Promises, promises
How to build a brand, pt 4
“Of all the agencies we’ve worked with, your placements have proved future leaders. I can’t tell you how valuable that’s been.”
So said an MD of one of my long-term partners.
Forgive the apparent bit of aggrandisement, here’s the point:
This became part of my brand, in the outcomes I can potentially bring.
Something I can describe to companies I might potentially partner with, and a reference they can check.
Something I aspire to, in how I might support them.
But in making that declaration comes accountability.
To bring those outcomes, the process has to lead to those outcomes.
Because if you don’t have a replicable, consistent process, those outcomes are less likely to happen.
And if you don’t have confidence you can consistently bring those outcomes, it’s just a promise with no substance.
If you’ve taken the time to define your employment brand, by establishing your employment value proposition, your culture, vision & values, and understanding the experiences your people have in working for you…
Then this becomes the benchmark of future experiences.
Not just a marketing piece, an employment brand is a promise that should be fulfilled.
If it’s an experience your people want to share it becomes the North Star for their values, attitudes, and behaviours.
That’s one reason attitudes can have weight over hard skills - skills don’t define a culture, shared experiences do.
Coming back to my testimonial at the top, I don’t always get it right.
Indeed between, 2015 and 2017, looking back, I got it regularly wrong.
I’d been a great recruiter and felt I could scale my personal performance by promising what I had done previously while cutting corners in a good process.
I picked up and lost loads of business, not recognising the disconnect between how I effectively supported long-term clients and ineffectively supported many of those new partners.
Principally I neglected the leg work in correctly analysing their context, something that wasn’t required by long-term clients, but so essential with new contacts.
But as I’ve said before, if you don’t get it right from the top of the process, errors will only magnify the further down the chain they are.
It took a bit of navel-gazing in 2018 to realise where I was losing my way.
Of those lost clients I haven’t kept in touch with, what might they think in reading my words?
For them, their experience of over-promise and under-delivery is my brand.
I wasn’t all bad - the quote at the top is from a relationship that started in 2015.
Cultures aren’t a stable entity. They are affected by many internal and external influences.
Sometimes market conditions. Sometimes a new leadership hire.
Cascade failure from hiring a narcissistic psychopath can lead to leadership teams voting with their feet, and their teams feeling the full impact.
A culture can turn overnight.
But while it can also turn for the positive, that brand of negativity takes longer to shake off.
Especially if the brand reflects what were the good times, misses the current fustercluck, and sweeps the journey that needs to happen under the carpet.
So a brand can be a benchmark to aim for, as you hire new roles, to ensure who you hire supports what you want to achieve.
But it can also be a snapshot.
Who are we right now? If things have been bad, how can we own it and give meaning to the people we want to employ, who have heard bad things?
Word of mouth
Glassdoor
Indeed
If things have improved, how can we show that?
If things are changing, how does that influence both who we recruit and what we say to them?
Whether or not you think a brand is an important exercise, it is always a reflection of who you are.
And it’s better to controllably define it than have others do it for you, no matter how unfairly.
Thanks for reading.
Greg
p.s. for those reading that aren’t familiar with the phrase - ‘promises, promises’ is an idiom for something that you say when another says they will do something and you don’t believe it.
p.p.s. give me your business, I promise to fill it, honest.