What makes inspirational, trusted ‘Leadership Brands’?
Real Leadership Brands take an ‘inside-out’ approach to executive development and look to construct a pipeline of consistently excellent managers over concentrating on strengthening the skill level of individuals. In distinguishing between ‘individual’ and ‘brand’ leadership, ‘individual’ focuses upon developing leaders with the emphasis usually on personal qualities, whereas real ‘brand leadership’ centres on the methods and programs which secure future commercial success of an organisation and as such, are embedded in the organisational culture. If focusing on desirable traits of individual managers and leaders, then senior management is at risk of promoting very generic competency models.
The starting point for greater organisational leadership capability is to ensure you’ve defined a clear set of statements of what the brand ‘stands for’. More specifically, ‘what do you want to be known for’ both to the customers (Brand Values), and to your employees (Internal Values) which can then be linked to a required set of management skills.
Harvard Business Review provides us with a good working example of this – Lexus, with its tagline “The pursuit of perfection”. This translates into the expectation that the Executives and Leaders excel at managing quality processes. Brand Leadership builds a reputation for high-quality managers who customers trust to deliver on that organisation’s brand promise.
Highlighting this further following examination of 150 companies with strong leadership capabilities, the Harvard Business Review article Building Leadership Brands found such organisations follow five primary strategies:
- Managers master the basics of Leadership i.e. setting strategy, developing their talent etc
- Leaders internalise their customers’ expectations
- Necessary to incorporate customer feedback into executive evaluations
- Invest in programs which help managers hone the right skills; and
- Track success of efforts to build leadership strength over the longer term.
Leadership brands inspire faith and trust through a reputation of developing exceptional managers. It’s a given that these brands are differentiated and enjoy a higher market value, however much of this value is driven by intangibles, such as the ability to deliver upon promises; propose new and sound strategies; employ (and retain) technically excellent talent; and foster greater customer/investor confidence in the brand.
Develop your leaders to be engaged and driven towards fulfilling customer, employee and investor expectations on a day to day basis. This takes individual commitment, senior managers sponsoring Brand Leadership initiatives internally, cross- functional senior management representation on the brand’s steering team, and HR practices and programs specifically designed to promote Brand Leadership internally. Naturally this also involves a shift in executive focus from inside the organisation to link activities happening outside the organisation, this assists to align new strategy and build confidence in your staff and customers.