Jay Acunzo
Founder of Marketing Showrunners
Better creative teamwork
Unlock maximum productivity and happiness for marketing, creative & design teams with these tips shared by experts from around the globe.
Julia McCoy
CEO of Express Writers
Barry Moltz
Small Business Expert, Speaker and Author
The future of agile teamwork
Taking a peek at the most promising ways to
supercharge teamwork, according to the pros.
Unlock 7 habits of highly
productive marketing & design teams
Download the guide
The first step in solving any problem is gaining a complete and accurate
understanding of that problem. Many common hindrances of team
productivity are well known — digital distractions, lack of clarity around
priorities, information silos, and more. Some pitfalls are less evident on the
surface. From roles to goals to orientation, marketing thought leaders
share the productivity pain points they are seeing today.
Aaron Orendorff
VP of Marketing at Common Thread Collective
Angela Tague
Content Marketing Writer & Founder of WebWritingAdvice.com
Founder and Creative Director of JUST Creative
Jacob Cass
Founder & CEO of Zen Media
Shama Hyder
Owner of Inspire to Thrive
Lisa Sicard
B2B Marketing Consultant & Agency Founder
Holly Locastro
Digital Productivity Coach & Consultant
Deb Lee
Trainer, Author and Speaker
Maura Nevel Thomas
01
The spoken and unspoken challenges and opportunities facing creative teams
Global Keynote Speaker and Author
Carla Johnson
Carla Johnson
Global Keynote Speaker
and Author
Twitter
LinkedIn
Jay Acunzo
Founder of Marketing
Showrunners
Twitter
LinkedIn
Julia McCoy
CEO of Express Writers
Twitter
LinkedIn
One of the biggest things that creates friction and keeps silos in place is that we focus so much on the job title and the role that we have as marketers. One of the things I talk about that really works for marketers and effective teams — whether your own content team or demand gen team, or marketing in general or across the organization — is to look at how people naturally show up in the world. I call these archetypes. There’s a difference between playing a role and an archetype.
01
The spoken and unspoken challenges and opportunities facing creative teams
Julia McCoy
CEO of Express Writers
Twitter
LinkedIn
Jay Acunzo
Founder of Marketing
Showrunners
Twitter
LinkedIn
Carla Johnson
Global Keynote Speaker
and Author
Twitter
LinkedIn
Slow your roles
1. Recognize that a metric is not a goal. (It’s a measure of a goal.)
2. Articulate the actual goal. (Identify a concrete outcome.)
3. Use an aspirational anchor, not a "goal.” (Nail down a practical and purpose-driven plan for getting from the current state to the desired future state.)
From goals to aspirational anchors
01
The spoken and unspoken challenges and opportunities facing creative teams
Carla Johnson
Global Keynote Speaker
and Author
Twitter
LinkedIn
Julia McCoy
CEO of Express Writers
Twitter
LinkedIn
Jay Acunzo
Founder of Marketing
Showrunners
Twitter
LinkedIn
Do all three things, and you'll be wildly productive and, I'm betting, much more fulfilled.
We aren't more productive because we aren't empowering ourselves and those around us with the motivation and clarity to do better, more innovative work. To solve this, we can rethink how we set goals. There are three steps to doing this:
Getting new hires up to speed is extremely important. At the beginning, our company rushed through that process. We’d get people hired and get them going, but then they don't know how to effectively produce content in our style, because we haven’t taught them how to follow the steps to produce it. So for us, it comes down to really giving a clear orientation process from day one. For each role, we have a customized orientation process with templates and interactive elements for every new team member.
Embed good habits during orientation
01
The spoken and unspoken challenges and opportunities facing creative teams
Jay Acunzo
Founder of Marketing
Showrunners
Twitter
LinkedIn
Carla Johnson
Global Keynote Speaker
and Author
Twitter
LinkedIn
Julia McCoy
CEO of Express Writers
Twitter
LinkedIn
If it works, it works. The most successful and productive marketing teams didn’t reach that point by accident — they develop habits and routines that empower confidence and smooth collaboration on a consistent basis. While every system should be tailored to the people using it, read on to find approaches that are working for productive practitioners in marketing and design.
02
Tried-and-true tenets of
team productivity
Jacob Cass
Founder and Creative Director
of JUST Creative
Twitter
LinkedIn
Angela Tague
Content Marketing Writer & Founder
of WebWritingAdvice.com
Twitter
LinkedIn
Aaron Orendorff
VP of Marketing at Common
Thread Collective
Twitter
LinkedIn
02
Tried-and-true tenets of
team productivity
Jacob Cass
Founder and Creative Director
of JUST Creative
Twitter
LinkedIn
Angela Tague
Content Marketing Writer & Founder
of WebWritingAdvice.com
Twitter
LinkedIn
Aaron Orendorff
VP of Marketing at Common
Thread Collective
Twitter
LinkedIn
As unsexy as it sounds, deadlines live or die by a single source of truth. Far more important than what project management tool your organization chooses is the number of tools: namely, one. Whatever you have to sacrifice in terms of onboarding time or complaints like, “But I don’t like that platform,” pale in comparison to the long-term benefits of one place that rules all deliverables — across departments. After that, every deliverable itself should have a single source of truth: one record with every stage — outline, draft, design, development, review, distribution, promotion, etc. — backdated automatically from the go-live date.
