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.