It’s the corporate dance that never ends.

Management sees the need for change – in strategy, values, brand or execution. The change will succeed only if employees embrace it. Management struggles to engage and inspire employees with the change, which takes longer and costs more than anyone wanted. Repeat.

Human nature plays a role in the dance, by making people leery of anything that pulls them out of their comfort zone. This goes double when people have been through the dance before and seen it bungled.

Yet for some reason, management and their consultants seem bent on ignoring human nature instead of embracing it. They come up with slogans, and catchy program titles, and announce them like a principal addressing an elementary school assembly. They expect the employees of the company to just fall in line and have a new set of priorities, values, or thought processes.

This is the beginning of the bungle. And it could easily be avoided by asking employees three questions:

• “Can you tell me about your experience and how it applies to where we’re going?”
• “How do your skills and interests and fit with our goals?”
• “What would you do if you were leading this effort?”

If this sounds like a job interview, that’s because it is. Only the goal is different. Instead of looking for a good hire, the goal is getting people ready for a good transformation.

It works because of human nature. When people are invited to report on their readiness to do something, they perform a mental and emotional inventory that is completely different from when they are told they must do something.

Imagine that you’ve just told me that I have to change my priorities and how I do my job because the CEO said so. Internally, I am already starting to resist. First, I will remember how this kind of executive order has failed before, and then I’ll start figuring out how my team can evade the lousy parts.

Now let’s imagine that you’ve asked me how well I’m prepared to help the company move in a new direction, and what I would bring to that if it happened. This I do not want to resist. This is an open door, and I want to walk through it. If anything, I’m going to sell myself. I’m going to tell you about the skills and interests that I would love to put to more use. Plus, I’m going to give you some ideas for implementing the change that would help win over my skeptical co-workers.

Even if I express doubts about the new program – based on seeing the dance bungled before – it’s not negative. It’s letting my interviewer know the real state of mind of people in the company, instead of keeping it secret and allowing it to block progress.

If you want to make the interview approach work with full effectiveness, start with the people on your management team. This may surprise anyone who thinks that arriving in or near the C-suite means the end of job interviews. But doing it diligently will surface up ideas, resources, and potential traps before the dance begins – and, with luck, prevent the bungle.

Outside facilitators can help with this, as long as they can genially speak truth to power and address corporate challenges both intellectually and emotively. That’s our approach at Emotive Brand, because experience shows it works. If you were to interview us before your big change, we would tell you all about it.

Photo illustration by Laurel Daunis-Allen

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Brand strategies strive for focus.

As such, most brand strategies are customer-centric.

And while there may be a certain logic to that (after all, where would your brand be without customers?), customer-centric brand approaches can backfire.

To illustrate this point, think of any brand that has a positive, upbeat “brand campaign” and either me-too products, miserable employees, or horrible customer service.

By embracing a broader, more holistic view of your brand, you start to see how your brand’s success relies on numerous interdependent factors.

The quest, in my opinion, is to find a universal idea that can bridge all the different brand constituents important to your success, from employees to partners to suppliers to investors, etc.

The trick is then to find the ways to translate the meaningful intent of that idea to each brand constituent in a way that makes it resonate with his or her needs, values, interests and aspirations.

The payoff comes when you also help each brand constituent clearly see what he or she can do to help your brand achieve greater meaning.

Read more on Jerry Holtaway’s personal blog.

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Ask any writer or reporter who deals with the real world, and they will tell you that language is not the thing that quickens their hearts. It’s numbers. In a world that’s awash in words, subjectivity, and spin, hard data is the ladder back to dry land. A few revealing numbers can instantly provide a clear context for everything around them, enabling us to understand things better, faster, and more usefully.

For example, a lot of people thought it was crazy for Angelina Jolie to get a double mastectomy to prevent cancer. (You can find her announcement here.) But once you get a few relevant numbers in your head, it sounds like the opposite of crazy.

The first number is 87%: Jolie’s likelihood of breast cancer based on her genetics. The second number is 56: the age her mother died prematurely of cancer. The third number is 5%: Jolie’s post-surgical risk of breast cancer.

Many people who read those numbers instantly connected them to other numbers they already know. I thought of 6 (the number of young children who call her “Mommy”). A friend thought of 38, which is how old Jolie will be this year, and then of 45, which is approximately how many more years she can expect to live with her newly reduced cancer risk. These are all just numbers, yet they pack an emotional punch.

