Putting together your marketing dream team can be quite the challenge, especially with the volumes of marketing professionals eagerly awaiting their chance. Combine that with a high-turnover rate industry, you need to focus on retaining talent, not just acquiring it.

You have to balance skill, knowledge, attitude, and creativity to create a powerhouse team that effectively meets its objectives. While putting your marketing team together, here are some red flags to watch out for that could save you from a lot of headaches down the road. Once you weed these issues out, you can start focusing on, and investing in, the right people.

The Know-it-All

The best way to make sure your marketing misses the mark is for your team to make assumptions about the market and the audience. Your team’s efforts will be ineffective if people in your team think they know everything and skip over research and data. Instinct is a great trait to have in a marketing professional, but that instinct should be to read the data and gain insights from it. This also applies to individuals who don’t believe they need training or to expand their knowledge, keeping both their skill sets and mindsets stagnant.

The Pass-the-Buck

Do you want to guarantee mediocre work? Have a team where nobody wants to take responsibility. If each person up the chain of command says, ‘oh my superior will fix this and make sure it’s ok’ before sending it along, by the time the work reaches a highly-stressed and busy manager, they may just approve it out of the need to meet a deadline or pressure to move onto the next project. The stronger the project starts the better it will end, especially if you want to save time and money. Every single team member needs to have this sense of accountability.

The Eccentric

We hear about this often at agencies and in marketing teams: The wildly eccentric creative individual who has their delicate process that by no means shall be disturbed, no matter what cost. Yes, you want creative people, but not at the expense of consistency, cohesion, and a tolerable workplace. Find the balance by giving the creative team their space to be creative, but at the same time setting up guardrails that keep them professional and playing well as part of the team. At some point, these eccentrics will do more harm than good.

The Super Rigid

The polar opposite to the eccentric is the super rigid type. Whether you’re an agency or an in-house team, your clients come to you for creative ideas. Submitting wild ideas that get shot down is better than proposing boring campaigns. You can strike the balance between consistency and creativity, but being too uptight will also hurt your team in the long run.

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We may all have a small amount of these personality traits, but if one of them is dominant and overwhelming, it can end up hurting your entire marketing operation.

Figuring out the right compensation, skill level, and role within the marketing team requires a balancing act, but what you can’t compromise on is a sense of shared values. You need people who live up to your organization’s values so they can work in one direction. Furthermore, this team needs to be compensated fairly and empowered. A marketing dream team has to feel like they are being invested in and have a career path ahead of them that will be rewarding over the course of several years. These points are absolutely critical to reducing turnover rates and will help you avoid losing good talent.