The Credibility Branding Blog

Becoming a Leader

Kevin Eikenberry has written a new book on leadership. It's called Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time.

And while it sounds like a leadership book, and you may not be in a leadership role, this is a book that I think everyone can relate to. (You will see more on that below.)

This book is practical, inspiring, relevant and real.

It introduces 13 leadership competencies, as the title says one skill at time.

And while it is a leadership book, and will help anyone regardless of their leadership experience become more effective, it isn't just for leaders.

This is a book for all of us, because all of us are leaders. And as Kevin says in the book, when we become better leaders, we become better humans.

I'd recommend this book to you any time, but never more urgently than today.

Because when you invest in the book today, you will receive more than 50 tools and bonuses from Kevin's expert colleagues from around the world that all will help you become a more remarkable leader. (I threw in a gift as well because I wanted to help Kevin spread the word about becoming a Remarkable Leader).

http://www.remarkableleadershipbook.com/bonuses.asp

All of these tools are yours just for buying the book today. And while you will have wait for your book to arrive, these other tools are available right now (sometimes it pays to be impatient).

http://www.remarkableleadershipbook.com/bonuses.asp

* * * * Guest Article by Kevin Eikenberry * * * *

Remarkable Leaders Learn Continually
Excerpt from Kevin Eikenberry's new book "Remarkable Leadership"

Often when I am with a group helping them think about or work on their leadership skills, I do the following exercise (feel free to play along):

1. Close your eyes, think of the most effective leader you know, and get a mental picture of him or her. This person can be alive or dead, someone you know personally or have only read about or observed from afar. Whoever it is, see the person in your mind's eye.

2. Make a list of the behaviors or skills that this person exhibits-the things that make him or her so successful as a leader.

After people complete this simple exercise, I ask them to share the skills and behaviors they have identified. The lists I hear are long and cover many of the competencies explored in this book-except one. The skill that is almost always is missing from these lists is being a lifelong learner.

There is absolutely no question in my mind that being a continual learner is a key skill for leaders. In fact, I believe that it is the most important skill of all for leaders, yet it usually doesn't make people's lists.

(Did it make yours?)

Why don't people consider learning and add it to the list of traits of great leaders?

Because it is the underlying skill-the skill without which improvement in any other area is nearly impossible. If leaders aren't learners, they can't be remarkable. Perhaps learning is a skill that we don't think about because it is assumed, considered a given, or deemed obvious.

Whatever the reason, it doesn't change the fact that we must start with learning. And while we all know how to learn, remarkable leaders know that because it is the underlying foundational skill, as they get better at it, it will help them in all of their other leadership development efforts.

http://www.remarkableleadershipbook.com/bonuses.asp

The You In Your Brand

There is always an aspect of you in your brand and in your business process. Who you attract to you business as a partner customer or employee is a reflection of you. Look around your business right now. Take look at your employees and customers. What do they tell you about the personality of your brand? Are they empowered, are they needy, are they intelligent are they followers are they entrepreneurial? There is no judgment but there is insight here.

These constituents can tell you more about who and what your company is right now than just about ay other intelligence you can gather. Now do the same investigation of your competitor. Do they have a clientele and employee base that feels like it is more in alignment with your brand than your current constituents? Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at why that might be happening. How is your personal showing up in you company? Where can you be more authentic as a manager, partner and brand?

Branding Focus – Targeting the Right Audiences

One of my favorite marketing blogs is my friend Derrick Daye’s Brand Strategy Insider, it consistently delivers the branding goodies. Today’s post is from my equally favorite blogger and pundit extraordinaire Seth Godin who is this months contributing blogger.

In today’s post Seth talks about “The Brand Formula” and in his usually succinct style offers a clear presentation of what a brand is. His point is focus on the target audience that will most embrace your value, succeed among them and even as you get successful think long and hard before embracing a different demographic. This is about focus. I think one of the biggest challenges facing companies at just about any time frame of its corporate life is focus.