The lesson for companies communicating with the outside world is that the right numbers can do as much or more than words to make brands more emotionally engaging. A good infographic, which puts numbers into context and makes visual connections between them, can make any story more memorable – with a minimal amount of words.

Two related points: innumeracy and statistics.

“Innumeracy” is the term made famous by mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book of the same name. (The term originated with Richard Hofstadter.) His argument is that we’re becoming a nation of quantitative illiterates who don’t understand numbers or how they work. It’s a fair point, but our response should not be to throw up our hands and stop using data to win customers and stakeholders to our brand. Our response should be to use numbers even better – more visually and emotionally – so that we capture every opportunity.

As for statistics, we’ve all heard Mark Twain’s famous crack that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” What makes this funny is what it leaves out. It’s not statistics that lie, it’s people who use them to mislead other people. Furthermore, the people being misled are usually happy about it because it confirms something they already believe. That’s the joke: people use facts to lie to people who like the lie more than they like the truth.

We need to get serious. Numbers can do a lot for emotive brands, by telling the right truth to the right people in the right ways.

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Comments (0) #brand #Communications #storytelling #strategy

Sage advice for brands that are failing to reach their targets.

How well is your brand presence connecting with the people who are important to your brand, both inside and out?

Is your brand working out from itself, or out from the needs, interests, values and aspirations of people?

Bringing empathy to your brand approach changes everything.

Seeing things from another perspective opens up new opportunities.

Putting people first leads them to putting your brand first.

Read more on Jerry Holtaway’s personal blog.

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Comments (0) #brand #Brand Strategy #differentiation #emotion #mattering #strategy

An excellent post at IMD.org speaks to two attributes that the writers, Professors Stewart Black and Allen Morrison, believe are necessary for leaders of global organizations today: emotional connections and integrity.

I think this advice is great for any business leader, not only those operating at the “global” level. Here’s the section on emotional connections that talks about being sincerely interested in others, genuinely listening to others, and understanding different viewpoints.

Emotional connections
Global leaders need to establish personal, empathetic relationships with people from all backgrounds inside their company, and in the broader community. Doing this requires three distinct abilities: sincere interest in other people, a heightened ability to listen, and a strong capacity for understanding different viewpoints.

Sincere interest in others
Our research found that effective global leaders actually like people – all kinds of people. They enjoy talking with people and being around them. They care about people and want in some way to make their lives better. All of these attributes help them to form better business relationships, which are a critical part of doing business in many countries. “International customers buy a relationship, not equipment,” David Janke, Vice President of Business Development at Evans & Sutherland, told us. “We’re not selling equipment: we’re selling somebody’s career, because she’s got her neck on the line. She is buying something and making a large investment,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, everybody points the finger at her, so she wants to deal with a company and people…that she trusts.”

Genuinely listening to people
Being interested in people is not the same as genuinely listening to them. As one executive recently told us, “It can be too easy when you are in a leadership position to do all the talking.” Yet, for others to feel understood, leaders must excel at picking up verbal and non-verbal communications. They must also overcome the “everyone thinks the same” assumption, which suggests a superficial understanding of the aspirations, interests, and feelings of other people.

Understanding different viewpoints
Understanding people requires leaders to relate personally to the lives of their employees, customers, and others who are relevant to the business. It means understanding context and, more specifically, how to provide appropriate leadership within it. For example, how a 40-year-old American expatriate manager delegates to a 35-year-old Japanese subordinate with a U.S. MBA should differ significantly from her delegation to a 55-year-old Japanese subordinate with no U.S. experience. To succeed, the American manager should pay much greater deference to the 55-year-old Japanese subordinate.

Establishing emotional connections is an essential part of effective global leadership, but this is not the same as “going native.” Leaders who are interested in people, who are excellent listeners, and who are familiar with local conditions and traditions do not have to become like the people they are with. While they need to keep an open mind, they should never forget who they are or what they represent.

When leaders have character, their behavior influences people throughout the organization. This impacts on every aspect of the business, including the way its brand behaves. When the organizational culture is built around character, a new way of being emerges that is far more appealing to people, both inside and outside the business.

To sum up: When you bring empathy to your leadership style, you win. When your leadership style makes your brand more empathetic, everyone wins.

Read more on Jerry Holtaway’s personal blog.

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In the hallowed halls of the C-Suite, your business vision seems clear.

