Tag: leaders

At Marketing Eye, we have a very diverse team. Members of our team come from the United States, Australia, Dubai, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and New Zealand. While accents may vary, the work that our team does remains based on an industry best practice standard and a need to bring diversity into our marketing perspective.

For the past week I have been in Sydney with two of my colleagues. It is an away trip for all of us, as we embark on working in one of our most central offices. Travelling with colleagues can be testing, just like any relationship. There is no truer saying than "it can make or break you".

It takes a team to build a business, and one bad egg can spoil the broth. If you have been in business for some time, like myself, this will ring true. While we read so many blogs and stories about how leadership determines culture, I beg to differ. In fact, I think leadership has little impact on culture, but people do.

Yesterday was a eye-opener for me. I saw an international team collaborated to make sure that their boss (aka me), knew how much they meant to each and every one of them. They went over and above, with every single person contributing in one way or another.

When you are a small business, it is hard to find money just to pay the bills most of the time, let alone invest in team bonding or outsourced employee development.

I know that in the first couple of years of business, other than some hands on training from moi, my team received little if any outside training to develop their skills and capabilities as marketing consultants.

They were expected (sadly, this was the case) to research and find their own path to developing their careers as marketing consultants and were expected to use market research and the Internet as resources to learn about small businesses and the challenges they go through on a day to day basis.