When you act consistently with your brand values, it creates goodwill. You always have a choice about how to act. Making sound choices burnishes your reputation and creates goodwill.
A strong reputation, or brand, is a promise. When you honor it, people can count on you to act in certain ways. When you act consistently with your brand values, it creates goodwill. You always have a choice about how to act. Making sound choices burnishes your reputation and creates goodwill.
That’s common sense, but sometimes it is harder than it sounds. Every day we make choices. Some of them are difficult. Usually, there are competing interests, needs or priorities. It is tempting to take shortcuts, or to make exceptions. Yet these personal choices are what keep this asset, our personal brand, strong, and valuable.
This article is about making choices that are consistent with your leadership brand. Here’s one entrepreneur’s real story about the choices she made to burnish her brand.
Kip Hollister, CEO, Hollister
Kip Hollister is the founder and CEO of Hollister, a full service staffing firm with a network of 15,000 businesses and 60,000 individuals.
After college, she found herself in sales at a personnel firm. She discovered in herself an uncanny ability to sell. “I learned that I could sell my way into a job, show them my work ethic, get myself trained and overcome objections. Anything was possible.”
Eventually she moved into recruiting. However, she soon learned she loved the work, but hated how her boss treated people. At the time, she was 26. Too young to be scared, she sketched her business plan on a paper napkin and went out to hunt for office space. She hired one “rookie” and then another—they came with open minds. “The vision I painted was we are here to make a difference for people.”
Choosing to listen
Breaking away from the stereotypical recruiting agency was difficult and Hollister did it all. She was coach and player, touching every deal, a self-admitted “control freak.” Building the culture in the beginning was easy. “It was contagious, I had instant followers. I got to set the pace and create the brand. I was just being me.”
However, at age 26 she wasn’t prepared for the challenge of managing a larger and larger staff. Driven to succeed, stressed and frustrated, she told people to hit the phones harder. “I was really angry,” she recalls, “when they weren’t at the highest level, I would rev myself up and scare them.”
It took an employee, one of her first hires, to confront her. Her frustration was having the opposite of the intended impact. “So I took in that feedback. And I met with all of them…I started forming culture in partnership with staff, instead of feeling like I had to have all the answers.”
Choosing how to lead
Hollister says this experience led her to make another choice – to be transparent, even in difficult times. Transparency is part of her brand, she believes in it as the vehicle for building trust. “Ultimately that builds your culture. You can trust that through thick or thin, they’ll know what is real and where you stand.”
In the spirit of open communication, the Hollister staffing office floor is wide open, no doors. They have a lot of brown bag lunches. This is new for many people.
Kip Hollister is so committed to this open style, that she hired a consultant to facilitate brown bag meetings, to be sure she hears the message straight. The result? In an industry notorious for high employee turnover, they retain top people.
Choosing to create a culture
As the company grows, it becomes more important than ever to nurture and stay true to that brand. This is especially challenging for CEOs who are entrepreneurs, who started their companies “from scratch.” While your brand values have shaped the company, those values have to live in the organization. Living the brand cannot revolve around you.
Building a brand is just like building a house. You do it brick by brick, choice by choice.
You’ve been there yourself. When you do the “right thing,” consistent with your brand, you often look back later and say, “Well, that was obvious.” You’re satisfied with the choices because you had a good outcome, and because you felt good. It was consistent with who you were, even if it was difficult.
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Suzanne Bates is author of the new book Discover Your CEO Brand: Secrets to Embracing and Maximizing Your Unique Brand as a Leader, just out from McGraw-Hill. Founding CEO of Bates Communications, a firm that transforms leaders into powerful communicators who get results, Suzanne is also author of www.thepowerspeakerblog.com and two other books from McGraw-Hill: Speak Like a CEO and Motivate Like a CEO.
