In the lead up to the Olympic Games there was a lot of media discussion around the IOC’s rigorous approach to protecting their ‘brand’. Everyone from butchers to florists were forced to remove ‘unauthorised’ displays of the Olympic rings or references to the Games.
This very commercial protectiveness is interesting given that the public experience of the Games is much more about the athletes and the competition – all the action that’s going on inside the arenas – than it is about the external symbols. The real brand of the Games is not the rings: it’s the interaction that we all have with the games as we watch them and share the joy and heartache of the competitors.
This apparent disconnect between the public experience of the games and the IOC’s jealous guarding of their symbols is similar to what we commonly see when there is a misalignment between the external brand of an organisation and the prevalent ‘leadership brand’ inside it. The way long running, successful organisations with well developed and widely understood brands – think Apple, Virgin or Walmart – maintain their success isn’t just via marketing. It’s by constantly translating their external brand back inside the business in the way they recruit and train their leaders and, in turn, everyone else inside the business.
The term ‘leadership brand’ was coined by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood in 2007. They identified that organisations with a strong and resilient connection between external brand and the customer experience achieve this through their approach to leadership development. Rather than developing merely ‘good’ leaders, they develop leaders with a distinct set of talents that are uniquely geared to fulfilling the expectations of all their stakeholders, both internal and external.
The main implication here is that developing leadership brand requires a much more individual approach to leadership training. To paraphrase Ulrich and Smallwood, generic training and development creates generic leaders. Just as, say, customer experience varies widely from one company to the next, depending on a whole range of factors, so too do leadership development requirements.
The same applies on an individual basis. In the context of our work, each individual we work with has their own Enneagram type, and their own level of emotional health. Understanding these, and working with them, can help a leader better understand the gifts they bring to their role, and any gap between these and the broader leadership brand required of the organisation.
When we work with leaders around their brand, we explore nine characteristics of a fully developed leadership brand, each associated with a different Enneagram type. This leads to a very personal perspective and, importantly, it helps identify and prioritise areas of development focus which are likely to make the biggest difference in the short to medium term.
The concept of leadership brand is becoming more important as the need for authenticity grows. Customers want to deal with businesses which meet the expectations of their branding. Potential employees are increasingly looking to work for leaders who they ‘want to work with’, not just organisations with a colourful external image – leaders who they can respect and admire as opposed to those who can ‘talk the talk’.
Malcolm
Thanks for blog post. Is an interesting discussion and one I’ve seen play out in various ways for many years. While I agree with premise that great brands must be built and driven by leadership, taxonomies that identify some idea of separate brand entities such as “leadership brand” and “external brand” suggest that they are somehow different, where nothing could be further from the truth.
There is only the Brand. It is horizontal and multifaceted and plays out across the organisation inside and outside as a result of the promises that are made and kept. Misalignment is an issue, but this is a result of promises being made. Per your example, on the one hand the promise of something the world participates in, and conflicting that the promise that unsanctioned use of the iconography around the event will be punished. It is the promises being made that are misaligned which leads to resulting brand being so.
Thank you for writing about this, Malcolm. I think you are absolutely right that employees are increasingly looking to work for leaders who are emotionally healthy. Did you ever take a look on the leadership of zappos.com (CEO Tony Hsieh) or Mindvalley (CEO Vishen Lakhiani) – they are thriving and highly successful companies – and their employees seem to love working there – and the leaders seem to be walking their talk every single day! Check it out!