agency teams and clients.

Simply said, helping team members understand each other’s preferences and talents may provide managers and leaders with insight into why individuals act as they do. This understanding also assists individuals in charge of allocating projects and responsibilities.

Tracking CliftonStrengths scores over time can assist agency executives in identifying, understanding, and hiring for the strengths that often produce the best performance.

What is CliftonStrengths?

CliftonStrengths, originally Clifton StrengthsFinder, is a Gallup-developed evaluation. It enables people to find their innate strengths.

The examination also determines how individuals lead, including through:

• Influence.
• Strategic thinking.
• Execution.
• Relationship building.

Those who lead with Influence flourish when collaborating with others, whilst those who lead via Relationship Building may excel at building deep relationships.

Creating a balanced team

As part of the interview process, we ask candidates to complete the CliftonStrengths exam.

• Determine where they naturally gravitate.
• Determine how they may fit into our team.
• Direct the last conversations of the interview process.

This information allows you to discover how an individual’s abilities appear when working with their team and clientele.

There are a total of 34 potential strengths. The examination indicates each person’s top five strengths. (One version of the exam evaluates all 34 strengths, whereas the default displays only the top five. We use the version that ranks all 34.

Each strength is assigned a color (blue for connection themes, purple for execution themes, green for strategic thinking themes, and orange for influencing themes).

Having a balanced staff is essential, especially when working with customers. However, we notice significant disparities in the mix of our leadership, SEO, and PPC teams.

Our SEO staff is a combination of achievers and strategic thinkers. Our PPC team combines Arranger, Strategic Thinking, and Relationship.

In leadership positions, we seek a mix of colors in the top five, with at least three colors present, and four being exceedingly unusual but desired. Orange is most often associated with persons who appear to be natural-born leaders, having the confidence to lead a group.

Command is the most unusual of the qualities, but we’ve been lucky to locate three people who rank it in their top five.

Our leadership team exemplifies diversity. With all colors represented, two people lead with Influencing themes, one with Execution, and one with Relationship Building.

We counterbalance each other. The diversity of perspective contributes to good arguments since we all tend to perceive things through a different lens.

Although people’s talents change as they advance in their careers, and new themes develop, I’ve discovered that 2-3 of mine have remained consistent over the last 15 years. They’ve altered positions yet remain present.

Developing rapport and understanding

To create a more successful agency team using CliftonStrengths, each individual’s scores must be shared honestly. Remember, no strength is “better” than another.

Knowing what makes each tick allows a manager to effectively manage their team, whether it’s a matrixed organization, pods, or direct reports.

For instance:

• Futuristic thinkers require a boss to provide clear boundaries to fulfill daily duties.
• Someone with good interpersonal skills may behave in a specific way because they are always thinking about the human consequences.
• Someone who is a high achiever may choose to do things on their own instead of collaborating with others. 

No strength is inherently evil. However, understanding how everyone feels helps in the organization of teams for success. (For example, your relationship-oriented employees might flourish in client-facing positions.)

The practical steps are as follows:

• Create a spreadsheet listing everyone’s strengths. Color-code them according to the theme.
• Provide training to your personnel managers. Assist them in recognizing how to leverage each of their strengths.
• Encourage team leaders to address this in their team meetings.
• Have peers and direct supervisors explore their own talents one-on-one to see how they can effectively collaborate.

Why is this so important for distant agency teams?

Statistics demonstrate that 93% of communication occurs nonverbally. Interpreting nonverbal clues through video is frequently difficult.

Also, while communicating via Slack or Teams, voice tone is left behind. Comments might be taken harsher or more passively than in person, resulting in unneeded and unwanted conflict.

Finally, learning by osmosis, as we used to do when we sat side by side, has become obsolete.

This is why StrengthsFinder is ideal for teamwork. It:

• Allows people to identify what their teammates excel at so that they may distribute work effectively.
• Helps team members view the world through each other’s eyes, helping everyone to comprehend what is important to their peers and how they work.
• Helps to build trust faster.
• Reduces the possibility of misunderstanding. 

Improving client communication

When peers start relating behaviors to qualities, they improve their comprehension of their customers, even if they don’t know their precise capabilities. This enables client-facing employees to pick up on hints and successfully steer discussions and meeting agendas.

This may help to strengthen relationships and, eventually, lead to improved service delivery. For instance:

• Marketing managers may notice that certain clients like to talk about their weekends or families at the start of conversations. These customers may be more focused on relationship-building qualities and regard them as an essential component of the partnership.

• Other clients may want to go directly to the figures and bypass the formalities. That’s not to say they don’t care; it’s simply that they’re more analytical or focused on execution themes.

• Some clients may want to discuss and learn about the newest and best; they may be more interested in futuristic thinking. They will measure success by how frequently the team brings fresh ideas to the table.

CliftonStrengths alternatives

While we use CliftonStrengths to discover strengths and inclinations, you may achieve comparable findings using other techniques.

Two more popular techniques can assist create a better understanding of your team’s capabilities and foster improved collaboration.

• The Enneagram test. This examination reveals someone’s motives, underlying beliefs, and unconscious patterns that underpin their behavior. Each of us is classified into nine Enneagram types, including the Reformist, the Helper, and the Challenger, with one dominant type developing.

• The Hermann Brain Dominance Index (HBDI). This evaluation uses cognitive science to detect the types of thinking that influence a person’s personality and behavior. It categorizes people as analytical, structural, relational, or experimental thinkers, with a color allocated to each type. Understanding your own style and the styles of others allows you to establish common ground and language to boost team cooperation and achieve better results.

Putting together remote agency teams may be tough. CliftonStrengths, or any personality strength evaluation, can help:

• You should better grasp your strengths.
• Peers and supervisors learn about one another’s abilities and interact more effectively.
• Improve client-agency interactions.

Source- searchengineland