Focus

The focus I am referring to relates to a number of areas within the company all of them represent your brand. First is the notion of culture. Does your company have more of a sales-driven culture, (which represents a majority of companies)? Or is your company an engineering driven culture? Or is it a marketing-driven culture? In my experience, a small percentage of companies are based on a marketing-driven culture, more than half are sales-driven, and for technology, they are generally engineering-driven. Not being a marketing-driven company is big challenge to maintaining consistent focus.

What I mean by marketing-driven is looking from the ground up at everything you are doing as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, looking at your sales strategy. Is your sales guy running the show? This is very common. The sales guys come in and they want the sale, no matter the cost. And that cost is what I call a "seat-of-the- pants" approach where there is a frenetic environment and the sales guy turns on a dime depending on his customer. And features and benefits of the products are sometimes even adjusted for that one customer. That is a lack of focus.

What most companies are not doing is starting from scratch, looking at the market opportunity, looking at the market need, looking at what pain their product is going to solve in the marketplace for specific audiences. (That's actually a key issue: "product myopia" or  “benefits” versus “features”).

In an engineering-driven culture, it's kind of a "if you build it, they will come" type of approach. They focus on "that little knob over there can create this really cool GUI which really is… like, cool". Versus creating a product that is actually going to meet the needs of the customer. Sometimes in an engineering-driven environment, the product marketing person will meet with customers and will clearly see the opportunities for product improvements that the engineers will resist to their death.

What is needed is a different way of thinking for example using your marketing brain when making business decisions is of the utmost importance. For example if resources are limited and you have the choice of pursuing several different customers but can't service them all, don't just go for the money. Go for the one that will meet budget expectations but also add credibility.

Here is what Seth has to say or click here to go directly to the post on Branding Strategy Insider:

The Brand Formula May 09, 2007

Branding Strategy Insider Blog - By Seth Godin

What's a brand?

I think it is the product of two things:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

If I encounter a brand and I don't know what it means or does, it has zero power. If I have an expectation of what an organization will do for me, but I don't care about that, no power.

Fedex is a powerful brand because you always get what you expect, and the relief you get from their consistency is high.

AT&T is a weak brand because you almost never get what you expect, because they do so many different things and because the value of what they create has little emotional resonance (it sure used to though, when they did one thing, they did it perfectly and they were the only ones who could connect you).

The dangers of brand ubiquity are then obvious. When your brand is lots of things (like AOL became) then the expectations were all over the place and the emotional resonance started to fade. If the predictability of your brand starts to erode its emotional power (a restaurant that becomes boring) then you need to become predictable in your joyous unpredictability!

If you want to grow a valuable brand, my advice is to keep awareness close to zero among the people you're not ready for yet, and build the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you

Happy Employees equals Easier Marketing and Better Brands

Alexander Kjerulf over at Chief Happiness Officer writes a great article on the importance of happy people in the workplace. This is both a message for those of us to become happier in our workplace and for HR departments and corporate managers to take a closer look at. Happy employees mean happy, creative, efficient processes equaling happy brands. Happy brands mean happy customers and happy bottom line profits which create happy shareholders… ok you get the idea. Check out the Worksona case study post to see their model as well as previous posts on corporate cultures

There is a great image and an anecdotal case study so click on the link to get the whole post. Following is an excerpt of the “list of 10 reasons”…

Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster

March 27, 2007 Alexander Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer

Here are the 10 most important reasons why happiness at work is the #1 productivity booster.

1: Happy people work better with others
Happy people are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better relations at work. This translates into:

· Better teamwork with your colleagues

· Better employee relations if you’re a manager

· More satisfied customers if you’re in a service job

· Improved sales if you’re a sales person

2: Happy people are more creative
If your productivity depends on being able to come up with new ideas, you need to be happy at work. Check out the research of Teresa Amibile for proof. She says:

If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.

There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.

3: Happy people fix problems instead of complaining about them
When you don’t like your job, every molehill looks like a mountain. It becomes difficult to fix any problem without agonizing over it or complaining about it first. When you’re happy at work and you run into a snafu - you just fix it.

4: Happy people have more energy
Happy people have more energy and are therefore more efficient at everything they do.

5: Happy people are more optimistic
Happy people have a more positive, optimistic outlook, and as research shows (particularly Martin Seligman’s work in positive psychology), optimists are way more successful and productive. It’s the old saying “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re probably right” all over again.

