Many agencies have been operating fully remotely or in a hybrid environment for four or more years. But some challenges remain, such as:
Lack of face-to-face interaction and inability to read body language. Over-reliance on communication tools such as Slack. Not being able to meet your boss or team members in person for months, years, or maybe never.
These and other challenges can lead to poor communication or hinder team cohesion.
This can be increased in matrix teams, where an account leader may or may not be the person’s direct manager.
However, tools like CliftonStrengths or the Enneagram can help create and optimize remote agency teams. Identifying your team’s individual strengths helps to:
Foster better communication. Improve team cohesion. Build understanding between agency teams and clients.
Simply put, helping team members understand each other’s preferences and strengths can give managers and leaders insight into why people behave the way they do. This understanding also helps guide those responsible for delegating projects and tasks.
In addition to improving your existing team, tracking CliftonStrengths results over time can help agency leaders identify, understand, and hire the strengths that tend to drive the highest performance.
What is CliftonStrengths?
CliftonStrengths, formerly known as the Clifton StrengthsFinder, is an assessment developed by the Gallup organization. It helps people discover their natural strengths.
The assessment also identifies how individuals lead, including:
influence Strategic thinking. execution Building relationships.
Those who lead with Influence tend to thrive when working with others, while those who lead through relationship building can excel at fostering deep connections.
Build a balanced team
We have people take the CliftonStrengths assessment as part of the interview process to:
Identify where they naturally gravitate to. Understand how they can fit into our team. Guide the final discussions of the interview process.
This information provides an opportunity to learn how an individual’s strengths manifest themselves when working with their team and clients.
There are a total of 34 possible strengths. The assessment identifies the 5 main strengths of each person. (One version of the assessment ranks all 34 strengths, while the default only shows the top 5. We use the version that ranks all 34.)
Each strength is associated with a color (blue for relationship themes, purple for execution themes, green for strategic thinking themes, and orange for influence themes).
Having a balanced team is important, especially when people collaborate with customers. That said, we see notable differences in the makeup of our leadership, SEO, and PPC teams.
Our SEO team is a combination of successful thinking and strategic thinking. Our PPC team is a blend of arranger, strategic thinker and relationship.
In the lead positions, we look for a mix of colors in the top 5, ideally with at least 3 colors present, and 4 is extremely rare but desirable. Orange tends to present itself in those who find themselves as natural leaders, with the confidence to lead a group.
Command is the rarest of strengths, but we’ve been lucky enough to find three people with it in the top 5.
Our leadership team serves as a good role model for diversity. With all colors present, two individuals lead with influence themes, one with Execution and one with Building Relationships.
We balance each other out. Diversity of perspective leads to healthy debates because we all tend to see things through a different lens.
While people’s strengths can evolve as they grow in their careers and certain new themes may emerge, I’ve found that 2 or 3 of mine have stayed in place for the past 15 years. They have changed position, but are still present.
Build rapport and understanding
To create a more effective agency team with CliftonStrengths, it’s important to openly share each person’s results. Remember, no force is “better” than the others.
By knowing what makes each person tick, a manager can better manage their team, whether it’s a matrix organization, pods, or direct reports.
For example:
Someone who is oriented toward forward-thinking may always be thinking, but they need a manager who makes sure that clear boundaries are set for day-to-day tasks to be completed. Someone with strong relationship skills may react in a certain way because they are always thinking about the human impact. Someone who is a high achiever may try to do things for themselves at the expense of working with others.
No fortress is bad, per se. However, knowing how everyone is oriented helps set up teams for success. (For example, your relationship-oriented members may excel in customer-oriented roles.)
Practical steps:
Create a spreadsheet with everyone’s strengths. Color code them according to the theme. Conduct training for your people managers. Help them understand how to build on each strength. Encourage team leaders to discuss this in team meetings. Have peers and line managers talk about their own strengths individually to discover how they can best partner.
Why this is especially important for remote agency teams
Statistics show that 93% of communication is non-verbal. It is often difficult to interpret these non-verbal cues through video.
Also, with communication via Slack or Teams, the vocal tone is left behind. Comments can be interpreted harsher or more passively than in person, which can sometimes lead to unnecessary and unwanted friction.
Finally, learning by osmosis, like in the old days when we all sat next to each other, has fallen by the wayside.
That’s why Strengthsifinder is great for teams. This:
It lets people see what their teammates are best at so they can delegate work appropriately. It helps team members see the world from each other’s perspective, allowing everyone to understand what’s important to their colleagues and how they work. It helps build trust faster. Reduce misunderstandings.
Build better communication with the customer
When colleagues begin to link behaviors to traits, they become better at understanding their customers, even without knowing their specific strengths. This helps customer-facing people pick up cues to effectively shape conversations and meeting agendas.
This can help deepen relationships and ultimately lead to better service delivery. For example:
Marketers may notice that certain customers always want to chat about their weekends or families at the beginning of calls. These clients may be more attuned to the strengths of relationship building and see it as a critical part of the partnership. Other customers may want to jump straight to the numbers and skip the details. That doesn’t mean they don’t care; it just means they may be more analytically inclined or lean towards execution issues. Some customers may want to brainstorm and hear the latest and greatest, they may be more forward thinking. They will see success based on how often the team brings new ideas to the table.
CliftonStrengths Alternatives
While we use CliftonStrengths to identify strengths and trends, you can choose from a variety of tools to achieve similar results.
Two other popular tools can help facilitate a better understanding of your team’s strengths and encourage greater collaboration:
The Enneagram Test. This assessment provides an understanding of someone’s motivations, core beliefs, and unconscious patterns that underlie their behavior. Nine types of enneagrams, including The Reformist, The Helper or Challenger, characterize each of us, with an emerging dominant type.
The Hermann Brain Dominance Index (HBDI). This assessment uses cognitive science to identify the type of thinking that shapes a person’s personality and behavior. It classifies people as analytical, structural, relational or experimental thinkers, with a color assigned to each style. Understanding your style and the style of others helps you find language and common ground to improve collaboration for team results.
bottom line
Building remote agency teams can be challenging. CliftonStrengths, or an alternative personality strength assessment, can help:
You will better understand your own strengths. Colleagues and managers better understand each other’s strengths and collaborate. Improve client-agency relations.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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