Common Business and People challenges in which Team Branding gets results.

I regularly talk about the importance of developing a Team Identity or ‘Team Brand’ for each unit, department or practice area within your organisation – each team’s developed sense of who they are and what they bring to internal and external stakeholders.

Not only does a strong Team Brand directly correlate with improved professional confidence levels leading to increased effectiveness… it gives team members the opportunity to say something specific about how they contribute to and align with overarching company brand values – it helps them belong.

All of this leads to TRUST – trust among teams as they clearly demonstrate and recognise particular strengths and resources within each other (making cross-referrals, internal networking and company-wide team building easier) – and trust from your external stakeholders (such as customers and prospective employees) as your teams present a unified message of credibility, confidence, and value.

So, when do you need to focus on developing team identities with your people?

I would say anytime, as it’s always going to be beneficial! However, there are particular opportunities to bring a Team Brand Discovery to a particular unit, or a series of Discoveries across teams, where the process can be an extremely valuable resource supporting specific People and Culture plans or Business Development, Brand Communications and PR goals.

Team Branding is particularly powerful if your current People or Business challenge falls into one of these two categories:

1. New Starts. When something new is happening in your organisation, Team Brand Discoveries can help people engage with and settle into the new, feeling like they are meaningfully part of the fabric of the organisation and the new focus. The new start could be:

• A Merger, where distinct brands and people now need to combine.
• An Acquisition, bringing new people and thinking into the family.
• A Rebrand, where the business image and messaging is going in a new direction, and your people need to feel authentically aligned with it.
• Refreshed company Purpose, Values or Strategy, where you want to bring your people in various teams along for the journey.
• A new Market, Product or Service, where a team is formed around that.
• When you have lots of new staff or are re-creating teams and you’ll have people working together for the first time (maybe even in new roles they haven’t done before!).

2. Roadblocks. When one or more teams are facing a barrier to performance or happiness at work, working on Team Identities can be one concrete way of helping overcome the problem, because it can set a much more positive tone and reframe previously negative thinking. Creating strong Team Brands can help with:

• Team motivation to improve and reach goals
• Team cohesion to work together; team pride in performance
• Team belonging, connectedness and communication
• Performance, Pro-Activeness and Leadership behaviours
• Being great Brand Ambassadors, in-person and online
• Confidence in selling, networking and talking about the business

In a future article (just as I do in webinars and presentations) I will share tips on how to work with your teams on developing their Team Brands!

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by innovation and scale-up strategic advisor Eva Chye for If Innovation Could Talk. We discussed:

• innovative measures New Work Consulting has developed to address the divide between a company’s brand and its culture,
• the ways businesses can build trust in the digital age, and
• how individuals build trust through their personal brands.

Here are some highlights from the discussion.

Q: Julissa, you have coined the term ‘Brand Culture’ to describe the connection between an organisation’s brand and its culture. What inspired this innovative focus for your advisory?

I describe Brand Culture as ‘brand expression through your people’. It refers to the ways team members understand and communicate the business vision, brand values and key messages, both internally among themselves and externally with stakeholders.

To build trust in a business, the intersection between the company brand and the company culture requires a clear strategy at board and leadership level, and engagement from the whole staff to understand and address how they see, relate to, communicate and express the brand in their daily work and in their online and offline communications with stakeholders and audiences.

Yet – I see a real gap here:

• Boards are now starting to more deeply address Culture on their agendas, but it is disconnected from Brand, because this is still seen as the realm of the internal organisation (in some cases, just the marketing department).
• Leadership teams experience a lack of clarity and real, on-the-ground meaning when it comes to brand, despite having undertaken ‘branding’ and ‘purpose’ exercises.
• Individual staff members are unable to meaningfully articulate what the brand stands for and what it means to them in their daily work, when asked.
• External stakeholders and audiences experience a disconnect between what the ‘official branding’ tells them and what they experience through their interactions with staff, or through online commentary such as staff and customer reviews and media pieces.

You can see how each of these problem areas point to the necessary connection between the company brand and its culture… but most leaders don’t have a clear pathway and tools to tackle this.

See below for how to bridge the gap and build trust…

The banking and financial services sectors have experienced significant challenges in the past few years: The Royal Commission put ethics squarely in focus and public perception of banks suffered. In addition, an increase in competitive alternatives in banking and financial services coupled with crisis-driven changes in market conditions are challenging the future of traditional institutions.

The ability to build trust remains at the centre of thriving in business, and yet in a competitive and challenged field, trust is much more than being seen to be doing the ‘right thing’.

“Trust is more than a code of ethics and it is more than PR management…”

Trust is more than a code of ethics and it is more than PR management. Culture may be intangible but it IS visible – publicly, online! In this week’s webinar kicking off the FINSIA (Financial Services Institute of Australasia) ‘Future of Finance’ 2021 series, I co-presented with futurist, researcher and author Rocky Scopelliti. Our discussion centred around how the nature of trust changed rapidly with the events of 2020, how technology will be central in building trust going forward, and where people play their part, individually and within organisations.

Coming from the Brand Culture advisory and Personal Branding for professional services perspective, I focused on practical frameworks for assessing and addressing the level of alignment between brand and culture within an organisation, and ways to build internal professional confidence with staff and external brand trust with stakeholders. I demonstrated examples of just how easily an organisation’s culture and leadership style is visible online… and the I walked FINSIA members through 3 frameworks to work with these concepts for themselves and their teams: NWC’s Brand Expression Quadrant, Trust Map, and Personal Branding ‘DECA’ model.

Watch the discussion in this video (my piece starts around 21 minutes in), and then scroll down for a sample model discussed in the video…