YOUR PEOPLE ARE YOUR BRAND
Brand-Specific leadership updates the traditional approach of Values Based Leadership – as a brand is more than just values – into an integrated framework of transformational leadership.
And, rather than values alignment – which always sounds painful! – a Brand-Specific approach enables the connection of an individual’s Personal Leadership Brand and their employer’s corporate brand.
Why connection? Regardless of which industry you are in, building a strong brand requires that all employees feel connected to the corporate brand, and understand their role in turning brand aspirations into reality.
This drives employee engagement, and highlights the fact that a company’s brand is more than just values – it’s what customers think, feel, understand, and experience the brand to be.
That brand experience is delivered through people.
Whether it’s the goods or services they produce, their face‑to‑face interactions with customers, on the phone, via email, on social media, or even around the dinner table with friends, people create the brand experience.
Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.
LACK OF CONNECTION
The research into brand connection is scary! The majority of employees don’t understand, or feel connected to the company they work for.1-4
Only a fraction of employees are effective ambassadors for their company’s brand:1,2
- Only 42% know what their organisation stands for and what sets it apart from the competition
- Only a third encourage their family and friends to purchase or make use of their company’s products
and services - Only 27% believe that their company always delivers on their promise to their customers
For employees who do know their company’s values, the research is equally discouraging:3
- Only a quarter of employees – 27% to be exact – truly believe in their company values
- Even fewer employees – 23% – felt that they could really apply those values to their work every day
Globally, less than half of all employees, across all industries, feel that their job is really important to delivering to the company’s objectives.4
Companies struggle to communicate the core of their brand down to the front line. And, if your employees don’t know your brand promise, they certainly won’t be able to deliver to it!
Plus, it’s no wonder that employee engagement is a global challenge.
BRAND-SPECIFIC LEADERSHIP
Effectively communicating a compelling brand proposition across the business – a Brand-Specific approach to people development – has been shown to drive employee engagement through brand connection, building real brand ambassadors.4,7‑9
Brand-Specific leadership also helps create an organisational culture that’s not only aligned to your brand, but also to your corporate strategy.10
As well as self-leadership, a brand-centric approach to learning and development builds your leadership brand… your reputation as a business for developing exceptional leaders. Leaders with a distinct set of talents, uniquely geared to deliver your brand promise – to both customers and stakeholders.
It differentiates what YOUR leaders do from what your competitors’ leaders do, translating your customers’ expectations – your brand promise – into the leadership competencies you wish to build.11‑13
And, by focusing on leadership as an organisational capability, rather than just the development of individual leaders, it builds your leadership pipeline: your next generation of leaders. Your leadership bench.
What are the brand-specific competencies of your leadership brand?
You want your leaders to be the kind of people who embody the promises your company makes to its customers.
CONNECTING BRANDS
A sense of our own purpose – the heart of our Personal Leadership Brand – drives everything that we do. A personal brand isn’t self‑promotion – that’s personal branding. Your Personal Leadership Brand is your identity, and distinctiveness as a leader. Of self, and others.
By understanding, and clearly defining, your own purpose, values, mission, strengths, and opportunities for development, it brings laser-like focus to WHO you are and HOW you are. It’s self-awareness on steroids.
However, research suggests that less than 5% of us have a clearly defined personal brand that we can live consistently at work, each and every day.14
Our YourBrand™ framework is designed to connect people and brand – enabling everyone to define their Personal Leadership Brand, and understand how their unique talents and competencies deliver results.
It’s about connecting the personal with the corporate, to drive performance and profit.
LEAD SELF • LEAD TEAMS • LEAD CHANGE
YourBrand™ is based on three pillars of leadership: Lead Self, Lead Teams, and Lead Change.
We start the journey with Lead Self – or self‑leadership – ‘understanding who you are, what you can do, where you are going and why, combined with the ability to self-manage your communication, emotions and behaviour on the way to getting there’.
Insights Discovery provides the golden thread of self‑awareness across any people development programme we build… plus YourBrand™ is SETA accredited skills programme.
YourBrand™ is designed as the complete solution to building your brand, and your people.
Want to find our more?
REFERENCES:
- Gallup (2013). State of the global workplace: Employee engagement insights for business leaders worldwide. (gallup.com).
- O’Boyle, E., Adkins, A. (2015). Super Bowl ads don’t make a brand. Gallup Business Journal. (gallup.com).
- Dvorak, N., Nelson, B. (2016). Company missions: Not resonating with employees. Gallup Business Journal. (gallup.com).
- Dvorak, N., Nelson, B. (2016). Few employees believe in their company’s values. Gallup Business Journal. (gallup.com).
- Aon Hewitt (2015). 2015 trends in employee engagement. (aon.com).
- Dvorak, N., Ott, B. (2015). An organization’s identity has to inspire customers. Workplace. (gallup.com)
- Morhart, F.M., Herzog, W., Tomczak, T. (2009). Brand-specific leadership: Turning employees into brand champions. Journal of Marketing, 73.
- O’Boyle, E., Adkins, A. (2015). Super Bowl ads don’t make a brand. Gallup Business Journal. (gallup.com).
- Arruda, W. (2013). Three steps for transforming employees into brand ambassadors. Forbes Leadership. (forbes.com).
- Intagliata, J., Ulrich, D., Smallwood, N. (2000). Leveraging leadership competencies to produce leadership brand: Creating distinctiveness by focusing on strategy and results. Human Resources Planning, 23(4).
- Ulrich, D., Smallwood, N. (2007). Building a leadership brand. Harvard Business Review. (hbr.com).
- Intagliata, J., Ulrich, D., Smallwood, N. (2000). Leveraging leadership competencies to produce leadership brand: Creating distinctiveness by focusing on strategy and results. Human Resources Planning, 23(4).
- Morhart, F.M., Herzog, W., Tomczak, T. (2009). Brand-specific leadership: Turning employees into brand champions. Journal of Marketing, 73.
- Llopis, G (2013). Personal branding is a leadership requirement, not a self-promotion campaign. Forbes Leadership. (forbes.com).
- Smallwood, N. (2010) Define your personal leadership brand in five steps. Harvard Business Review: Leadership Development. (hbr.com).
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