Opposites Attract: Building a Kick-Ass Business Team to Achieve More

opposites attract

Opposites coming together is a favorite trope of romance. But it’s a theme that works just as well in business. Contrasting voices, ideas, and approaches create balance and equilibrium. Your creative team needs management to reel them in. Management needs a creative team to help them ideate new ways forward. It’s a dynamic that holds true across every part of your organization – so here’s how to leverage the power of opposites to achieve more.

Let Organization Meet Disruption

If your mental image of a successful business is one characterized by suits and Excel spreadsheets, it’s time to rethink. Those management consulting types can add value, sure. But research shows that bringing design-driven approaches into your decision-making is the real secret sauce. Getting your creatives in the same room as your executives create new opportunities to explore problems, develop ideas, and weigh approaches that don’t necessarily appear in the data.

Creatives can help management:

  • Imagine solutions that don’t exist yet
  • Explore rough ideas, prototypes, and “what ifs.”
  • Connect the dots in ways that the standard metrics can’t

In contrast, management can help creatives:

  • Understand the market need and size
  • Work to budgets and timelines
  • Find efficiencies and exploit resources

If the world were full of only business people, we’d never get true innovations or anything fresh and unique. We’d just get slight variations on all the previously successful things. But the same holds true for creatives. Without business minds able to identify a business case for a product or to point out where costs and features need to be reined in, we’d have a whole lot of products that look great – but don’t sell.

The same is true of business leaders: a company with two co-founders with the same strengths and interests won’t take off in the same way as one where the founders have complementary areas of focus. The former creates a lopsided echo chamber where certain areas of the business are neglected—the latter results in a well-rounded organization where collaboration, rather than competition, thrives.

Build a Team of Opposites

In addition to bringing together marketing and management, sales and IT, design and production, strive to build teams that themselves consist of diverse approaches and viewpoints. Do you hire people from the same schools with the same degrees and with the same job history? If so, the chances are that your organization is stuck in a rut.

Strive to diversify your organization with talent representative of different backgrounds, life experiences, educational histories, and outlooks. Someone with a background in fine arts can help shake up a tech-leaning design team. Someone with a decade of hospitality in retail, hospitality, or teaching can bring a wealth of organizational skills – and people smarts – to your management team. And if your organization is striving to be relevant beyond your city or your state, make sure voices from all over are represented.

Of course, jamming a group of disparate people with hugely different work styles together doesn’t automatically mean instant success. Consider:

  • How people work and making sure they have room to thrive
  • Letting go of the idea that there’s a “right” way to do something
  • Creating spaces for feedback, discussion, and conversation
  • Providing opportunities for further growth and development
  • How strong your company culture is and whether people have a shared, communicated goal

Ensure that every team member knows that their ideas and approaches are valid, expose them to the philosophies and decision-making styles of others, and provide opportunities to grow and work together. You’ll end up with a team that realizes that their strength is in their complementarity, and your organization will be all the better for it.

At StellaPop, We Welcome Opposites

StellaPop is proof that opposites do well together. Half marketing master, half management prowess, but all success, we can help you bring your best to the table. Whether you need help creating and marketing a killer brand, or tips on a leadership strategy to help you level up your game, we’ve got the team you need to make it happen. Drop us a line today!

 

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