6: Happy people are way more motivated
Low motivation means low productivity, and the only sustainable, reliable way to be motivated at work is to be happy and like what you do. I wrote about this in a previous post called Why “motivation by pizza” doesn’t work.

7: Happy people get sick less often
Getting sick is a productivity killer and if you don’t like your job you’re more prone to contract a long list of diseases including ulcers, cancer and diabetes. You’re also more prone to workplace stress and burnout.

One study assessed the impact of job strain on the health of 21,290 female nurses in the US and found that the women most at risk of ill health were those who didn’t like their jobs. The impact on their health was a great as that associated with smoking and sedentary lifestyles (source).

8: Happy people learn faster
When you’re happy and relaxed, you’re much more open to learning new things at work and thereby increasing your productivity.

9: Happy people worry less about making mistakes - and consequently make fewer mistakes
When you’re happy at work the occasional mistake doesn’t bother you much. You pick yourself up, learn from it and move on. You also don’t mind admitting to others that you screwed up - you simply take responsibility, apologize and fix it. This relaxed attitude means that less mistakes are made, and that you’re more likely to learn from them.

10: Happy people make better decisions
Unhappy people operate in permanent crisis mode. Their focus narrows, they lose sight of the big picture, their survival instincts kick in and they’re more likely to make short-term, here-and-now choices. Conversely, happy people make better, more informed decisions and are better able to prioritize their work.

Read the rest of the post

Credibility Branding Through Your Employees (the most important marketers)

Today’s special contributing writer Holly Dutra from Worksona is offering insights into creating a culture of trust from within among employees.

“There has to be trust between a company and its employees before there can be trust between a company and its customers.”

This is such an important piece of the credibility puzzle and Worksona has developed an elegant solution using social networking systems to assist with this. I don’t know if this particular solution is the answer, but the idea is a good one and the energy behind it and the intelligence of the Worksona team makes it a good bet.

Holly’s Worksona blog post on April 10th is a nice entree into her article; it reflects her passion based on her personal experiences:

People are the Heart of the Workplace

April 10th, 2007

At the heart of many workplace organizations is the unspoken mantra: value knowledge first - then people.

Before starting Worksona, I worked at a company like this. The result was that I felt very much like a cog in a machine, a number, and was completely miserable. People would get burned out, and were easily replaced when gone. I left before a year was up.

 At the heart of any workplace organization should be a high valuation on people, because people and relationships are the foundation of any organization. Work doesn’t get done without human hands. It is through people that knowledge flows.

 If that were to happen, social networking tools might become just as important as document repositories. Steve Roessler at All Things Workplace put it best when he said:

 I find social networking tools more natural and conversational than emails. Sort of the difference between telling people a real story and showing them bullet points on Powerpoint.

 … that’s what happens when you put people first.

 Worksona Has Your Most Valuable Customers

By Holly Dutra, Worksona

Credibility is the heart of any successful brand. Credibility leads to fulfilled promises of the service or product that the company creates. Oftentimes companies look outside to its customers to build this credibility, but the most valuable brand building can come from right under a company’s nose.

Yes, from its own employees.

A company’s employees are its most valuable customers. These are the people you have already been sold on your service or product. In fact, they are the ones that you as a company are depending on to create and deliver your product or service. They spend more of their waking hours with you than anywhere else. And employees are usually quite proud of what they do.

Thus, it is in the company’s best interest to ensure that their employees are engaged in the company’s brand and promises made to customers. The question becomes: How can companies help employees become loyal, engaged customers of the product and brand?

Trust is a crucial factor in building a credible brand. There has to be trust between a company and its employees before there can be trust between a company and its customers. And as always, the first step to building trust is to get to know “the other”. Who is “the other”? It’s those folks you don’t know at your company--the amorphous “they” who take the fall. It’s much easier to blame a group or department when you do not know them. Anonymity is a breeding ground for mistrust and suspicion.

Worksona was built around the two things that are fundamental to trust in the workplace: people and relationships. We designed Worksona to foster workplace relationships and decrease anonymity within your company.

