Leadership 'off-brand' behaviours

Chapter 4, Part 1 - Corporate Brand Personality

There is no doubt that your leadership team are responsible for and represent one of the most powerful influences on your corporate brand and reputation today, over and above all other aspects. Their style and behaviours are a catalyst for the employee brand you create due to the standards they set, the employer brand that is projected, and the culture ultimately maintained. This is a responsibility that merits a high and constant level of assessment, measurement and adjustment.? We are in a business world where this simply has to be at the very core of your brand strategy if you are to compete effectively and achieve the goals you set yourselves as an organization.

We are going to focus in this Chapter (2 more parts to come) on bringing leadership brand to the fore of your thinking and covering ways in which to address and adjust by looking at:

·??????????????? how the culture is influenced by leadership style and behaviours;

·??????????????? top down or bottom up cultures;

·??????????????? CEO Brand;

·??????????????? the narcissistic leader;

·??????????????? humour in the office;

·??????????????? the effect line managers have on your brand;

·??????????????? leadership brand and executive presence.

What is authentic leadership?

What your employees look for in your leaders today is a high degree of honesty, integrity and fairness and a feeling that they are genuine and not trying to be somebody they are not. Your customers are also looking for something similar. Authentic leadership means being aware of your strengths, limitations and emotions and behaving in a way that demonstrates this self-awareness. When leaders appear to put on ‘an act’ it will dramatically dilute the levels of trust their teams have in them and therefore the effectiveness of taking people with them.? The follow-on effects of this are obvious.?

?In his book, Authentic Leadership (2004) Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic looked at what makes successful leaders today successful. The thread that runs through the book is that they are firstly crystal clear about their values and what they stand for. Secondly they are transparent with those values so others around them know what they stand for. They are therefore more effective at taking people with them and exerting influence. Thirdly, they don’t compromise on those strong values. That is the toughest piece of course. Sometimes we are challenged on our values and have to do things that aren’t necessarily in total alignment with our value set. However we can probably live with it once or twice. If compromise is required regularly in our roles, then it’s time to consider moving on.

You cannot lead productively today if your teams don’t know who you are. They need a solid direction from a leader who is self-aware, genuine, is clear about what he stands for and is prepared to stand up for this. A level of vulnerability is also essential and this can only be achieved if you as a leader are totally comfortable with yourself.

?A few years ago I spoke in Poland at a conference for a large financial organization, focused on building confidence amongst their top talent and female leadership in particular. In preparation for this event I was part of a planning forum to discuss the objectives and other elements of the conference. One session was to be a panel of senior level leaders who were to share how they had got to where they are now and the mistakes and challenges along the way.? The two questions they struggled with most were; ‘Can you tell us about a time when you misjudged a situation and made a wrong decision, and how you recovered?’; and ‘Tell us about a situation where you felt out of your comfort zone in terms of your abilities to achieve success.’? Of course both of these were asking them to expose their vulnerability with the result of showing the audience that it’s ok to make mistakes because you can still get to where you want to be, and that as a senior leader you do not always get it right first time.?

They truly struggled with this 'exposure' as they saw it, and it was decided not to include those questions, therefore never got to the true person behind the leader. ?Most importantly the objective of the panel session, which was to help build confidence in their future leaders by showing that being out of your comfort zone is necessary to grow, was never met.

You cannot be authentic by trying to imitate someone else. You can learn from others’ experiences, but you can’t be successful if you are trying to be just like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else. Former Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer, who worked as Jack Welch’s assistant in the 1980s, saw the downside of this. ‘Everyone wanted to be like Jack,’ he said. ‘Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else’ (George, Sims, McLean and Mayer, 2007).

So, the first step in great leadership is to establish who you are as a leader and how you want to be perceived, clarifying your own brand and value set. We will cover more on this in Chapter 5 – Getting back on-message.

THE CEO AND CORPORATE REPUTATION

According to research by Burson-Marsteller in the United States, a CEO’s reputation accounts for 50 per cent of a company’s reputation (Jensen, 2014). In Germany, it counts for 63 per cent.? Just like a product or service brand, a CEO’s brand is a collection of powerful and clear ideas that people have of that brand. To be successful, the CEO needs to project a brand that is consistent with and in alignment with his/her value set. They need to be known for what they are great at and the uniqueness of their brand. It is this that will make them stand out and be successful, influential, and memorable – by being unique and different.

The CEO brand is not just an external face of the company – people see the CEO as a representative of the corporate brand on the outside but the face of the culture on the inside, thereby also impacting on the employer brand and the reputation of the company. The CEO brand can also very effectively inspire employees to do the best job they can for the company.

