News on Trending Initiatives in Company Trust-Building & Reputation Management
In the last 18 months I have seen an uptake in organisation-wide Leadership Brand Development Programs. What does this mean?
Organisations have, for some time now, had the following in place:
- A consideration of reputational risk on the board agenda, or at least, a crisis response process at management level and a concern for ‘trust levels’ with stakeholders.
- Support from their marketing and communications teams to clarify and build a cohesive brand through stakeholder engagement, digital platforms and campaigns.
- External ‘personal brand’ and ‘LinkedIn’ trainings at foundational level.
What has changed is that organisations are realising that they now need:
- A pro-active, company-wide approach to shared identity-building, online and offline, to build differentiated brand awareness and brand trust as the foundation for the company’s narrative – to help counteract reputational challenges when they come up.
- To go beyond a stand-alone ‘training program’ – instead, to develop a strategic brand re/building and online identity alignment process, that is championed and modelled at leader-level and cascades into the culture of the organisation over time.
What is a ‘Leadership Brand Development Program’ – and why this?
I talk a lot about Leadership Branding – how your personal brand requires a different level of thinking and communication at leadership level, and why so many leaders are seeking to undertake this process for themselves.
The trend I am starting to see in Australia is a marked increase in awareness and interest in developing an approach to Leadership Branding for senior staff across whole organisations or jurisdictions, in alignment with the global brand and aspiring culture. The goal is not just to train leaders in how to represent themselves and the business (what I call ‘personal brand foundations’), but in developing a culture of strongly positioned, visible and aligned leadership brands.
“Trust built into systems as a sustainable competitive advantage” – Marcos Aguiar, BCG
One analytical tool I use is NWC’s ‘Trust Map’, which helps decision-makers to see where their people sit on the map in terms of how effectively their individual brands build trust with others – of course, directly affecting trust levels in the business as a whole.
A strong organisation-wide Leadership Brand Strategy means that:
- Your most senior staff are united in leading trust-building through authentic but well-structured personal identities aligned with the company brand, and –
- You have not only an individualised, leader-level approach to brand-building, but a company-wide cultural strategy that works to move ALL your people towards the top-right quadrant on the Trust Map.
(You can watch me explain the Trust Map in the opening 15 minutes of this webinar recording.)
Getting leaders’ engagement in the process
When it comes to developing leadership brands, crucial to success is getting engagement and commitment-to-action from participants. These time-pressured leaders are working in complex environments and juggling multiple objectives, so connecting at an individual level on how this work will directly support them to succeed is vital. For example, many senior executives I work with are concurrently developing either a board portfolio or an understanding of how their work impacts board decision-making, so a consideration of their ‘board brand’ becomes part of the strategy to help them achieve at work. This tailored advice from knowledgeable experts is the kind of thing your leaders value spending time on.
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