In this episode of Leadtail TV, host Bryan Kramer chats with Carla Johnson, global keynote speaker and author of 9 bestselling books about how to rethink your marketing to innovate faster, and how marketers can start with the experience they want to create in mind.
Get ready for a conversation full of insight.
How Do You Hire?
Let’s talk about hiring for a second, shall we?
If you manage a team, you probably think day and night about how to inspire your team to perform better. How to create the right environment for your people to work better together and think differently.
But what happens when you need to hire a new person for your business or organization?
Traditionally, you reach out to HR. And if you don’t have an HR department you most likely pull up the job description from the last time you hired somebody, dust it off and update a few things here and there. Right?!
Yes, we mostly focus on job descriptions. When we’re looking to fill in a specific role, we focus on how we want people to perform in a particular situation.
But real life is not as easy and straightforward as it looks on paper, is it?
If we look at how people really come out and show their genius at work, it’s really more related to an archetype, than a job description.
That’s why we end up saying things like, “Well, let’s get Brian because Brian’s really a people person.” Or, “Let’s get Carla because, you know, she’ll talk to anybody about anything.”
Archetypes are how we naturally show up in the world.
Jump to this portion of the interview [01:35 – 03:52]
Architect Your Teams to Innovate Faster
Carla introduces a new concept when it comes to hiring and building teams.
Instead of focusing so much on all of these roles we want to fill in, we need to look at the archetypes of people we want to bring to the table.
That’s really going to help us reach across departments, start to break down silos, and look at the work we do from a different kind of perspective.
Carla found there are six archetypes as follows:
- The strategist
- The culture shaper – these are storytellers of a team.
- The psychologist
- The orchestrators – these are the people who are fearless leaders.
- The collaborators – these are those who get people to work together.
- The provocateur – these are those people who just cannot sit still and deal with the status quo.
When you look at how these six archetypes work together, each one of them has a strength that supports another one’s weakness.
What does this mean?
It means you can now start looking at aligning teams based on these six archetypes, and how each member of the team supports each other.
You’ll create an incredibly powerful marketing team that has nothing to do with their job titles or their roles.
Something to ponder …
Jump to this portion of the interview [04:14 – 06:50]
What Is the Future of Work?
So you built a powerful marketing team, based on archetypes rather than job descriptions. Now what?
Do you follow industry best practices?
“A best practice is a bench to sit on,” Carla boldly states. “That’s not what marketing is about.”
“Always look for the next practice,” Carla advises.
That’s what helps you consistently innovate – taking a best practice and making it better; better for your company, for your particular situation, and also for your career.
Ask yourself “what could be next that could be even better?”
Jump to this portion of the interview [08:45-09:47]
How to Rethink Your Work as a Marketer
It’s not about building the next digital campaign, or about building new web pages or even about doing more trade shows.
You have to ask yourself “how do I become the inspiration for how we build a better relationship for the customer?”
That right there starts to give you, as a marketer, a bigger platform to talk to other people within the company about something other than marketing.
Gain their attention and interest by presenting colleagues with another brand or experience that you have seen working well, and use that as the inspiration for your idea.
It will give people an insight in what’s possible and open their mind to new ways and opportunities.
Look not at the execution, but at the essence behind that idea that made it work for the other brand.
Maybe it was about building community, maybe it was about making customers feel more welcome or just having more fun. How can you relate that into the work that you do?
When you start to rethink your work as a marketer and start to behave, talk and show up differently, the way you are perceived by the rest of your organization starts to change, too.
And then you will see that you can have a bigger impact with your work than you have ever imagined.
Jump to this portion of the interview [13:55-16:50]
Living Abroad Can Spike Your Creativity
Probably the fastest way to spike your innovation and creativity is to travel and live abroad for a while.
It gives you a change in perspective, that otherwise you wouldn’t experience. A different, new environment takes you out of your reality, out of your default mentality and habits. You look at what’s possible and exercise your problem-solving abilities.
Carla moved her entire family to Spain and they lived there for a year while leading her business remotely.
That year was in her own words “probably one of the most creative and also productive years I’ve had in my life.”
Jump to this portion of the interview [20:00-22:22]
Watch Carla Johnson’s full interview for Leadtail TV here.
Want to have a conversation about social media? Let’s talk.