Getting the Story Out

Marketing, particularly at bigger companies, is such a collaborative process, as you have pointed out. You’ve got the folks driving strategy, you’ve got the storytellers, the copywriters, the communications team, the video editors, other craftspeople, and so on and so forth. What do you think is the biggest roadblock to teamwork?

Yeah, I think it’s just—and particularly in a fast-growing company, it’s just people will start running. Also, one of our other high impact behaviors is biased towards action, right. So we hire people who want to get stuff done who are coming in the door.
And so I think sometimes what can become a roadblock to actually getting that collaboration is someone will have their eye on, like, “Hey, this is what I need to go do, or this is what I need to solve,” and they’ll just run after it and actually sometimes pay attention to, “Oh, this is where it could intersect with a team over here or a team over here.”
So it’s really interesting, because I think that’s something that I talk with my leadership team about a lot, which is how are we making sure, also, that the team understands as they’re running towards things that they’re taking a moment to say, actually, could this impact another team’s work? Or could we actually get even greater leverage out of this if we were working across different teams?
And so I think a great example of that is with the work that we do at BetterUp, and again, as we help people on these journeys, we have these amazing member and customer stories, where basically people are talking through their own story of transformation, working with BetterUp. Or we hear from HR leaders where, hey, when they’ve brought BetterUp in, this is the actual impact that they’ve seen.
And so we have this incredible team who’s been pulling together these amazing stories of like, individual transformation and organizational impact and had this realization, well, have we thought about the distribution? Are we actually thinking about how we are sharing these stories? And the team was running…

Good point.

You could create something amazing, but if no one sees it, you know? It was one of those things where they were just running really fast towards it and they were like, we know that what we are here to do is to share these incredible stories from people and incredible stories from companies. I was like, “Okay, but how are we making sure we’ve got that collaboration going?”
And so, again, I think part of that’s on the leaders to just sort of keep an eye on it and to think about it and then part of that is to start building that into the team to say, okay, actually, is this what I’m doing? Is it about creating the story or is it about getting the story out to the world? And if I realize that getting the story out to the world starts with creating it, but then it’s about sharing it more broadly, then I realize I have to work with these other teams and it’s actually a really great thing because then they’ll plus up the work that we do.