Working Genius for Marketing Teams: How to get more from the team you’ve got

Your marketing team is busy. Campaigns are going out, content is being created, meetings are happening and leads are being chased. Clever use of AI means your team can deliver more and faster than it could a few years ago.

But here’s the more useful question: Is your marketing team producing more work or delivering more value?

They aren’t necessarily the same thing. And it is an issue every marketing manager grapples with at some point. A team can get on well, work hard and hit deadlines, yet still spend too much of its energy on work that isn’t necessarily the highest priority or going to deliver the greatest value.

That’s where Working Genius gets interesting for Marketing Teams.

What is Working Genius?

There’s no shortage of tools that tell you something about yourself at work - but Working Genius is genuinely different. It isn’t trying to define your personality, it looks at the types of work that you absolutely knock out of the park, the work you can do with competency, and the work that drains you.

Developed by and The Table Group, the model identifies six types of Working Genius needed to take any kind of’ work’ from the first thought through to completion.

They are:

Wonder: asking whether something could or should be better

Invention: creating ideas and solutions to achieve that

Discernment: identifying which of those ideas are most likely to work

Galvanizing: getting people behind the idea you are backing

Enablement: identifying how to turn the idea into action and helping to do it

Tenacity: pushing the work through to completion and results

Most people have two of these as areas of Genius, two as areas of Competency and two as areas of Frustration.

No one Genius is better than another - and that matters. All are important and deliver real value to any given piece of work.  

So why does Working Genius matter so much in marketing?

Think about what a marketing team is asked to do. You need people looking ahead and asking what needs to change. You need ideas. You need people who can tell a clever idea from one that is likely to work. Then somebody needs to get everyone behind the idea – often selling it across cross-functional teams. Then somebody has to figure out how the team is going to do it and help make it happen. Finally, somebody has to keep going until the campaign is live, the leads are followed up, the numbers are measured and the work has produced a result.

That is all six Geniuses at work.

The problem? Very few marketing teams have every genius present. In many of the teams I have worked with there is often not just an absence of a Genius but also an over-abundance of another. It means teams can:

• be really busy doing what they’ve always done without questioning how the world has changed and what could be improved upon
• the first idea becomes the best idea for lack of competition
• or there are too many ideas and no one with the ability to see which is going to move the needle the most
• get everyone really excited about a project… but somehow something else brighter and shinier comes up and that project doesn’t get finished
• have really great ideas that stay really great ideas as it is all too hard to work out how to actually deliver on them
• or things get done but deadlines are more a concept than a reality creating ripples of growing frustration

The useful part is knowing what you do have so you can absolutely play to those strengths. As AI is being actively deployed by Marketing Teams it is important to really understand how you can use the human strengths you have to make that even more exponentially valuable.

What can Working Genius show a marketing leader?

For a Head of Marketing or Marketing Manager, the team map can give you a different view of the people you lead. Job titles tell you what someone has responsibility for, skills tell you what they have learned to do. Working Genius adds another layer: what type of work is someone naturally gifted at delivering?

It can explain some things you may already have noticed:

• why does one person come alive when the team is trying to solve a new problem, yet lose interest once everyone moves into delivery?
• why does someone else seem impatient in brainstorming sessions, then become the person you can rely on to get the work over the line?
• why does one team member keep asking questions that feel inconvenient at the time but then turn out to be exactly the questions you needed to answer?

You stop seeing those differences as something to fix. You start seeing how they contribute to the team. The goal isn't to squeeze more ‘doing’. The goal is to enable your team to work more effectively to their strengths (Genius) and ensure you deliver exponentially greater value as a result.

So, what happens in a Working Genius marketing team workshop?

Before the workshop, each team member completes the Working Genius assessment. We then use the results to look at the team as a whole not just the individual reports sitting beside one another. We look at where:

• your Geniuses sit
• you have overlap
• you have gaps
• if competency exists to fill the gaps
• people may be spending too much time working in their Frustrations

Then we bring it back to your actual work. Your meetings. Your projects. Your campaigns. Your planning. The work that gets stuck. The work that always seems harder than it should. The work you really want to do – but can never get to. That’s the part I find useful.

Working Genius is simple to understand. The value comes from applying it to the way your team works every day. I was lucky enough to be one of the first 600 people globally to train as a certified Working Genius facilitator, and I bring a particular industry-based lens when I am working with marketing teams.

If you’re wondering whether your team could be using its strengths better, reach out to me and we can look at how Working Genius can apply to your team.