CEO Brand Impact

Whatever the personality of the CEO, we can be sure that it will have some level of impact on the brand perceptions of the company. This can be a good thing of course as what the CEO says and does can have as much impact on sales as TV advertising or marketing campaigns. Interestingly, according to The CEO Reputation Premium and Weber Shandwick’s research, 50 per cent of executives say that their CEO’s reputation impacted their decision to accept the position, and 58 per cent say it keeps them at their company (Weber Shandwick, 2015).

However this can go badly wrong too – remember Tony Hayward, former CEO of BP after the catastrophic oil spill and those famous words? ‘I want my life back’. He also previously stated that the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico is ‘relatively tiny’ compared with the ‘very big ocean’.? The share price of BP slumped after this, as did his and BP’s reputation. Mr Hayward’s response also tainted the brand image of the whole industry such that huge efforts had to be applied to regaining their collective reputation.?

On the other hand, Richard Branson rarely makes public appearances as he knows he’s not great at it and not the best person to do it. However, after the Virgin Rail crash in 2007 he decided to speak to the press. Although the interview was hesitant and not slick, he came across as authentic and empathic saying the right things at the right times without blame. This was yet another reinforcement of the strong Virgin brand via its chairman - worth more than any advertisement. Consumers can relate to him as the personification of the brand.

In 2015, the CEO of Merlin Entertainments, Nick Varney was interviewed after a serious accident involving one of their UK theme park rollercoasters. In one particular instance, Mr Varney, was interviewed by a TV presenter, after which a petition was signed demanding her be fired due to the harshness and persistency of her questioning. Mr Varney remained calm and composed yet empathic and professional. He gained much praise for his handling of this interview and as a result his brand has grown positively. He has become known for his professionalism and grace, and despite this being a tragic accident, the company has retained its dignity and brand, and its loss of share price is likely to recover fairly quickly. Mr Varney remained as CEO until his retirement in 2022 and was subsequently knighted for his services to the visitor economy.

?There is often a misconception that brand management is in the hands of a company’s communications and marketing team, particularly when a crisis happens. However it’s the CEO who holds the future of a brand in their hands. It is how they initially handle the situation personally in the face of the media that will recover the brand or not. It is also their opportunity to add a personality and human element to the brand that is much needed at these times.

How a leader responds to the challenge of taking responsibility can influence public feelings to the whole event. CEOs handling bad news ineffectively can have a detrimental impact on share price and reputation, and add to the list of damage already in place for a business. This happened when Thomas Cook CEO Peter Fankhauser took too long to respond personally to the tragic incident of the family of two children who were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning in a Corfu hotel in 2006. He eventually apologised ‘for all they have been through’. ?It was not the heartfelt response to such a tragedy that the public and family involved quite reasonably had expected.

Whether we like it or not, the CEO brand projects what the company stands for, in the eyes of customers and shareholders. Business leaders are emerging from a period in which traditionally CEOs kept a low profile, except in times of crisis.? This is rapidly changing and we’re in an era now of social media and the ability for consumers to quickly spread a dilution of the corporate brand with comments about its leaders. We have also come to expect a rapid and human response.

In addition, employees can be inspired to do the best job by the brand the CEO projects. Feeling proud of the company you work for is a key element of employee engagement and feeling pride in senior management is a part of this.? The CEO’s brand adds the much-needed personality to the brand, in a way that no other means of marketing can do to the same extent. However, this brand needs to be defined, nurtured and exposed wherever possible and appropriate, and the brand story told - we will cover more on this in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.?

Of course this goes further; it is the brand of the whole executive team that shapes the brand of the organization.? This needs to be congruent with the values of the company and each personal brand within the team needs to dovetail with and be in synergy with the others. You also need to be cognizant of the need for the leadership team to complement the brand of the CEO, rather than contradict it. This is not to suggest, that all personal brands of the leadership team need to be the same or even similar, they just need to be in alignment and fully understood by each other, and consistently projected. In my experience, leadership team brands are often unclear, incoherent and nowhere near enough time and focus is applied to this aspect of corporate branding. Now is the time to address that.

If your employees are proud of, aspire to be like and talk positively about the leadership team, this creates a powerful employee engagement element that is seen as critical in some organizations. Employees want to be proud of the leaders in their company when they see them interviewed on TV or quoted in a press article.

