Your Team is Your Brand

"Not finance.

Not strategy.

Not technology.

It's teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare."

Patrick Lencioni

Your Team is Your Organisation Brand

Sunder Madakshira (CEO, Rezolve Ltd) shares an analogy, "If the organisation brand is a house, then each personal brand is a brick. After all a house is as strong as its bricks are". He shares that the true worth of a corporation is the synergy of expertise of the talent pool it owns. While each employee makes a contribution in building the organisation, some employees may be "first among equals" or primus inter pares.

Let us take some examples where team branding can be very critical (or useful) in building the organisation brand.

a) Co Founders or Founding Team- Team of co-founders, their areas of expertise, how they complement each other, what brought them together and the story which they are co-creating together are some of the aspects which can be highlighted in the team story. Merely creating profiles of the co-founders is not sufficient, but how their stories intersect each other is a critical issue. Y Combinator has an interesting article on how to find the right co-founder, and has also created a collection of video stories of 60 Startup Founders on how they met their respective co-founder.

Besides the Co-Founders, the other team members who were part of the organisation, right from the beginning can be highlighted through the Founding Team.

b) Board of Directors (BoD)- The BoD story can highlight the Members of the board (executive as well as non-executive /independent) and how each of them contributes to the team and makes it stronger. The Board not only represents the shareholders but also needs to balance the interests of other stakeholders such as local community, government and public. For example Mondelez International highlights its pride in its Board of Directors.

The CSR / ESG stories and how the board is contributing to these initiatives are important aspects, that need to be highlighted in a narrative format. Even organisations have been talking of Purpose post covid.

c) Advisory Board Team- People on the advisory board of the organisation, also bring long experience, unique skills and mentoring expertise together. The Advisory Board story can highlight how the various advisors together complete the jigsaw and add value.

For a startup, the advisory board story may be even more critical and the narrative can highlight how advisory board compliments the skills that the Co-Founders and board directors do not have. Educational institutions such as MIT Sloan often highlight their advisory board.

d) CXO Team- Team of top management or C Level Executives, and their unique contributions to the organisation story can be used for team branding. CXOs are usually heads of functions such as marketing, operations, finance, HR, IT etc, and as functional heads they become the representative of each function in the organisation and of course the function's excellence.

Highlighting excellence in each function and how each function contributes to the overall excellence of the organisation is critical to the story.

e) Consultants / Doctors/ Domain experts Team- In many organisations like management consulting companies, hospitals, architectural firms etc, which are primarily based on knowledge, the expertise of each domain expert can be highlighted. Here is an example of SpencerStuart from consulting domain.

The shift to knowledge economy makes team branding even more critical in such organisations.

f) News Anchors Team- News anchors and senior reporters often become the face/ faces of the organisation and pull the audiences to the media platform.

To me Aaj Tak means its prominent anchors / faces such as Anjana Om Kashyap, Sudhir Chaudhary, Chitra Tripathi, Shweta Singh and Sayeed Ansari (in fact, the last two have been my ex-colleagues).

g) Professors Team - Teachers or Professors are the building blocks of an educational institution though the administrative & support staff are also crucial for the success of an educational institution.

Masters Union School of Business is a classic example of team branding of its masters/ professors, and it highlights its Masters in its marketing communications. In fact, the name "Masters Union" means the union of masters or domain experts.

h) Functional Team- In organisations where the primary strength is an individual function, (for example R&D in a pharmaceutical company), the R & D or respective team and its story can be highlighted for team branding purposes.

If you need help on your own path, please consider?our book , or?a 1:1 coaching session.

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Brief Profile

Dr Amit Nagpal is a business storyteller with special interest in brand storytelling, data storytelling and social media marketing through storytelling. He has more than two and a half decades of experience as teacher and practitioner of brand management and media marketing including television, print and digital/new media. He has co-authored the Amazon bestseller, “Personal Branding, Storytelling and Beyond”. He believes “Digital is Magical” and stories are the most powerful tool to build brands as well as bonds.?He's often sought after for his innovative techniques that blend traditional wisdom with modern research and trends in storytelling.

To know more visit?www.dramitnagpal.com .

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