CSCOs: Be the Brand

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By Wade McDaniel , Distinguished VP Advisor

The first thing that might be popping into your head is how I could represent my company or product more effectively. If so, you’re on the right track, but in this case, you are the brand.

We all have a personal brand. Some of us actively participate in the process, while others simply accept the brand bestowed on them.

You might also be thinking, what’s this got to do with supply chain?

We hear many opinions like this regarding personal branding in our chief supply chain officer community . From “This isn’t something I spend time on” to “Doesn’t every CSCO know this stuff?”

The Bottom Line

CSCOs must influence a broad audience to achieve organizational and personal goals, and a well-designed personal brand will help improve results. However, many overestimate their understanding of how they are perceived.

A personal brand is the context people use when making judgments about your messages, actions and requests. It is how they hear you and how you encourage them to act. Executive leaders build a personal brand through accumulated interactions with their teams and others.

Your personal brand is the intersection of your personal self-perception and how others perceive you.

We should adopt a brand-conscious view of our actions and communications. We should assess how we think about ourselves and how we believe others perceive us. This is the start of building and changing our brand.?

The Continous Journey

Crafting a presence and brand that builds influence can be as simple as creating two shortlists and keeping them in mind as you go about your day. This provides the goals and guardrails you need to guide your decisions and ensure that your presence not only reflects, but amplifies, your personal brand. Those lists are the words or phrases that define the brand you aspire to and the brand you want to avoid.

We tend to focus on our weaknesses rather than our strengths. But with a bit of effort and a tweak in mindset, we can judo-flip what we perceive as weaknesses into strengths.

Brands do not remain static over time or the same in a different context. Just think of your favorite consumer product and how it has changed over the years and been adapted to where it’s sold.

Your brand needs to be continually updated and adapted, so use this checklist?(subscription required) to monitor and refine your brand:

Have a focus and values — Know what you stand for and what you want to be.

Be true to yourself — While it’s possible to play at being someone different, it is exhausting and eventually ineffective. Know who you are.

Let others tell your story — Your brand is the combination of how you see yourself and how others see you.

Be ready to learn and unlearn — Do this, particularly as you look to adapt your brand. Recognize that it’s easy to build a track record of success by tackling similar challenges, but your brand grows significantly based on how you face and recover from adversity.

Be a positive force — Use your brand to advance your team, peers and organization. This positions your brand in a positive light and builds influence, which draws people to work with you — the ultimate measure of an effective executive.

Taking Your Brand On The Road

Building a brand is not all about the “personal.” It’s about how effective we can be as leaders and deliver value to the enterprise. To do that, we need to build high-performing teams. And research shows that engaged teams perform at higher levels.

We must remember that our teams are comprised of individuals who are also developing their brands and influencing skills. Their development needs to be supported sustainably, not just through one-time training.

I think we all might agree that a group of high-performing individuals might not produce the best-performing team. We can view high-performing teams in this way (subscription required).

CSCOs should prioritize and embed these characteristics into their teams:

• Create a?shared culture?by identifying the lacking, and existing, core behaviors people should exhibit and develop them.
• Engender?trust?by creating a climate of emotional openness where vulnerabilities?are put out in the open.
• Champion a constant flow of?shared meaningful and?impactful work.
• Apply?decentralized decision-making?by granting?team members?greater autonomy.
• Nurture?relatedness. It's about nurturing an environment in which jumping to help a colleague and vice versa becomes a habit.
• Foster?seamless communication?by removing the “authority” and the “relevance” filters.
• Instill a?future-focused mindset?by identifying and preparing for probable upcoming challenges.

Many supply chain leaders cite influencing other executives as one of the more demanding and difficult parts of their jobs. By developing an intentional brand, your presence is known by others, which can help smooth communication, gain quicker agreement and be more effective. This all leads to getting things done.

CSCOs should continue this positive cycle by developing high-performing teams that exhibit the same branding and presence. By continually investing and adapting to this mindset, leaders will achieve what’s needed and expected of them.

More Supply Chain Resources

• Download the Supply Chain Transformation Narrative Guide for CSCOs
• Download the Leadership Transition Toolkit for New Supply Chain Leaders
• Watch the webinar : Impactful Storytelling for Supply Chain: Influence the C-Suite
• Want to learn more ? Let's connect

This newsletter provides an opportunity for Gartner analysts to test ideas and move research forward. Some comments or opinions expressed hereunder are those of individual analysts and do not always represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management.