The Leadership Brand

The July/August edition of the Harvard Business Review features an article by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood entitled Building a Leadership Brand. Ulrich’s and Smallwood‘s underlying message is that companies must look to move from focusing on building the abilities of individual leaders to creating a general leadership capability, which they label a leadership brand.

Possessing a growth mindset, companies like General Electric, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson (and many others) emphasize developing leaders with a very explicit set of competencies that are focused on meeting the needs of customers. These companies have established a brand promise with consumers and focus their leadership development on building a leadership brand that encourages employees and managers alike to deliver on this promise.

The authors share that far too many organizations have focused their energy on individual leadership development that is not clearly linked to their brand promise. Typically, organizations have a very generic set of competencies; so generic that you often see the exact same set of traits represented in a pharmaceutical company as a financial services company. So what can you do?

The first step is to ensure that the organization possesses the fundamental leadership elements (which Ulrich and Smallwood term the Leadership Code):

Strategy: developing a point of view about the future and positioning the firm for continued success
Execution: building organizational systems that deliver results and make change happen
Talent management: motivating, engaging, and communicating with employees
Talent development: grooming employees for future leadership
Personal proficiency: acting with integrity, exercising social and emotional intelligence, making bold decisions, and engendering trust

Too many companies identify requirements that clearly fall into the personal proficiency component (demonstrates integrity, willingness to learn, and consistency) rather than a development model that encompasses the full range of the Leadership Code. Once an organization has successfully incorporated the Code into their organization, they can move on to designing their leadership brand.

Ulrich and Smallwood identify four principles that help companies to build the capability to develop leaders that embody the promises that your organization makes to your customers. They are:

Connect Executives’ Abilities to Your Desired Reputation

Decide what you want your firm to be known for, then link those brand attributes with specific leadership skills and behavior.
Assess Leaders Against Your Leadership Brand
To ensure leaders are living up to your leadership brand, regularly assess their actions and accomplishments from an external point of view. Invite key customers, investors, and community leaders to periodically evaluate your leaders through surveys, interviews, and focus groups.

Let Customers and Investors Teach

Incorporate external expectations into your leadership-development efforts by:
• Giving customers a voice in training-program design
• Making sure customer expectations inform every aspect of leadership courses
• Using customers and investors to observe training sessions and to offer feedback about the content’s relevancy or act as expert faculty for certain training programs
• Giving managers assignments that demand a customer “lens”

Track the Long-Term Success of Your Leadership Brand

A strong leadership brand translates into superior financial performance. Evaluate the success of your leadership brand by considering how much confidence investors have in your future earnings (as expressed by your company’s price/earnings ratio) and how much customers value your brand (as expressed by market share).

Why do it?

The strategy in creating a leadership brand is to clearly differentiate your organization from your competition. This will require commitment from all levels (the authors suggest that the CEO must function as the “brand manager” and be the catalyst in building programs that foster brand leadership). As leaders learn the Leadership Code and the crux of the leadership brand, they will also begin to participate in the enhancing the value of their organization.


A nice feature of the article is the inclusion of a Leadership Brand Assessment that will help you to determine where your organization scores in relation to leadership branding capability.

Mindset - The Psychology of Success

A colleague recently recommended Carol Dweck’s book Mindset as a fresh take on the psychology of success. I strongly recommend this book as a ‘must read’ for any of you that are actively involved in coaching or guiding performance (that probably covers the majority of reviewers). You can even do an assessment that allows you to test your own mindset

Dweck has spent decades researching achievement and success and is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck posits that there are two different kinds of mindset:

Fixed mindset
Growth mindset

People that have a fixed mindset believe their basic qualities (intelligence or talent) are fixed traits. You have them or you don’t. Their belief is that you have talent and this talent will create success. The most interesting belief held by those with a fixed mindset is that this success will come without any effort.

People that have a growth mindset believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedicated effort and hard work. They see possessing brains and talent as table stakes, rather than the ingredient that dictates success. The embrace life long learning and relish the opportunity to grow through challenging opportunities that stretch their ability.

Dweck dedicated a chapter to mindset and leadership as it relates to business. Dweck emphasizes that the key factor that led to implosions and misdeeds by corporations like Enron and WorldCom was their ‘talent mind-set’. Essentially, these companies suffered from an integrity gap as a result of an over emphasis on talent within their corporate culture. When a company places a very visible emphasis on talent, they are at risk of experiencing situations where employees may compromise ethics to maintain an appearance of dominant talent within the organization.

I found Dweck’s comparison and contrast of some very well known leaders very interesting. Dweck looked at a number of high profile CEO’s, comparing their mindsets. She profiled Albert Dunlap (known as ‘Chainsaw’ Al for his prolific slashing of staff during his assignments), Lee Iacocca, Kenneth Lay, Steve Case and Gerald Levin. The common denominator with this group was their emphasis on their own brilliance and talent. Their fixed mindsets resulted in underperforming organizations that suffered while these leaders attempted to build a legacy that would honour their achievements. These leaders were very ego based and far less concerned with the ongoing development of their people.

Dweck also profiled Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner and Anne Mulcahy. This group of CEO’s transformed their companies by chasing out the fixed mindset and introducing a culture of growth and development. Dweck feels that instead of using the company as a vehicle for their greatness, these leaders use it as an engine of growth – for themselves, the employees, and the company as a whole.

If you need more convincing then perhaps compare the results of the following companies:

Growth Mindset
General Electric (Welch)
IBM (Gerstner)
Xerox (Mulchay)

Fixed Mindset
Enron (Lay)
Chrysler (Iacocca)
AOL/Time Warner (Case and Levin)

Throughout the book Dweck offers directions and tips on growing your mindset. There are a number of great ideas that can be implemented by anyone to move from a focus on ego and control to growth and development.

Last One Out Turn Off The Lights....

As you enjoy your summer time activities with family and friends, achieving that precious balance between family and work, you have probably taken a moment or two to consider the vibrant economy that we are experiencing in Calgary. You do not have to look far to see the prosperity that abounds; new cars, brand new million dollar homes and record energy prices (and until very recently, a very robust stock market).

As you know, not all Calgarians have shared in this abundance and the increasing cost of living (think affordable housing and general inflation) is making it even more difficult for those have-nots in our city. Many of you may not know that thousands of Calgarians rely on the social network for their daily needs. The vast majority of programs that service this slice of society are run by non-profit agencies. There are literally hundreds of agencies and associations that toil day in and day out to bridge the gap for the unfortunate. They provide social, health, counselling, addiction and so many other essential services to a truly vulnerable segment of our city.

We take it for granted that these agencies will continue to reach out to these people and provide those services while we enjoy our lives to the fullest. These agencies are lead by very capable and courageous leaders that demonstrate an above average ability to manage with few resources while facing ever increasing challenges presented by complex social needs.

Now, put on your management or business hat and consider this for a moment: How concerned would you be if you learned that your organization was destined to lose a full 80% of your most senior leadership in the next three years. Would you remain as competitive and innovative as you are currently? Would you even survive? This is the challenge that faces the non-profit sector in our city. Centre Point indicates that fully 80 % of the Executive Directors leading non-profits will retire or leave their positions in the next three years. That is a truly frightening statistic!

I am fortunate to be involved with an amazing group of professionals that provide services to over 200 families/youths in Calgary. The Enviros Wilderness School Association has been providing support for over 35 years and continue to develop programs to meet the needs of their challenging clientele. It can be very rewarding to bring your experience and knowledge to a non-profit organization. I urge you all to give some thought to how you might be able to volunteer with one of the very many agencies in our city. They can use your leadership talents; now more than ever!

Enjoy your long weekend!