When it comes to training programs to embed the values of the new brand throughout the organization, the leadership and executive teams can at times be deemed internally as exempt from needing this. Or perhaps they themselves see it as ‘going through the motions’ only, as they have of course been immersed in the re-brand process and there is the assumption that this training is ‘just for their teams’. This is potentially a dangerous trap to fall into.

?‘The Executive Team are not exempt from brand behaviour training’.

BOTTOM UP OR TOP DOWN CULTURE

A culture cannot be created purely via a top down approach. It has to be encouraged to emerge naturally from within an organization, and then reflected, supported and reinforced by the leadership team and senior management.? Yes standards need to be set and inspiration provided from the leadership, however it will always be at the heart of the workforce that the culture is created and ultimately adjusted where necessary.

We could say that the culture of an organization is built from the bottom and shaped from the top. Or on occasions, tainted and diluted at and from the top. I have experienced many situations where a company is re-branding and wanting to embed the values and brand messages throughout the organization, but where I’m told from several angles that the leadership teams need to work on this too.? It seems that at times, senior leaders are either lacking in self-awareness or deem themselves exempt from needing to modify behaviours in the way they expect their staff to. ?Executives are no different from everybody else – nobody admits to bad behaviours and everybody thinks they are better than the average. Similar to how most people think they are better than the average driver! ?So a good starting point is to acknowledge the fact that you may not be getting it right yourself all of the time and raise your level of self-awareness. Then you need to demonstrate that you are willing to admit that you can learn and improve by attending programmes yourself.

Feeling slightly uncomfortable? Could this be you? ?

Old style ‘command and control’ leadership has of course no place in today’s corporate world. In any event, it was never effective in creating an environment or culture that was healthy for any company to maximise people effectiveness.? It stifled creativity and innovation, and restricted individuals in being authentic in their behaviours. This was very much a top-down culture and today we need to recognise that the corporate behaviours and culture that exist in an organization are created from inside at the heart of the workforce. We need therefore to turn things on their head and look at them, not so much from a bottom-up approach, but from an organic growth from within the workforce that is diffused throughout, all the way to the top, and down again. Of course the executive team and all senior leadership need to embrace and reflect the desired behaviours in all that they do internally and externally. Without this reinforcement, leakage will occur with the result of confused and unclear employer brand messages, and ultimately the desired corporate brand message is not fortified.

THE INFLUENCE AND IMPACT OF THE LEADERSHIP TEAM

Your company, no doubt, has management development, talent and leadership training programmes and initiatives in place, or at least you are starting to create a framework for such a programme. In fact, with those of our clients who have a limited training budget, training is almost always concentrated at senior leadership or talent communities. You may also have induction programmes for new starters, and training courses for those aspiring to management positions of course. These may all have varying degrees of content and focus on your corporate values, what the organization stands for and what is expected of individuals. So let me ask you, what do you have in place for your executive leadership team that ensures that every one of you consistently reflects and reinforces the corporate values via your internal and external behaviours??? What measures are in place for feedback on how you come across and what your personal brands stand for??? My guess is that you as a leadership team, neglect this area for yourselves and it’s also an unwritten assumption that ‘of course the leadership team represent the corporate values at all times - why wouldn’t we’? In addition, how much do you encourage and allow, I mean really invite and allow, feedback for yourselves, and then act on it?

When I asked Sarah Dickins , former executive people director at Friends Provident about how they ensure that the leadership are also ‘on-message’ with the brand messaging in their behaviours, she told me that this last year alone they have spent ￡1 million on leadership training and this includes their Board and their direct reports, amounting to 1200 employees.? ‘Every member of the Executive Team has gone through this training. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and each other by putting ourselves in challenging situations, and making ourselves a little vulnerable’, she says. ?

Firstly, there is little time for you as a team to focus on this and secondly it’s often considered a no-go area for heads of learning & development to question the behaviours of the leadership team, let alone provide a coaching or training programme that addresses this subject for them too. I am frequently told when developing personal branding programmes with L & D Managers, ‘we’re not sure yet how we’re going to get the leadership team to take part in this too. They think the rest of the company need it but see themselves as exempt.’.?? Of course, my reaction is, if you are really serious about getting the results and total buy-in to this programme then you simply have to have the leadership team take part.? They not only need to be seen to embrace the concepts and live them, but quite possibly also really need the training and coaching themselves too.?? Is this the case in your organization?

NON-VERBAL LEADERSHIP INFLUENCE

It is often the non-verbal behaviours that have the greatest amount of influence on others. Generally these are sub-conscious and present a lack of self-awareness.

