513. How / What vs. Do / Is 🤸♀️
The different types of people you'll work with (and hire!)
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
The many different types of people you’ll work with (and hire!)
When I was building startup marketing teams (and now when I advise others on how to build them), one of the biggest tensions was always how to bring in people who were strong fits with your company culture and values but not to build a homogenous team that thought, acted, and looked all the same.
One of the most helpful reframings I heard, as it relates to hiring for your team culture, is that you aren’t always looking for exact culture fits; you are looking for culture contributors.
It’s more inclusive, it’s more expansive, it’s more beneficial to the breadth and quality of ideas and perspectives on your team.
This did not mean to hire randomly. It did not mean to hire against your values. Instead, it shifted the mentality toward understanding your team better and recognizing which perspectives and personalities might you be lacking.
Of course, in order to do this, it helps to know what all different types of people are out there! I’ve come across a handful of different frameworks, metaphors, and personality tests that have helped expand my view into the array of people I might have the privilege to work with. Here are some of my favorite ways to think about the breadth of culture contributors on a team.
(Note: These can make for great team activities as well!)
How / What vs. Do / Is
How / What people are endlessly curious about the world around them, wanting to know how things work — be it marketing or business or, yes, even (especially, perhaps) people.
Do / Is people are hyper-focused on the job ahead of them, single-minded (in a healthy way) of getting to their goal then getting on to the next goal, always living in the present.
There is no “right” way to be.
(This is true for all of the following frameworks as well.)
A team is likely to have a mix of How / What and Do / Is people, and you may find that different roles within your team call for different approaches. Your brand strategists and product marketers might be more How / What, and your growth marketers more Do / Is.
The language for this comes from user research and how we ask questions. Open-ended questions allow the person being asked to take their answer in any different direction. Closed-ended questions can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” or a specific piece of information.
The Nielsen Norman Group has a great overview of the difference between the approaches as they relate to customer research. Here is a comparison of some of the questions:
Leading, Closed Question ……….. Non-leading, Open-Ended Version
Was that experience helpful? ……….. How did you find that experience?
Did that make sense? ……….. What did you think about that?
Did you find that task difficult? ……….. How did you find that task?
To what extent was the visual design a factor? ……….. What factors did you consider?
(In user research, there is a right answer for how to ask questions; you’re supposed to ask open-ended ones. But remember: There’s no “right” / “better” type of How / What or Do / Is person.)
🧭 Explorers vs. 🏴☠️ Pirates
Explorers want to build something new and want to do revolutionary things, and solve problems in a unique way.
Pirates are fast followers, market centric and are very focused on building the solution.
I first learned of this when hiring my team at Buffer. It came from a podcast with Hiten Shah, and the thinking went that you need to be clear about whether you were building a business for explorers or for pirates, which will then tell you which type to bring on to the team.
I’ve evolved this one slightly since those days. I think that a well-rounded team takes a bit of both types.
It may be true that an explorer might have a tricky time working at a young startup all about speed and solutions, and a pirate might feel misplaced in a big-picture, visionary business. But as you zero in on particular jobs and channels and team structures, there will always be room for both.
Personally, I liked to hire pirates to scale my validated channels and hire explorers to come up with new channels and strategies to test into.
Neurotic needs
Psychoanalytic theorist Dr. Karen Horney came up a theory about neuroses, our tendencies toward unhealthy behaviors when we experience stress and anxiety. Dr. Horney’s theory in particular was about interpersonal relationships, of which there are plenty at work!
Now, I never suppose that I’ll deep-dive into neuroses with a job candidate, so these personality discoveries more often come later on if we do a team exercise or if someone’s interested to discuss in a 1:1. And, knowing where I stand on this myself is perhaps the most helpful bit of all.
Dr. Horney says that there are three basic neurotic needs:
Needs that move people toward others: These neurotic needs cause individuals to seek affirmation and acceptance from others.
Needs that move people away from others: These neurotic needs create hostility and antisocial behavior.
Needs that move people against others: These neurotic needs result in hostility and a need to control other people.
Most people will identify more strongly with one of the three, but for all three of these, keep in mind that it is a spectrum of healthy and unhealthy — these neurotic needs are not universally bad. And once we know more about how these appear for ourselves at work or in relationships, we’ll be able to recognize and respond with more understanding.
Strengths Finder
This personality test from Clifton helps you identify your top strengths from among a list of 34 different strengths. If your style of people management and leadership is strengths-based, then I highly recommend taking your team through a study like this.
Here are all 34 of the strengths — feel free to click on any of them to learn more.
STRATEGIC THINKING
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
INFLUENCING
EXECUTING
Enneagram
I’ve done this personality test many times with my teams, and it is always an eye-opener. The Enneagram test will reveal your personality type to be one of nine different Enneagram Types.
1 THE REFORMER — The Rational, Idealistic Type: Principled, Purposeful, Self-Controlled, and Perfectionistic
2 THE HELPER — The Caring, Interpersonal Type: Demonstrative, Generous, People-Pleasing, and Possessive
3 THE ACHIEVER — The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type: Adaptive, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious
4 THE INDIVIDUALIST — The Sensitive, Withdrawn Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental
5 THE INVESTIGATOR — The Intense, Cerebral Type: Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated
6 THE LOYALIST — The Committed, Security-Oriented Type: Engaging, Responsible, Anxious, and Suspicious
7 THE ENTHUSIAST — The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Distractible, and Scattered
8 THE CHALLENGER — The Powerful, Dominating Type: Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational
9 THE PEACEMAKER — The Easygoing, Self-Effacing Type: Receptive, Reassuring, Agreeable, and Complacent
And what’s unique about Enneagram is that there is an acknowledgment of how our personality may adapt when we are feeling stressed or feeling in a groove. So, really, you end up finding out three of your different personality types.
Over to you
What are your favorite frameworks, metaphors, or tests for finding out more about your team? What do you think of the notion of cultural contributors? It’d be great to hear from you.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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