Centralize project details
As I've built my full-time freelance career over the past 11 years, I've discovered a mindful, organized onboarding process tends to yield the best collaborations and content assets. At the start, I ask clients to share several documents and walk me through their workflow, including introductions to platforms or software that will be used and what channels of communication they prefer.
As we get going, they loop me in on the systems they have in place for assigning projects, checking-in during production and how to submit the final drafts. As far as communication, some stick to emails while others prefer phone calls or chats in Slack channels.
Organize docs and workflows upfront
02
Tried-and-true tenets of
team productivity
Aaron Orendorff
VP of Marketing at Common
Thread Collective
Twitter
LinkedIn
Jacob Cass
Founder and Creative Director
of JUST Creative
Twitter
LinkedIn
Angela Tague
Content Marketing Writer & Founder
of WebWritingAdvice.com
Twitter
LinkedIn
Managing workloads and productivity comes down to creating healthy habits, and identifying tools that help facilitate these habits. Some may want a to-do list, broken down into categories and sub tasks in a way that establishes clear priorities for all to see. This could simply be pen-and-paper, but technology is making it easier to put something more flexible and integrated in place. The visual organization available through monday.com is a good example.
Visualize tasks and priorities
02
Tried-and-true tenets of
team productivity
Angela Tague
Content Marketing Writer & Founder
of WebWritingAdvice.com
Twitter
LinkedIn
Aaron Orendorff
VP of Marketing at Common
Thread Collective
Twitter
LinkedIn
Jacob Cass
Founder and Creative Director
of JUST Creative
Twitter
LinkedIn
I've been excitedly tracking the rise of technologies that allow marketers and creatives to collaborate remotely — so much that I've built an agency around it. Video meetings and online project management are so much better than they used to be, which really opens up opportunities for accessing talent that might live in a different city or need a more flexible lifestyle away from the commute and the 9-to-5. Agencies now can operate with relatively low overheads without compromising on creativity, execution or speed. And for clients, that means a better and more cost-effective end product.
Eliminate disadvantages of distance
Lisa Sicard
Owner of Inspire to Thrive
Twitter
LinkedIn
Shama Hyder
Founder & CEO of Zen Media
Twitter
LinkedIn
Holly Locastro
B2B Marketing Consultant &
Agency Founder
Twitter
LinkedIn
I love having a chart of what needs to be done for each team member, often in the form of a color-coded calendar.
Some members of my team love simply working within Google Docs. Others like to chat about tasks, and so we will jump on Zoom. It’s a great way to learn how to use new tools. We can share our screens and quickly point out how to accomplish what needs to be done and HOW. Another thing that I’ll often do is send out quotes or stories related to some of the things on our radar, keeping us all focused and on the same page.
Create individual charts for team members
Shama Hyder
Founder & CEO of Zen Media
Twitter
LinkedIn
Holly Locastro
B2B Marketing Consultant &
Agency Founder
Twitter
LinkedIn
Lisa Sicard
Owner of Inspire to Thrive
Twitter
LinkedIn
Empathy is critical. It's much more than just having an understanding of what someone else's challenges might be.
Part of it is that you have to give up being a control freak. As leaders, we should really look at the big picture and ask ourselves, is this necessary? Or is this just politicking, or someone trying to make it seem like it has to be done this way because it's the way they prefer?
So within that empathy, you have to go a layer deeper and say not just “Do I understand how people prefer to work and what their challenges are?” but also, “Am I willing to let go of my own notions of how it should be done?”
Employ empathy and keep an open mind
03
Holly Locastro
B2B Marketing Consultant &
Agency Founder
Twitter
LinkedIn
Lisa Sicard
Owner of Inspire to Thrive
Twitter
LinkedIn
Shama Hyder
Founder & CEO of Zen Media
Twitter
LinkedIn
As the old adage goes: if you asked customers before the invention of the car how they’d like to reach their destination faster, they would’ve said “a faster horse.” There's surely a breakthrough out there for boosting productivity that's yet to gain mainstream traction. From four-day workweeks to morale-boosting activities and beyond, businesses across the world are experimenting with new methods. Read on to find ideas shared with us by three company leaders who are putting them into practice.
