The Importance of Building Your and Your Team's BRAND

Simply defined, a BRAND is what thought or sentiment comes to mind when a specific thing or person is mentioned.?

Part I- Individual brand

Brands apply to us as individuals as well, not just to celebrities.??Individually, we influence the development of our brand through 3 main areas:?What people see, what people hear, and what actions people witness.

1)???Visual Appearance

The first impression we have of a person is formed within 7 seconds. Your visual appearance is establishing your brand even before you say or do anything.?Everything from your clothing style, body care, grooming, and choice of accessories. Understanding how your visual appearance reflects on you, and what signals it is sending is key to establishing a healthy brand.

2)???Communication

Both verbal and non-verbal communication matter.?The words you choose, the tone, pitch, volume all tell a story about you.?Choosing to use slang or curse words has an impact (usually negative for the latter.) Using imagery (photos) as well as specific acronyms, shortcuts, signals in texting for instance are all part of a communication pattern that builds (or degrades) your brand.?Body language accounts for more than 50% of all communication.?Things such as your posture, subtle facial signals, eye contact, hand and foot movement have significant impact on your brand.

3)???Actions

It’s what you do and what you don’t do.?Arriving on time, keeping commitments, delivering on promises, taking risk, standing up for what’s right.?All of these are examples of actions that affect your brand.?Holding the door, allowing others to finish their thoughts before sharing yours, asking questions to clarify instead of assuming, sending thank you emails, calling colleagues about concerns instead of stonewalling…all are things that shape that brand.?

Part 2- Team Brand (at work)

The same concept of an authentic brand that you would want to build for yourself extends to your team.?And it shows up in similar ways.?What your team consistently looks like, sounds like, and does has everything to do with their brand, and ultimately the team’s ability to be successful.

1)???Visual Appearance

The way a team assembles and works in a meeting setting, becomes part of the team’s brand.?The way they dress for work, on/off camera, in/out of meetings affects how seriously they will be taken and the trust they’ll be given.?If your team is on deck to present a serious project to leadership, you would want to ensure they are dressed professionally, displaying confident body language, making good eye contact.?An under-dressed engineer, unshaven and nervously tapping his foot or fidgeting with his pencil will likely not reflect well on the team and the individual.

2)???Communication

Solid team communication is heavily impacting of a team’s brand.?A team that uses positive, supporting language, tone, pitch, volume and pauses when conversing is more effective than loud, disruptive, interrupting teams.?Being aware of basic body language signals such as arm crossing, glaring eye contact, foot and finger tapping can help a team interpret the effectiveness of communication in team settings.?Helping your team develop open, constructive, and focused communication styles will also help them be more efficient in their activities, as communication is the way we bridge thought and action.?

3)???Actions

When developing your team’s brand, it’s imperative that you’re aware of and careful with action.?A team that perpetually uses email exchange during situations of conflict rather than direct in person contact may find this prolongs confusion and develops animosity between team members.?Being decisive with planning and follow through on commitments can range anywhere from sharing a list of agreed to tasks in post-meeting minutes, to delivering on a report or development effort that was requested within a set time.?How you act, whether done with consistency or not, impacts your team’s brand.?A team that has a habit of recognizing the contribution of others and sending thank you notes and buying team members lunch builds a brand that’s supportive of celebrating success.?

Brand and Culture

5 years ago I held an exercise with my team to determine what our teams’ brand was.?I asked members of the collective team (over 50 people at the time) what words they think people use when they talk about our department.?Their responses included: passionate, focused, empathetic, supportive, driven, and professional.?From that, we derived what we later coined as the ITSM Core Values: Passion, Purpose, Patience, Positive, and Pride.?That exercise was monumental to developing our team brand.?Getting consensus from the team on how they thought and wanted to be seen helped us establish our inclusive brand.?Still now, the team works hard to embody the brand in everything they do, reminding each other often of what the team stands for.

Finally, the concept of brand awareness and the reality of brand power is the reason everyone should focus on learning of and developing their own and their team’s brand.?Your/your team’s brand enables doors to open, just as fast as it enables doors to close.?It’s a reputation, an impression, a feeling that we as humans have about each other, and it either works to help us or to hurt us.?Take the time to learn what your brand is from your inner circle.?And once you know what your own brand is, start focusing on your team’s brand next.?The more you know what this is, the more you can learn how to improve it, and the more it works for you.