The procrastinator: waits seemingly forever for the right moment, the right situation, to act. If you want a self-fulfilling prophecy, then practice procrastination! It leads to apathy and is extremely demotivating. It’s easy for many people to be procrastinators. There’s always “a better time” to do what needs to be done. To say we work better under pressure is bogus and it really means we are desperate and have no choice but to perform.
The distracted person is one I’ve written about before. This kind of person is like the cat chasing the red laser light. They’re constantly vulnerable to the shiny object syndrome (SOS). Too much time is spent on poor ideas and rabbit holes instead of setting goals and working the plan. I see this in business owners that constantly think they need to add an additional service to their product offering. They waste valuable time and resources (often money) trying to get a new service or product off the ground and yet they haven’t perfected their core services.
The dreamer has lots of big ideas and I’ve also written articles about this too. Since we all know that dreaming can be a good thing for coming up with new ideas, we get pulled into the dreaming syndrome of wasting time on far-fetched ideas and failing to implement any of them. Sadly, without effective and full implementation, dreams are doomed to failure.
The analytical becomes too paralyzed with overthinking to let go and make something happen. I teach specialized marketing classes around the country and routinely see business owners and sometimes even GMs that are so focused on “what might go wrong,” or “what could improve it” that they never take the strategies any further. They can see it all “in their head” but that’s where the strategy stays – dead and incomplete.
The non-producer is always busy but never really productive. How many marketing reps have worked for you that were always bubbly, energetic, happy, and constantly on the go, But… rarely ever really produced jobs or real work. Their engine is screaming, there is lots of noise, and smoke is pouring out the exhaust, but their wheels are in the mud just spinning and not going anywhere. Owners often tell me their marketers are rocking but these same owners don’t understand that real jobs need to be generated by these marketers. Lots of “busy” action rarely leads to jobs and projects that generate income. Without COLLABORATION MARKETING, it’s all wasted effort.
As a side note about the non-producer: this type of person usually only lasts a few months to a year and then the owner hires another person to do the same foolish thing. If only they knew how to use collaboration marketing to generate maven relationships, instead of the Stop Drop and Roll marketing!
Dick Wagner is a Disaster Restoration and Commercial Marketing Consultant.