03
Beyond best practices: different ways to think about team productivity
Holly Locastro
B2B Marketing Consultant &
Agency Founder
Twitter
LinkedIn
Lisa Sicard
Owner of Inspire to Thrive
Twitter
LinkedIn
Shama Hyder
Founder & CEO of Zen Media
Twitter
LinkedIn
Beyond best practices: different ways to think about team productivity
03
Beyond best practices: different ways to think about team productivity
03
Beyond best practices: different ways to think about team productivity
You must decide what the priorities of the team are. There will always be more tasks than time. Help the team rank what is most important not just the most urgent and make sure those are worked on first. To do so, ruthlessly prioritize tasks:
Ruthlessly prioritize
04
A productive path forward: maximizing creative clout in 2020 and beyond
Maura Nevel Thomas
Trainer, Author and Speaker
Twitter
LinkedIn
Deb Lee
Digital Business Coach and
Productivity Consultant
Twitter
LinkedIn
Barry Moltz
Small Business Expert,
Speaker and Author
Twitter
LinkedIn
Time management is an outdated concept. We can’t control or “manage” time, and when we try, the result is appointments with ourselves that we move from hour to hour and day to day as our meetings run long and we get trapped in the rabbit hole of email, texts, and instant messages.
The biggest challenge for getting important work done is not that we don’t have enough time. It’s that we have too many distractions. This is especially true for creative professionals who need to maximize their imagination, innovation, and inspiration. Instead of time management, focus on attention management. One often-undervalued component of this is daydreaming, which is when new ideas and insights form—a necessity for creative professionals.
Manage attention instead of time
04
A productive path forward: maximizing creative clout in 2020 and beyond
Deb Lee
Digital Business Coach and
Productivity Consultant
Twitter
LinkedIn
Barry Moltz
Small Business Expert
Twitter
LinkedIn
Maura Nevel Thomas
Trainer, Author and Speaker
Twitter
LinkedIn
If you want to get more done with your teams, you need to keep it simple. Pick one or two goals versus 10 or 50 that you want to really focus on, and get buy-in for those goals.
Figure out, why are we really trying to achieve these things? And once you get clarity around the goals, look at your workflows, are they solid? Are they wonky? Are there any inefficiencies that are built in?
And keep in mind that as your company grows or maybe even pivots, you do need to look back at those workflows and really make sure that they still fit with you, and they're growing with you as well.
Focus on one objective at a time
04
A productive path forward: maximizing creative clout in 2020 and beyond
Barry Moltz
Small Business Expert
Twitter
LinkedIn
Maura Nevel Thomas
Trainer, Author and Speaker
Twitter
LinkedIn
Deb Lee
Digital Productivity Coach & Consultant
Twitter
LinkedIn
Marketing is a discipline driven by smart bets. Following the road everyone else has taken won't uncover new ground in the quest to engage and delight audiences. While any sound strategy is guided by data, insight, and experience, the great ones sprinkle in a dash of daring, plus a healthy dose of creative ambition. Applying this mindset to productivity and collaboration, here are some smart bets being staked by experts in the field.
04
A productive path forward: maximizing creative clout in 2020 and beyond
Barry Moltz
Small Business Expert
Twitter
LinkedIn
Maura Nevel Thomas
Trainer, Author and Speaker
Twitter
LinkedIn
Deb Lee
Digital Business Coach and
Productivity Consultant
Twitter
LinkedIn
• Urgent and important: do it now
• Urgent and not important: delegate
• Not urgent and important: schedule
• Not urgent and not important: delete
Also, the day before, decide the two priorities you are going to work on before anything else and tackle those for the first hour of scheduled time (before checking emails or social media feeds).
Eliminating the barriers of remote work. Rethinking goals. Tapping the psychology of retention. These and other building blocks bring out the best in today's most productive marketing
and design teams across the globe.
The key now is to fit them together in a way that makes sense for your own talented team. Below, you'll find a tactical guide that distills all of these expert insights into seven embeddable habits.
Put the pieces together
Ready to turn these insights into reality for your team?
7 habits of highly productive marketing & design teams,
Founder of Marketing Showrunners
Jay Acunzo
CEO of Express Writers
Julia McCoy
VP of Marketing at Common Thread Collective
Aaron Orendorff
Content Marketing Writer & Founder of WebWritingAdvice.com
Angela Tague
Founder and Creative Director of JUST Creative
Jacob Cass
Founder & CEO of Zen Media
Shama Hyder
Owner of Inspire to Thrive
Lisa Sicard
B2B Marketing Consultant & Agency Founder
Holly Locastro
Digital Productivity Coach & Consultant
Deb Lee
Trainer, Author and Speaker
Maura Nevel Thomas
Small Business Expert, Speaker and Author
Barry Moltz
Check out our free guide, for a collection of proven best practices your team can put into action right now.
Check out our free guide, 7 Habits of Highly Productive Marketing & Design Teams, for a collection of proven best practices your team can put into action right now.
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