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You Have a Leadership Brand! What is it?

What is your personal leadership brand? In other words, what is your reputation? What would your superiors, peers, direct reports, customers, and vendors say about you as a leader?

Of course all of these people see you from a different perspective, but they all see who you are as a leader. For example, let’s say a significant claims issue with a large commercial insured comes to your attention. Do you take responsibility yourself to gather information from everybody involved and then make decisions and give instructions to those that need to do something to solve the problem? Do you do this calmly and without passing judgment on people or do you do it with threats or a more passive aggressive emotional manipulation. Do you want to be perceived as the hero in this situation or as a martyr or as simply an effective leader?

You may instead go to your direct report and coach them how to handle the problem to help them grow and to position them as the “go to” person for these issues. Again, you can do this in a positive way or a negative way positioning yourself as the hero, martyr, or effective leader?

In the end, what do superiors, peers, direct reports, customers, and vendors say about you as a leader?

What about different situations such as a department initiative to improve internal processes? Is your brand that you have a good grasp of the issues that will impact your staff, customers, vendors, etc.? When people are struggling with the change, are you a leader to whom they feel like they can whine and you will make excuses or are you the kind that says suck it up. Perhaps you are a leader with exceptional empathy and communication skills that those impacted know you understand and appreciate where they are coming from and therefore would rather bust their humps to push through their collective discomfort and come out on the other side of change a better organization?

Why do I ask the question about your leadership brand in the first place? The reason is this. Most people don’t start looking for a different job to earn more money. Most start looking for a job because their manager or their manager’s manager has a poor leadership brand.

For example, employees will start looking for a new job when there is something causing people not to feel good about their job or their department and their leader has not acknowledged the problem or they have acquiesced to the situation. Maybe poor performers and dysfunctional employees are allowed to have too much of a negative impact. Maybe poor clients are allowed to have too much of an impact. Maybe their leader does not realize their strengths and does not leverage them in ways to help the company be more competitive and the employee to grow (i.e., use them to mentor or train, lead community outreach, plan internal events, represent your department to other departments, interview candidates).

On the other hand, people stay with companies and are attracted to opportunities where the person to whom they report has a good leadership brand. For example, think of a challenge in your office. Ask yourself how General George Patton would handle it. How about Jack Welch, former CEO of GE? They have strong leadership brands. What about Gandhi or Martha Stewart?

Effective leaders have a brand, a reputation, for being effective which helps retain people and should be used to attract people. One thing we do at the Garrison Organization when we work with a client is to identify the leadership brand of the leader for whom we are working. We communicate the leadership brand through examples to potential candidates who crave effective leaders.

A strong leader with a good opportunity effectively communicated by us to stand-out, passive candidates is the most effective way to attract top tier people to your organization who will collectively have a tremendous impact on the competitiveness of your company.

Please share any leadership brand stories (legends or nightmares) with which you are familiar or respond to my thoughts above. Do you agree or disagree with the impact of a leadership brand?

Monte Wyatt:

What a great topic. Every person in a business can and should be a leader. It is determined by how we interact with others, the words we use, decisions we make, and by the trust that others have in following us.

I truly believe that a person's business or the department that you are in, is a reflection of the leader and the leadership that is expressed in the team.

If you have the skills, desire, and have made the choice to be a leader, there are a lot of opportunities for you to succeed in the job market.

To be a leader you must be willing to learn, to change, to adapt, and continue to think about getting others to go where you want to go without forcing them to.

There are 2 aspects of team. #1 inclusion - the leader needs to include others in the team to gain understanding and buyin. #2 involvement - the team members need to choose to be involved. If they choose not to be involved then you have a issue. Leadership can sometimes force a person to make tough decisions when others are choosing not to become involved.

Actions like this will create your leadership brand.

Great posting. I look forward to other comments.