A female board director I worked with, from a large global organization, was ‘sent’ to me for coaching specifically because the way she presented herself was not congruent with the expectations of the company at that level. She was well-liked and professionally brilliant, however when she turned up at company events her interpretation of ‘appropriate dress’ was, I was told, not at the level expected by a board director. ‘Leggings that were so old you could see through them, blouses that would often have a mark or stain on, and hair that needed a good brush through’, were the words used. This was truly getting in the way of her aspiration of becoming a non-executive director and in gaining extra exposure as an ambassador of the company.? It was a very sensitive area to address as you can imagine. However, the point being, are you seeking the coaching and advice needed in this type of blind-spot’ area?

So having got this sensitive area on the table, let’s look at what you could be doing to establish what’s needed and then assess what has to be implemented.? It makes sense that if you as a leadership team consistently represent and reinforce the corporate values authentically in the way you behave, then this will filter down to your management teams and thereafter their people, reinforcing the whole desired culture. As mentioned, the leadership team do not shape the culture, but they do infect and colour it with influential behaviours, creating a diluted and weakened culture, or if we get it right, a heightened and strengthened cultural environment that creates and encourages their teams to operate consistently and effectively in all that they do and to be the best they can be. The Water Tank Theory illustrates this;

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If you put a coloured dye in at the top of the tank of water, it will slowly but convincingly and permanently colour, taint or dilute the rest of the water in the tank. You simply cannot afford for this effect to happen with negative behaviours. In a positive sense, it will influence culture and behaviours throughout the organization, keeping them intact in a way that you need in order to stay competitive, stand out and remain relevant in your sector.? You cannot hope to create the ultimate sustainable culture without paying close attention to the way you behave and therefore influence as a leadership team.

It is essential to role-model the behaviours you want to see in others throughout the company. For example:

·?????? You want your teams to take control of their careers, personal development and attend training sessions? Then attend them yourself and be fully present (no sloping off early to go to urgent meetings or answer emails).?

·?????? You want people to turn up to meetings on time and fully prepared, then do this yourself too with no exceptions.

·?????? You advocate that you want people to get a better life balance? Then demonstrate this yourself by not being in the office all hours or answering emails in the middle of the night

As soon as you stop exhibiting the behaviours you want to see in them, you give others the perfect excuse to stop too.?

?‘Consistently emulate the behaviours you want to see in others’

?As Fred Astaire said, ‘The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.’ The same applies to leadership.

I was asked by the HR director, to work with a CEO of a large finance organization in the United Kingdom, who needed help with the way he came across to employees and the media. I was told in the brief that people didn’t really ‘know’ him; he never made time for anybody or spoke to employees in the office, and sat in his plush, glass office on the top floor not really interacting at all unless he had to.

When I started working with him, I first of all discovered he was shy and introverted and also that he disliked interacting with people for the sake of it with no real agenda. I gathered some feedback from people from various levels in the company and yes sure enough, they were feeling like they were invisible to him and that he had no interest in them as individuals. This was causing them to feel irrelevant and under-valued.?

Of course we had to work on this as it was negatively affecting his brand internally and externally, and ultimately the brand of the company and how his employees felt about working there. It had a danger of leaking out too with potential negative effect on the business and employer brand.

Starting with his authentic brand, and how he wanted to be perceived, we worked on many areas of the way he communicated and represented his brand. Among other things, I suggested that instead of calling down from his office to the person he needed information from, that he actually walk down there to see the person, have a 2-minute chat and get or request the information he needed.? He liked this idea, as he said it has a purpose and it’s not just small talk and wandering through the office for effect.

A few weeks later, however, I discovered that he had been going down to see the relevant person, but walking past many others to get there without even making eye contact. So it was back to the drawing board to address this too. We got there in the end and eventually people started to talk about him in a more positive way, without realizing that he had specifically worked on this aspect of his brand behaviours.

This alone, was a huge lesson for my client. He realized that his brand was on show all the time and that people judged him, and to a degree the company, on how he projected himself.

At the end of the coaching program, he stated that the coaching had enabled him to put himself on a conscious track, and every decision he now makes and every communication he has is more in alignment with his brand and values and therefore those of the organization. In other words, he became more self-aware and more consistent in the projection of his personal brand because he’d found a way to be authentic and true to himself, as well as being more effective in the eyes of his team and wider employee base.

He said afterwards that a re-framing took place from which all his actions and behaviours could flow. As CEO he recognized that he demonstrated leadership behaviours in the choices he made, subconsciously, every minute of every day, whether they related to the way he presented himself, dealt with people or interacted with clients or employees.

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