By Ann Monroe
As the technology landscape continues to change rapidly, creating new opportunities and greater competition, companies are looking for any kind of competitive advantage. This includes overcoming significant hurdles and empowering the workforce with the tools and support needed to innovate and deliver new products, services and processes.
Companies most often name excessive red tape, a dearth of new ideas, getting bogged down by daily tasks and putting out fires as their primary barriers to forward momentum. So, how do you confront these? It comes down to three significant skill-sets within the work ecosystem: the dreamer, the driver and the doer.
Let’s look at each of these in turn, starting with the dreamer. What do they do? Dreamers come up with the great ideas. They are willing to think outside the box and try new things. When you’re bogged down in the day-to-day activity of a business, it can sometimes be hard to come up with creative, new approaches. But that’s exactly why the dreamers possess such a key ability—every business needs forward-thinking employees who can help shake things up and come up with new suggestions. As a business leader, it’s important to instill a culture where this kind of thinking is encouraged and supported.
It takes more than just generating a big idea, though; someone has to figure out how to take it run with it. This is where the drivers come in. Drivers help make ideas become reality. They can push projects through and assist with the process of securing buy-in from internal—and sometimes external—stakeholders. If a reallocation of resources is needed, the drivers are the people who will make this happen. They are the people with the communication skills to push ideas forward.
Finally, we have the doers. They are the tactical, front-lines people who do the actual work needed to make the dreamer’s idea and the driver’s plan a reality. Doers are an integral part of an organization. Without them, little could get accomplished. Once a big idea has gotten off the ground, the doers are the people who not only execute on them, but they’re also key to keeping the day-to-day operations running.
These three skillsets come together in a symbiotic relationship to make a company successful. People need the bandwidth and support to come up with innovative ideas and the power of brainstorming can’t be underestimated. At the same time, you need people who have the ability to actually bring these ideas to life, who can take them from idea to reality and provide the support, resources and other necessities.
No one person has everything needed for a business to succeed. Rather, an organization gathers its dreamers, drivers and doers to share strengths and skills. This is what enables companies to see new possibilities and then act on them. This is the kind of collaboration that engenders the innovation and follow-through needed to succeed in today’s fast-moving business climate.
Ann Monroe is vice president of worldwide marketing and customer success at FileMaker, Inc., Ann Monroe drives programs and strategies to advance the customer experience. Monroe leads three teams: the customer support and success team, which provides support, learning and community programs; the web team; and the marketing team.
Business opportunity stock photo by Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock
