Have you ever stopped to watch the V-shaped formation of Canadian geese migrating in the fall? Flying at an altitude of anywhere from 3,000 feet to 29,000 feet above us, these birds have a lot to teach us about stamina, streamlining, and leadership. The groups are not necessarily related to each other but take the thousands-of-miles treks twice a year.
Their success only comes by working together, shifting leadership positions, and the trust that they place in each other to accomplish their migratory goal.
Corporate America has capitalized on the concept of the beautiful flights of Canadian geese. Look at their work ethic! See how well they fly together without a squabble! Observe as they share the load, shifting leadership roles to each carry their own weight.
These birds have inspired everything from motivational posters to leadership workshops, where coworkers are encouraged to work together.
As copywriters, we look up and see the greatest copywriting resource to date: The copywriting workshop.
Maximize One of the Best Copywriting Resources
Whether you work from home, work in an office, or freelance, the benefits of teamwork are indisputable.
Teamwork:
- Fosters creativity
- Builds trust
- Develops new ideas
- Blends strengths within the team
- Teaches conflict resolution skills
- Creates a strong work ethic and promotes a team spirit
But if you’ve ever been through these types of corporate training, you might be shaking your head right now. Because even with the best intentions, these types of forced team-building exercises rarely work in the long term. After all, you don’t really get to choose your coworkers in the corporate world. And some of the ones you end up working with might be downright dreadful.
Benefits of Solo Work
Whether you work from home or freelance, your work is solitary. If you’re lucky enough to have a home office with four walls and a door, you may work an entire day without speaking with another person. And although this may be a relief from the orchestrated chumminess of cubicle land, it can have its own pitfalls.
Some of the benefits of working alone include:
- You can set your own pace.
- You have complete autonomy over projects.
- There’s little to no conflict unless you like to fight with yourself.
- You get to take full credit for successes.
Yet there are pitfalls to working alone. You don’t always see your own mistakes. You lose something by not having feedback from a fantastic copywriting resource – coworkers. If you have an editor or someone who reviews your work, they may simply edit your work without you ever seeing the final result.
Other problems common to freelancers include distractions not found in an office setting, like online surfing, the responsibilities to others in the household, your barking dogs, or your growing laundry pile.
Sometimes, when the only person to motivate you is yourself, you don’t always function at your highest capacity.
This is where the geese come back into the picture.
Building a Perfect Work World
What if…
What if you get to create, build, and design your own V-formation of geese to fly with? What if you have the capacity and ability to bring people together to help each other lighten the load?
After reading this article, take a pen and a notebook to a place where you normally don’t work–maybe the back patio or a park where you can reset your mind for a few moments. Think about building the perfect world–and a perfect team–for your freelance life, your full-time work, or your work-from-home experience.
What’s missing from your environment that a workshop team could bring to the table? What are some of your weaknesses that teammates could help strengthen? What strengths do you bring to the table? Think about why you chose to work the way you do now.
Did you want freedom? Did you want to create time and space in your life for you to complete creative projects? And now that you’re here, how can you make your work time and workspace more efficient so that you reach those goals that you’ve set for yourself?
Here’s one major element to success: plain, old-fashioned teamwork. Yes–just like those Canadian geese. The key is building your own workshop team.
Building a Workshop Team
Where do you start? If you’re freelancing, every gig is different. You get used to juggling your work, submitting pieces to multiple editors with multiple style preferences. So there are two ways to move forward with building a workshop team:
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Building a workshop environment with the people you currently work with, or
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Creating a new workshop within your network of other trusted writers and editors.
If you’re working with what you’ve got, that means you’ll take steps to implement change within an already established system to serve as an additional copywriting resource.
Let’s say you’re working from home as a content creator for an online magazine. In the current system, you get your assignments and your deadlines each month, you turn in your work, and you may never see it again.
If you want to create a workshop environment, you’ll first need to communicate with your first reader. Let them know you want more interaction and a better opportunity to improve your work and your workflow.
That starts with:
- Asking to see your line edits
- Asking for a dialog regarding improvements you can make
- Asking to work with the graphics team to have more creative influence on how the final piece is produced
- Offering to proofread or line edit work for others in exchange.
You can also talk with your sources for your pieces. Ask for their feedback before the piece is published. Make sure you have a full grasp and understanding of what they’re trying to convey. Make sure that your piece is hitting all the right notes.
Now, this may be the way you’re already working. If so, congratulations! You’ve got a good network of coworkers who really get what you’re trying to accomplish.
But if you want more, you can create your own workshop outside of individual gigs.
Does it seem far-fetched?
After all, you’ll need the following components:
- A trusted first reader
- A graphic designer or creative team
- A project lead or project manager
A trusted editor can be a fellow content creator who agrees to edit your work when you agree to edit theirs. As your work relationship grows, you can add a graphic designer and a project lead to the mix.
Why would you do this?
If you’re not working full-time and are looking to grow your business, you can pitch your team concept to potential new clients to have greater value for them with these additional copywriting resources.
Secondly, by working together, you can help each other land gigs. There’s strength in numbers. And with your shared skills, you each have contacts in the work world who need a skill that you may not have. By bringing your workshop concept to the client, you match their needs with your collective skills.
And thirdly–a workshop group of trusted creatives who come together means you gain all the benefits of teamwork without losing your autonomy or your freedom. You’re simply teaming up to be stronger together. You’re already running your own business as a freelancer.
If you want to grow your business, earn more, offer more, and shape your future to align with your goals, you can form a workshop team to help you all get there together. I bet you know two or three other freelancers you trust, work well with, and actually like right now. Why not start right there?
We’re the Copywriter Exchange. And guess what? We started right where you are. We were a group of freelance writers, editors, creators, designers, and project managers who trusted each other to take a small leap that became a big jump. And we know that you can, too.
Join The Exchange today to start your journey.
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Author Bio
David J Ebner is the President of Content Workshop and an advisor to Copywriter Exchange. Before all of that, he was a freelance copywriter. David is the author of Kingmakers: A Content Marketing Story, a book designed to help writers leap into the content marketing world.
