Who Am I? Defining and Communicating Your Leadership Brand

 

Reprinted with permission from the August 2008 issue of PR Tactics. Copyright 2008 Public Relations Society of America.

 

 

From James L. Heskett to David Maister to Bill George, I have read many authors’ advice on leadership in a service business. One of my favorite quotations from Maister’s book True Professionalism is, “A leader doesn’t build a business — a leader builds an organization that builds a business.” If you believe that premise, read on.

 

Leaders are people you want to follow. They coach you to success, share your values and bring new ideas to the daily routine. Sounds easy, but can you articulate the traits good leaders in your agency or company have? Is there a clear leadership brand?

 

Dave Ulrich, author of Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value, defines the concept of a leadership brand as the “identity of the leaders throughout an organization that bridges client expectations and employee and organization behavior.”

 

Some agencies want to grow fast and need leaders who are entrepreneurs and innovators. Others want to maintain their size and be known as having the best client service, work atmosphere or niche expertise. Each of these objectives requires different leader behavior. Once your vision and business goals are clear, you can define the types of leaders you need to achieve those goals. They can be written out as a list of traits. The brand should be relevant to internal and external audiences and be easily articulated by both. Over time, your clients should be able to describe your leadership brand based on their experiences with your people.

 

A leadership brand is only effective if the traits you value are clearly articulated to all employees. For it to really take hold, you must train against those traits and hold talent accountable to those competencies. The idea is not to thwart people’s natural leadership styles, but to blend their leadership traits with those you value as a company. People must demonstrate the traits of your leadership brand while bringing their complete selves to the office. If you hire someone who has to work to demonstrate the attributes you value, she or he is not likely to make it in your culture.

 

To effectively manage your talent, you need to identify and develop your stars and emerging leaders. Thus, you should ask yourself the following questions: Who are your “superkeepers,” the cultural role models you cannot imagine losing? Who are your rising stars, those doing extremely well in their current jobs but with potential to do more? Who are the fast-trackers who show a pattern of success and could be ready to advance in the right role? Who are you spending the majority of your time developing?

 

As leaders, we often spend time with those who are role-mismatched, possible pearls or actively disengaged. For an organization to thrive, we need to get better at isolating those who drain energy and focus on managers whose enthusiasm inspires others. We need to cultivate our leadership and make personal commitments to develop their career plans. At Ketchum we have the Ketchum Leadership Institute, a training program that articulates our leadership brand and populates it with our top leaders around the world. We then provide our leaders tools from human resources that allow them to more easily access and manage talent.

 

We all make leadership choices by what we book on our calendars each day. We choose to spend time with the client, on talent or on the business strategy. Look at the past month on your calendar and see what percentage of your time is spent on each area. Looking at the month ahead, how could you make that time more effective?

 

How we distribute our time impacts our current and future business results. The best leaders provide fast feedback, create career development plans for their future leaders and think about succession. They can articulate the agency’s desired leadership brand and explain to individuals how they can better deliver that brand promise. They can focus their leaders on common business goals yet give each leader room to bring her or his own personality and vision to the task.

 

The best leaders focus on the future — it’s not an afterthought. What you do with your nonbillable time is often more important than your billable time. Sound easy? Think again. Sound doable? Yes, with discipline.

 

As I began, the goal of the leader is to build the organization. Only once you have identified the next tier of leaders and focused them on a common leadership brand can an organization thrive. If you are committed to building a service business, you must unite the agency’s human assets and think deeply about the current and future state of the business.