If Your Employees Don’t Understand Your Brand, How Will Your Customers?
The other day I was meeting with the executive team of a growing retail chain, a prospective client. The conversation turned to the brand tagline and as the Chief Executive Officer began to explain how the tagline came to be, it became clear that no one around the table had ever heard the explanation before.
The scene provided a stunning example of a mistake many business leaders make. They assume that people understand the background and rationale behind the brand strategy.
Read on to learn about how a Brand Toolbox can help inform, inspire, and instruct all of your stakeholders about the brand.
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Blue Ocean Leadership
New research by the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy offers a systematic approach to uncovering, at each level of the organization, which leadership acts and actions will inspire employees to give their all. The first steps can be quite revealing:
- Audit how leaders currently invest their time and energy (for middle managers, for example, requesting frequent and detailed progress reports, spending time with senior managers, coaching people, etc.)
- Develop alternative leadership profiles by interviewing people at all levels of the organization about desired acts and activities
- Map the two profiles on a “Leadership Canvas” and classify each act/activity into one of four categories: eliminate, reduce, raise, and create
This focus on leadership behaviors is very instructive and actionable. Check out the article in Harvard Business Review (subscription or payment required.)
Managing Time as Money
Forward-thinking companies bring as much discipline to their time budgets as their capital budgets. A “Zero-Based Time Budget” is one tool for managing organizational time as the scarce resource it is.
Just as many companies develop operating and capital budgets from scratch every year (“zero-based”), the same approach can be applied to time by adhering to the following principles:
- We will invest no additional organizational time in meetings
- We will “fund” all new meetings through “withdrawals” from our existing meeting “bank”
- We will specify, for each new initiative, its total cost, including the time of executive leaders
Check out how to implement this rigor and the benefits of doing so in this HBR article (subscription or payment required.)
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