But down on the street, in the halls, in the meeting rooms, in the labs, in the factories, in the warehouses, at the desks, and around the water cooler, your vision is hard to see.

What else would explain why your organization is failing to keep up with the competition, why customers are going elsewhere, why it is getting harder and harder to hire good people, and why investors are starting to fidget?

What can you do to make your vision crystal clear – and actionable?

It could be that your “C-Suite ready” vision doesn’t feel personally relevant or emotionally important to the troops. The language, the story, and the meaning behind your vision can all work harder when they are aligned to the needs, interests, values, and aspirations of your employees.

A manifesto is one tool to use. It can capture the intent of your vision and represent it in a way that makes sense to employees across your organization. It can help them see the reason “why” they should believe in the vision, and point to the ways they can individually, and as teams, work to help realize your vision.

Don’t simply “forward” your vision to your people. Get it translated into something that will inspire, engage, and activate your employees to make it a reality.

Read more on Jerry Holtaway’s personal blog.

Photo by Spencer Holtaway

Comments (2) #ceo #leadership #strategy #vision

“The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.” – Saint Augustine

It was earlier noted that people today, including employees and prospective recruits, are looking for more meaning in their lives.

This shift has not only prompted companies to reconsider their business models, product offerings, and workplaces, it has made them re-think the terms on which they engage people.

Messaging alone won’t pull employees in

This is especially true when trying to build a Meaningful Workplace. It becomes far more involved than simply sending a PDF of the master plan to every employee or hanging posters in the cafeteria. Indeed, every aspect of the master plan’s deployment needs to be done in a highly sensitive and respectful way.

It has been said that messaging is dead, meaning that the idea of simply creating and broadcasting a bank of words, no matter how charmingly poetic they may be, simply doesn’t cut it any more.

Such business transmissions smack of company speak, and worse, of marketing. Eyes glaze over. Defensive shields are erected. Pure messaging attempts fail.

The goal, after all, is a meaningful outcome that seeks to bring the employer and the employee closer together. This is not to say messaging doesn’t play a role in the development of a Meaningful Workplace.

What it does say is that messaging cannot be the primary tool for instilling a sense of ambition, for evoking feelings, and for creating a meaningful culture.

This excerpt is the eighth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

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An emotive brand can’t simply advertise its way into being meaningful. It has to exude meaning at every opportunity. All too often brands seeking to appear more meaningful rely purely on tactical communications like an ad campaign. We are as likely as anyone to say, “that’s nice” after viewing an emotional commercial or a touching bit of Flash on a webpage. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Well, there can be.

Sadly, these brands often come off as being superficial. They wear their feelings on their sleeves. And they use advertising to claim to be something meaningful. However, they end up creating emotional dissonance by not being truly meaningful in everything they do. So the warm and fuzzy sensations these brands provoke quickly disappear when the brands act in a way that is inconsistent with their claimed emotional premise. We all know the drill: the product doesn’t work the way the brand promises; employees of the brand are insensitive to customers; the wishfully “meaningful” brand treat its partners, supplier, and distributors “meanly”.

Far better, in our view, is to create a brand culture that exudes meaning, that evokes emotions rather than simply displays feelings, and that transforms every point of contact between the brand and the people vital to its success into a subtle and powerful meaning generator.

Our advice:

Don’t emote, evoke.

Don’t tease, connect meaningfully.

Don’t claim you’re worthy, make it evident.

Comments (0) #culture #Emotive Branding #engagee #meaning #Meaningful Brands

A Meaningful Workplace is built from the company’s master plan – a strategic platform used exclusively by senior management – that defines the three core elements of ambition (purpose), feelings (values), and behavior (building a culture).

This master plan drives all subsequent activities, which include:

• Macro Plans – how the business itself will be evolved;
• Group Plans – how groups of employees will be engaged;
• Solo Plans – how individual employees will be personally engaged.

Building something great and enduring

Macro Planning puts the business’s structure, policies, and procedures through the filter of the master plan to identify opportunities to better align the work experience to the agreed ambition, feelings, and behavior.

Group Planning develops tailored interactions between the company and groups of its employees (e.g. by location, discipline, seniority, etc.) that engage employees in the principles and practices of the master plan (note: not the master plan itself).

Solo Planning creates the means by which individuals come to personally identify with and internalize the principles and practices of the master plan (note: not the master plan itself).

When senior management has a Master Plan, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This excerpt is the seventh in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

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