Would you like to count the beans or add the flavor?

Let's imagine your company is making soup. If we look at this through the lens of diversity, we can deduce all sorts of takeaways. All ingredients matter. Get the right ingredient in the right bite. Develop each ingredient so that its strengths shine. Balance ingredients so that no one can overpower the others. And ultimately, that all ingredients must act together to achieve their desired soupy goals.

Instead of truly just looking at diversity of skillset, function, thought, personality, etc., yet also considering ways organizations have gained efficiencies through reductions in force or utilizing resources across multiple functions, I wonder if companies are truly allowing individuals to shine as just ONE ingredient in the mix anymore.

Which brings me to an important consideration: your bean counter and your flavor setter are not the same person, nor should they be. Applied to marketing, the takeaway is that your thought leader, influencer, or voice-of-customer needs to be a different person than your research analyst and report builder.

First and foremost, it's a different skillset. Looking at this as if it were an economic consideration and not just empowerment of diverse skillsets (both of which are important), we should consider the work of John Nash, famous mathematician and father of modern economics. Some of my favorite applications are those of game theory, where each player's (or employee's) strategy is optimized when they consider the decisions of all other players, and when every player wins because everyone gets the outcome they desire. Nash's theories have broad application today in international trade theory, pricing and negotiations, conflict resolution, and more because they propel "players" to logical decisions that strike the proper balance between cooperation and competition. Almost anything can be turned into a game, so long as there is more than one "player," where there different outcomes (payoffs) are achieved based on the players' decisions, and where outcomes and rules of play are known by all parties.

With that in mind, let's look at your marketing workload as a game, but I won't bore you with assigning numerical outcomes, only theoretical ones… For my nerds, fascinatingly, this does (with some outcome shifting) plot in to a Prisoner's Dilemma chart where asking each player to deviate from their original intent leads to a worse outcome for both.

In a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, two individuals are caught in some illegal activity. Authorities have enough to put them each in jail for a certain number of years. In separate rooms, those same authorities promise them that if they confess and rat on their buddy, they will walk away with a decreased sentence, while their now former buddy will get a larger sentence. Because they can both be persuaded to deviate from their original intent to collaborate, instead focusing on a better individual outcome, they will both wind up confessing and both receive an even worse sentence than the original.

Oh, you're starting to actually like the nerdom, you say? Fine, here's a chart…

To apply this to marketing, imagine instead that those two players (I won't refer to marketers as prisoners!) are instead your two employees of drastically different skillsets. Let's call their outcomes Job Satisfaction, or Optimization of Skillset, which should correlate. They get a certain amount of job satisfaction from doing what they are naturally best at, as noted in the top left box.

Now to turn it into a game, they are incentivized to add on competing tasks that take them away from where they are best suited. They may even be persuaded that this will lead to a better outcome for them by showing their dedication to the company, possibly convinced that by going that extra mile and stepping outside of their comfort zone they may more quickly get a promotion, raise, or bonus. I will still call this a decision on the players' part, albeit not much of one, because of our recent cultural push to always say "yes and" in order to maintain some sense of job security. There is still some choice involved that makes this a player decision, not just an organizational imperative. The choice still is the employee's. Their other choice would be to say, "I’m sorry, I simply can’t because that will take me away from the work that I’m best suited to doing."?That is rarely heard, and by the time it is, they're probably already job hunting.

As with the Prisoner's Dilemma, when both employees fall victim to this pressure, they inevitably both wind up dissatisfied and underperforming, the bottom left box.?

Alternatively, we could build systems that allow them to work share when this mentality begins to creep in, pretty much what Nash would have us do. As leaders, we could also ensure that we know our employees' skillsets enough to stand guard over external demands on their time and give them the freedom to say no.

Let's humanize our charts just a bit and get back to why this all matters.

If your "player one" is one of those influential, intuitive movers and shakers, asking them to stop achieving what they are passionate about and instead stare at a screen of numbers can be demoralizing. Additionally, the time that they spend in an Excel spreadsheet or Powerpoint deck is time that they could have put to better use in building a new strategy, a marketing message, a creative asset, a customer-centric approach. Yet so many companies ask them to do both. To think that they can easily shift from one foot to the other is folly. After staring at screens of numbers and reports, it is near impossible to get back into the creative swing. By asking them to do both, you are crippling their effectiveness. You are not optimizing your employee resources.

Now, I'm not suggesting that there is never a need to report on what you're working on, especially if that work is impactful. It is one thing to make it a simple request, "If you build me a report on what you’ve done, I’ll give you 15 minutes with the executive team." But if this instead turns into spending half of every week of building reports, then formatting and reformatting and representing them over and over and over again, tailored to the desired recipients' personal report and presentation preferences, it becomes too much.

I've spent a lot of time on the thought leader type, which is not to say that these influencers are the only employee party whose skillset needs to be critically optimized and utilized, because in that game application, we have a highly valuable "player two" to consider. It's highly uncomfortable for the analytically-minded to suddenly be thrust into a spotlight they didn't ask for or forced to interpret data and plan a mega-strategy off of it. If this particular skillset is asked to juggle both roles, we see issues play out in situations where there may be data to support a new marketing message, but not knowledge of the ins and outs of the industry to gauge when the timing is right or when a message might come across as tone-deaf. This player's analytical research is nonetheless critical to guiding the path of your company's influencers by allowing them to make informed decisions and to witness the results of their work. Some of it may be intuitively known, but decent research will always reveal something new.

This is how both players (and their organization/management) can win.

What this means is that you need to recognize these personality differences. Ask employees which bucket they fall into. Capitalize on their skillsets. Build enough headcount and establish protective measures so that each has the time and is empowered to excel at what they do best. Let your thought leaders run with their intuition of what works and just get down to doing! And let your analysts pore into the data so they can get to strategically guiding.

In short, don’t make your flavor producers count beans. And don’t make your bean counters try to guesstimate how many are needed for a flavor-filled result. And let's game our way to making better soup together.

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Melissa Reali-Elliott has spent over 15 years marketing digital technologies. Her marketing efforts have supported organizations specializing in gaming software, IoT, RFID, supply chain, and power distribution to utility markets, including smart grid and microgrid applications, as well as industry verticals such as data centers, oil & gas, metal refineries, and food & bev. She is accomplished at developing and implementing innovative marketing, branding, and messaging programs that improve market position and drive demand generation, as well as inspire customer and industry engagement with a brand.

If you are just landing on this series, the background for its creation in the first post here. The gist is that the data center industry where Melissa specializes does not have many formally-trained marketers dedicated to it and those that actually are are newer to industry. She wants to use her years of experience to help bridge the gap between industry influencers and technical marketers.

A general closing note from Melissa: In my efforts to share experiences and data that help others in the data center space to improve their marketing efforts, I often use both positive and negative examples, some of which will be from companies I have personally worked for or done business with. No anecdote will reveal proprietary information that can be tied to a company. Neither will I cite an organization I have worked for by name. While none are perfect, these companies have been fundamental to my success and have provided my life’s work. I respect them too much to attribute public criticism to their brands, though it is inevitable that those who have worked alongside me will pick up on certain references.