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The brand that you want to be known for by your customers should translate into your employees' behaviour. If there is a line of sight between what the customers know you for and what the employee does, you can have a brand that has a sustainable impact. "Leadership should be a brand; it's the identity of the leaders that you want the customer to know you for," says Dave Ulrich, HR guru and co-author of How Leaders Build Value.
However, he cautions, just thinking about a firm's brand as its culture and set of management practices does not fully explain the power of the brand. "The brand of a firm should be embodied in each leader throughout the firm," Ulrich notes.
Ulrich strongly believes that when leaders embody the firm's brand in their actions and results, they communicate the brand identity to employees - who in turn communicate it to customers. "Leadership brand occurs when a sufficiently large number of leaders exhibit distinct leadership practices over time. As a result, the organisation creates leaders who are distinct from leaders in other firms." The leadership brand, in Ulrich's words, "lies at the heart of a firm's identity".
Brand matters
Ulrich insists that thinking about leadership as a brand instead of being simply something leaders do offers a number of insights into leadership effectiveness and into creating sustained and consistent leadership that enhances the organisation's value.
Moreover, he feels, a brand has both core and differential elements. "All cars have steering, suspension, cylinders, and other components which make them go. Without quality parts, the car will not work," he says. Similarly, many individuals that govern organisations need to demonstrate personal qualities, beyond generic attributes, that give them credibility. "What differentiates branded leaders is the ability to reflect in their leadership styles - the attributes and results that customers want to see in their firm. Lexus leaders would be driven to continuous learning and improvement while Yugo leaders would be focused on managing costs and delivering efficiencies. The leadership brand in a firm should reflect the customer expectations for the firm."
A brand puts leadership into business terms. "Leadership rhetoric is often plagued with ambitious but fuzzy terms such as transformation, vision, aspiration, character, and empowerment," Ulrich states. "A leadership brand focuses on quantifiable business terms of customer share and market value. The ultimate return on a leadership investment should be a 'return on intangibles' - a new ROI for leadership - that shows up in a firm's stock price. When leadership brand connects to customer share and/or market value, the rationale for leadership investment is much easier to make."
Generic qualities vs. specific attributes
While generic competencies offer the core elements of leadership, a leadership brand goes much further. "It pushes leaders to move from generic leadership to targeted leadership. In our work we have proposed the 'so that' question to move from generic attributes to focused results. At Marriott, leaders communicate so that customers experience exceptional service - the Marriott brand. At Pfizer, meanwhile, leaders communicate so that innovation can more readily occur - the Pfizer brand," he explains.
Moreover, firms with branded leadership win with employees. When a consistent and effective leadership brand exists in an organisation, employees know what to expect and the productivity and engagement-draining dissonance is eliminated. "Ultimately, if employer branding is not embedded in the leadership brand, it won't be sustainable, because people don't see the firm as much as they see the leaders," Ulrich observes.
An all-inclusive brand
Ulrich feels that an effective leadership brand must be reflected by leaders at all levels of an organisation. "A strong brand is universally understood to convey a specific message: Nike communicates athleticism to rich and poor, athletes in training and athletes in mind only. In the same way, a firm's leadership brand cannot be something that the top leaders in an organisation do while others watch - or worse, do something else. Instead, it must engage and be reflected by leaders at every level of the organisation," he emphasises.
It is here, Ulrich says, that HR professionals can play a pivotal role in leadership branding. "They should become the embodiment of the leadership brand first. It's because they touch everybody in the company. Everybody in the company sees and knows who the HR professionals are. So if they represent the right leadership brand, the leaders in the company will also have the right leadership brand," he notes.
Building the leadership brand
However, a leadership brand cannot be built overnight. Ulrich suggests five key steps that must be incorporated in the branding strategy to make it effective. To begin with, employers have to create a need for the leadership brand. "Before making investments in creating a leadership brand, the senior team needs to recognise that investing in a leadership brand will help the company's financial and customer performance. While some senior leaders will immediately understand that creating a leadership brand can deliver much the same value as a firm or product brand, others may want something more substantial," he says.
Secondly, it's important to articulate a declaration of leadership as "branded leadership is more effective with a declaration of leadership". This declaration states clearly and succinctly what leaders should know, do, and deliver. "It combines attributes or competencies of leaders and their results. For a company's leadership brand, it sets the standards of what leaders at all levels should know and the results they should deliver. At a personal level, a declaration of leadership brand articulates the personal reputation that a leader aspires to, what he or she wants to be known for," Ulrich says.
Assessing leaders against the brand
Ulrich further believes that with a clearly articulated declaration of leadership, a standard is set that can now be assessed. "Leadership assessment requires collecting perceptual and objective data on leaders' behaviours and results," he says.
However, Ulrich warns that personal assessments are rarely accurate. Data should also be collected from multiple stakeholders in a 360-degree assessment with input from superiors, peers, and subordinates or, even better, in a 720-degree, where feedback from sources outside the organisation can be evaluated.
Also, using data from an assessment, investments can be made to enhance the leadership brand. There are three general types of leadership investment: training, on-the-job experience, and off-the-job experience. Measurement of leadership investments is critical to ensure that appropriate resources are invested in next-generation leaders effectively. "Measurement starts with the business case for why leadership matters: Why are we investing in leadership brand? What results do we expect to see as a result of this investment? Often this means tracking things like employee engagement, customer share, or investor intangibles. Measurement may also focus on behaviours that leaders demonstrate," he elaborates.
Furthermore, Ulrich stresses the need to publicise the leadership brand in ways that encourage continuity. "The CEO should be the brand manager of the company leadership brand and he or she should take the lead in building brand awareness. This is done by ensuring that employees, customers, analysts, and investors understand the leadership brand, what leaders are doing to build the brand, and the results that have been achieved as a result of the investment." HRM
BIO BRIEF
Dave Ulrich is professor of business administration at the University of Michigan where he is in the core faculty of the Michigan Executive Program, co-director of Michigan's Human Resource Executive Program and Advanced Human Resource Executive Program. His teaching and research addresses the question: how do you create an organisation that adds value to employees, customers, and investors?
He has published over 90 articles and book chapters. Some of his books include: Organizational Capability: Competing from the Inside/Out; The Boundary Less Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organization Structure; Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results; Tomorrow's (HR) Management. In 2001, he was ranked the number one management educator by Business Week. He was also the winner of the George Petitpas Memorial Award from World Federation of Personnel Management for lifetime contributions to the human resource profession (2000) and listed in Forbes as one of the world's top five business coaches in the same year.