Developing Leadership Brands: When One Leader’s Clarity Becomes a Business Case
In this article:
- Why leadership brand work rarely stays with one person
- How a GM’s individual clarity became a team capability, then an organisation-wide investment
- What a VP noticed as he watched this unfold
- The misconception that can keep this work confined to one or two leaders
A General Manager sits down with me to do some deeply personal work on his own leadership identity. Nobody else is in the room. Six months later, members of Business Development, Legal, People & Culture and Corporate Affairs are doing versions of the same work.
Rather than a hypothetical, this is what happened recently with a client in the resources sector, and it’s worth understanding why, because it changes how you should think about the return on investment on this kind of work.
Does getting clarity on your own leadership identity change anything beyond how you personally come across?
The GM’s brief was typical of the usual individual-level leadership branding engagement: distil a career’s worth of experience into a clear, confident account of who he was as a leader and what he brought to the table. That work is personal. It looks at values, leadership style, career story… the whole person, not just a polished CV.
What happened after that is the part worth paying attention to! He didn’t keep it to himself. He brought his senior team, working in new green energy markets, through a similar process. Team members who had never had a structured way to talk about their own contribution suddenly had one, and the effect on how they operated as a team, not just individually, was immediate.
As the Vice President overseeing the business described it:
“Today’s corporate market has no shortage of competition and a well-built, relevant and authentic identity is a foundation of a strong business strategy. A failure to manage this vital part of the business can result in reduced productivity, loss of market confidence and ceding market share to competitors. The stakeholder socio-commercial interface in today’s market is a pressing influence to manage to establish a brand that meets social and community expectations of governance, performance and inclusiveness.
With this in mind – As a Vice President leading a nationally significant new energy business, I required a comprehensive professional brand make-over and my rapidly growing management team also required the same support.”
Why this expanded past the new markets team
The work didn’t stop with the ‘mission-critical team’ leading the business’s strategic growth. Senior leaders saw the opportunity for the business in moving leadership brand development into the corporate functions that work alongside technical and growth teams: Legal, People & Culture, Corporate Affairs. These are teams whose value to the organisation is real but often harder to articulate than a growth team’s, because their contribution doesn’t show up in a sales figure.
The VP’s own account of what changed points to why this matters at scale, not just for the individuals involved:
“The structured approach engages leaders to not only build their profiles; it is a learning experience teaching the client about careful and effective brand development, delivery and maintenance… aligned with business growth objectives, target market and key stakeholder base.”
The leadership branding program, from start to finish, was not about creating a one-off deliverable such as a refreshed LinkedIn profile. It was about building lasting capability that keeps generating value not just for the participants directly involved, but for the business and the culture.
A misconception worth correcting
Some leaders that consider this kind of work default to thinking of it solely as an individual personal leadership challenge: the new CEO’s bio, the board director’s public profile, perhaps a handful of high-potential executives preparing for increased exposure. Useful, but narrow.
What this engagement demonstrates is different. Leadership brand clarity, approached strategically with one intentional leader who cares about creating a culture of confidence, tends not to stay contained. It moves sideways into their leadership team, and from there into other parts of the business that support and enable growth, often the functions least likely to have been offered this kind of development in the first place. Legal and People & Culture professionals are just as likely to be underselling their value, and just as worthwhile investing in to provide them with the framework to articulate that value.
The business case for organisation-wide leadership brand development also extends beyond the designated participants and the program you paid for… just watch what happens when you give a few passionate leaders the clarity to articulate their own value properly, and how others start to notice.
Further reading
When your people need clarity… sharpen your leadership lens
Why Comms and Marketing Teams need a Leadership Brand