Business Today Needs TLC

Today business is in quite a state-of-flux.

Managing functionality is a full-time job.

Finding the right mix of talent, leadership, & culture, or T.L.C. is quite an ask.

The legacy business models are simply not able to create sustainable revenue or reputational growth simply because trust has gone to an all-time low. Coupled with the rise of social media and the speed of technology adoption by people the reliance on word-of-mouth recommendation has increased.

People, not processes nor technology, are the difference between success and failure for any business.

A key ingredient in achieving success is the ability to map strategy into a robust operating plan, with clearly identified milestones, deliverables and responsibilities, in order to achieve the targets. For any business this requires high involvement of their people, or the employees.

It's this engagement and involvement that creates the overall brand experience.

Many a business leaves the brand management aspect only to the marketing department. Yet every function, of a business, is impacting on the brand experience in its interaction with stakeholders.

Employees have an immense value to a brand through the experience they create in its delivery.

All businesses look at employees as cost. If one were to flip this and look at it as an investment, then the expected ROIs can be recovered over a planned time period. Similar to what is done with an investment in an asset. What this change in perspective does,, from a financial perspective, is that it then brings on board all other cost inputs that employees need to create either revenue or reputational growth for a brand.

Which then makes employee performance measurement simple and easy by virtue of having two key corporate KPIs-- revenue growth percentage to achieve and reputational growth metric to achieve.

Going forward with this view makes employee advocacy have a very significant role in creating the right experience for customers and business partners. It’s this advocacy and the brand experience that translates into sustainable profits.

How do we bring this to play?

Let’s look outside the business world for a simple learning. Let’s view how we manage our families and the lesson we get from that.

In our families we invest, as best as we can, all our resources in our children’s’ education and we provide tender loving care in nurturing them to be good individuals for, at least, 18 years.

After 18 years these individuals’ step-forth into higher education and into society as the next generation. They contain the values, personality and cultural backgrounds of all that has been experienced, taught and learnt through their respective family units.

Two key learnings come through:

1.     Real returns occur over a long-term period

2.    Monetary investments also deliver back qualitative value

Given the ever-changing environment in which businesses today have to operate undertaking a similar approach of nurturing employees and creating value over the long-term creates a brand experience which fuels the cash-flow and builds operational sustainability.

Doing that requires TLC!

1. Talent
2. Leadership
3. Culture

We often overlook what kind and type of talent the business requires for the future. This is due to the dependency we have on the legacy system of recruiting and managing talent, that comes from still hanging on to a product-centric point of view.

It’s employees that create the competitive edge. Identifying required talent, on-boarding them and investing in them to grow their careers, whilst growing the brand, creates an employee experience that makes for strong engagement.

For any business it’s the talent development process that impacts on leadership & Culture. 

Leaders of organisations, if their intent is in the sustainability of the institution, must selflessly put the development of their people first and foremost.

Leaders create leaders not followers.

An employee first approach is always followed by having a keen focus on key external stakeholders such as business partners, vendors, and customers in terms of strategic decision making.

Leadership of an organization must have clarity of purpose and should communicate clearly how the dots join up and provide clear direction to their teams.

They should display empathy and practice empowerment to give due recognition, motivate and engage and drive the teams successfully.

By having a people focus, what the three essentials—talent, leadership & culture—does is to make the leaders evaluate themselves, first, as leaders from the perspective of emotional intelligence and communication skills.

This evaluation is critical is because the displayed leadership style often leads to a non-articulated creation of the organisational culture.

As humans we are wired for social acceptance and decades of environmental practice in the ‘command & control’ style of management has left us with the behaviour of adopting what we see our leaders do.

Where culture is concerned there is a lot going on with regards to employee engagement. Employees are asking to be heard, to be given a chance to act on their business suggestion to add value to the organization so that they feel they are of value.

Glossing over or simply not viewing the linkages between these three key elements can be a very expensive mistake for any business as many a example has shown us.

Focusing on employees and their development leads to ensuring having the right competencies & commitment in place to generate healthy performance for the organisation. Such a focus comes about when good, authentic leadership is in place.

Having the right people in the right roles with a leadership that cares creates a culture of empowerment, accountability and most importantly innovation, where employees feel they can contribute new ideas and not be afraid of failure. This creates advocacy which results in generating trust or social capital.

Social capital is what any business should strive to build as it is the reputational asset that will ensure financial sustainability and business continuity way into the future.

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Joy Abdullah? is a strategic marketing leader who creates marketing solutions, for businesses, by facilitating key conversations within employees and customers, that lead to developing a unique brand experience.

Focusing on Leadership & Mindfulness, Communication and Process-Thinking, as key skills that go into delivering an experience, he guides CEOs and business owners in re-discovering the value their employees bring.

His expertise is in helping businesses harness the value of their employees in creating a unique brand experience that delivers sustainable profits.

His purpose is to humanize the workplace by guiding employees in creating a unique brand experience for themselves and customers and getting business heads to engage, appreciate and recognize the value employees bring in creating this strategic advantage.

Having worked across India and ASEAN he has Asia-centric international experience in business strategy, marketing, and business operations.

He guides, consults, writes and speaks on the importance of brand experience in business strategy from an Asian market perspective.

Click here for his articles.  

?Connect with Joy on:

1. Linked In 

2. Twitter @JoyAbdullah

3. Instagram: joyabdullahTM

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