How does Worksona do this?

1. Once you sign up, you are placed into your workplace community (validated by email address).

2. You can create and control your profile (goodbye nameless face!).

3. Your profile is dynamic, populated by your colleagues on how you have contributed to their work/team (via applauding and tagging).

4. Relationships can now be expressed outside of the orgchart, making it easier to network internally and get to know more people.

We think Worksona is a powerful way to build more trust within your company. And once trust is building between colleagues and managers, credibility branding can really grow among your most valuable customers – your employees.

END

Holly Dutra is a founding member of Worksona and responsible for the user experience of the product. She's worked in large corporations such as AOL, Accenture, and Arthur Andersen... and knows how to fill out more than a TPS report =). Worksona is currently in private beta to select companies. If you are not an employee of the supported company, please submit it with the company name and your email.

Improving Marketing’s Internal Credibility?

Forrester came out with a report on March 9th that offers ideas to improve marketing’s internal credibility. They postured that “Today's marketing function lacks authority, follows the lead of other departments, and operates disconnected from peer functions. To build momentum for marketing reinvention, marketers must focus on three key activities:

1) Setting executive expectations regarding responsibility and accountability

2) Building bridges with peer functions through communication and collaboration

3) Extending internal capabilities by balancing skills and resources.”

This is good advice yet so typical of the “lean,”  “efficiencies” approach to marketing. Marketing is not a product it is a strategy. While I would not suggest that what Forrester is recommending is wrong and is probably worth investigating. I would instead say that it is more about the marketing than the department and its relationship with internal constituents.

Question: Do you know how to make an internal marketing organization more credible? Answer: Outside results.

Question: Do you know how to gain outside results?

Answer: Leverage the internal points of corporate credibility to establish market credibility.

Question: How do you find those internal points of credibility?

Answer: Create them.

Question: What are these points of credibility?

Answer:

·        Listen to the breath of the market, listen to your customers, partners and vendors, listen to the product solution and deliver something that addresses the pain that customers are having

·        A strong credible management team; a product that delivers a clear value and answers a need; brand recognized customers; marquee strategic partners; and contributing your vision to the unique trends in the market (see Credibility pyramid)

·        Gaining third party recognition from influencers and leveraging that to find more influencers

·        Becoming an expert/influencer

Have you ever noticed, when the marketing programs are successful the marketing department has more resources and respect? Yes it is possible the marketing department in hampered by the departments around them, the lack of resources available to them and the executive ranks that don’t support them. I have been there I know that this is often the case. However, if your own “marketing head” is in the right strategic place and you have done your homework (the bullet items above), you can use under the radar programs to win points and elevate your status. Under the radar programs are low budget guerrilla programs that can confirm your marketing strategies. For example if you can’t get the big budget for that direct campaign you have been planning, do a viral program. If the advertising idea is not approved, do a survey of your web site users and leverage the results of that survey into a blogger outreach or broader publication PR program. If the fundamental strategy is being questioned, do an audit of customers or the media to confirm or change the strategy (an audit is also a strategy to gain credibility through influencers --to validate programs).

There are a ton of other things you can do. The bottom line is; get your passion back and do the great work that is inside of you. The marketing programs that you put out there, despite the internal hindrances, is a big part of the credibility you need to improve marketing’s internal corporate respect. I think the priority should be the marketing, and then do what Forrester recommends to clean up the remaining internal challenges.

Following is from the Forrester web site on the report:

March 9, 2007

How To Improve Marketing's Internal Credibility

Three Keys Set The Stage For Reinvention

by Peter Kim

with Cliff Condon, Cindy Commander, Sarah Glass, Jennifer Joseph

This is a document excerpt:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Marketing leaders are starting to take steps to reinvent their organizations in order to drive long-term success. But they are discovering that they lack the internal capital required to lead change. Today's marketing function lacks authority, follows the lead of other departments, and operates disconnected from peer functions. To build momentum for marketing reinvention, marketers must focus on three key activities: 1) setting executive expectations regarding responsibility and accountability; 2) building bridges with peer functions through communication and collaboration; and 3) extending internal capabilities by balancing skills and resources.