Working in the Zone

I've been reading a self-help book that has a pretty cool exercise you can do to gauge where you are in your life, to determine if you are balanced. Thinking this over for the last few weeks, it suddenly dawned on me that this exercise is perfect to help a marketing department determine whether they are on track with their objectives.

First, make a list of your identities/roles within the company and within your customer’s lives. For me this would include two sets of identities as I deal with both internal and external customers. For both sets of customers I would list: trainer, consultant, documentation specialist, and public relations specialist.

Take these roles or identities and place them on the graph that you have created (example below), basing the placement upon how you feel that you or your department has met the expectations for each of these roles/identities.

The goal here is to be in ‘the zone’. The Zone is that place where inspiration, imagination, creativity, and over all drive and flow come together to make everything you do one of those ‘Yes!’ moments – those moments when you can say that THIS is why you do what you do. Outside of these zones are Learning Zones. These areas are where your skills are being challenged to expand. You are learning new ideas, new concepts, and working harder than normal to meet deadlines.

None of us are meant to stay in these Learning Zones forever, but as we conquer new skill sets, our Learning Zones get incorporated into The Zone, creating an ever widening point of job satisfaction. The areas were we don’t want to be is outside the Learning Zones. At the top is the Burned Out Zone – where the stress is so much that we can never hope to cope and we eventually burn out. At the bottom is the Rust Out Zone – where there is no challenge, no joy, and no anticipation of things to come – where skills become rusty with disuse. So the diagram we use looks something like this:

We perform at an optimal level while we are “in the zone”. When we are in one of the learning zones, we are working, but it is more stressful, takes us longer to get the job done – in effect we are trying to expand our “zone” to include the learning zone. Is this where you want to be?

What can you do to bring the specific role into the “zone”? It may sound basic, but having this laid out will help you to realize what specific areas of your marketing you to need to work on in order to bring it into alignment with where you want to be.

Here at my company our marketing department wears many hats. They are involved with sales, direct marketing, contracts, customer support, and many other areas of company life. Where on the graph do each of these reside? Break the areas out further to help determine specific aspects of each hat. With direct marketing, where are you in regards to social marketing? To more traditional, email and phone marketing? And let’s not forget the all important internal marketing – direct marketing can play a huge role in marketing to a company’s internal customers. Which hat, or aspects of the hat is falling behind? Which are too much to handle at this time until new job skills are learned? By using this exercise we can quickly become aware of whether we are on the road to success, or if we fell off somewhere along the way.

So where are you?