Brand Leadership and building great Leaders: The Basics and Beyond

In a world where Leadership, ambassadorship, authenticity, and credibility are necessary capabilities for brand success, what leadership skills help us excel in this reality? This is the first of a series of articles in which I’ll discuss leadership traits and share the most controversial experiences that I’ve had with different types of leaders over the past 20 years. I will also invite professionals from my network to contribute and share their personal stories and thoughts on Leadership.

In this first article, I’d like to share seven critical principles that I discovered through exceptional mentors, visionaries, and highly effective leaders, that shaped my ground rules and leadership perspective in general. By adopting these principles, you can ensure that your brand leaders will be capable of defining accountabilities and rigorously holding direct reports to those commitments so that brand ambassadors can succeed and produce the results they need.

Grow Leadership by mirroring the best and experiencing the worst

Before I started my journey as an entrepreneur in business consulting, I’ve worked for several institutional corporations, midsized companies, and start-ups. At the time, I had the privilege of learning and gaining knowledge from highly effective leaders, but I also experienced peer-to-peer management through poor Leadership.

When I finally started my consultancy business, I decided to focus on helping small businesses and start-ups transition from transaction based to customer oriented businesses. One of the difficulties of servicing small businesses is that the leader of the company is often focused on short term returns, and often lacks the long-term vision to invest in his staff.

In both cases, these experiences shaped my understanding of a leader’s impact on the organization and made me realize that leaders have two main categories.

Two categories of Brand Leaders

1. Personal Brand leaders: Reflect on their image to express personal greatness and consider that all achievements are self-accomplished. (It’s all about the Benjamins!)
2. Brand leaders: Overcome chasing the ambition for individual fame and instead focus on achieving a greater goal by empowering excellent people. (empowering brand ambassadors is the road to maximum success!)

The most successful leaders know that their brand success hinges more on their team’s performance than their own. Hence, they will act with great appreciation and acknowledgment towards their team. The list below displays some of the traits you will find a successful leader reflects upon during his or her day-to-day operations.

• Channel business into the company;
• Empower and invest in team members potential;
• Create a culture where inclusion and diversity lead to equity;
• Look in the mirror and take responsibility for failure; never mirror external blame!;
• Lead by example;
• Setting ego aside and expressing mutual strengths and openness;

It’s all about composing and enabling the team

Above everything else, start with getting the right people on board and invest in developing resilient Leadership, excellent ambassadorship, and building on people evolution to secure the sustainable brand promise.

Based on professional experience, I’ve encountered leaders who saw their most vital employees as a threat to their Leadership. This ego twirl is a destructive trait for a leader, but not every leader can disconnect ego from team results.

Sacrifices are inevitable

Selecting the right people does not necessarily mean that only genius workers can be considered your winning team. It would help if you never built on genius workers to represent the vital capabilities of your company. Considering that genius workers are often primarily driven by self-fulfillment goals, pressure workers to do what they’re told, itimediate co-workers with their expertise, and blame external circumstances if their personal goals aren’t accomplished.

“In today’s world, everyone will strive for fifteen minutes of fame and spend six months as a leader.”

— Peter Block, author, Flawless

Moreover, mind that If the genius worker leaves, your operations can be lost in mimicking and cloning these bad traits and minimize your company’s future potential.

On the other hand, great leaders envision that organizational success is achieved through workforce empowerment, self-discipline, team synergy, and developing the right people.

Go for the leaders committed to enable growth through a group- contribution, inclusion culture, performance capabilities, and fit-for-purpose effort.

Create an environment where the next leaders can thrive

Leaders are no longer individual contributors and will no longer be measured that way. They are held accountable for others’ actions, results, and their own and must take accountability for team outcomes — the good and bad.

- Express personal humility and will to make good on it

- Setup and invest in successors to make even greater leaders

- Consider that success is achieved through luck, not by personal greatness

- Driven to produce sustained results, no matter how big or difficult the decision

- Get the right people in and get the wrong people “off the bus.”

- Develop the best management team and take the risk that they will be recruited to lead strong companies

“Great vision without great people Is irrelevant.”

Personality traits of a great Leaders

1. Always act with integrity, and accept your accountability.

2. The need to make a difference in the world.

3. Pushing yourself to do better.

4. Balancing everyday life pressure.

5. Building on positive self-esteem.

6. Be motivated by an inner drive to achieve success.

7. Resilience in dealing with problems and issues.

Three simple truths

- Begin with who instead of with what.

- Be flexible to change course If the path is shady.

- Empower the team, and success will be inevitable.

What is your relationship to the leadership window and the mirror?

Our Leadership reflection program challenges upcoming entrepreneurs to develop their strengths, identify weaknesses and break downward patterns to grow as a Great Leader. The emphasis is on leadership growth: 24 steps in Leadership development getting out of the weeds to work on your vision and develop a will that will help manifest that vision.