#17: Brand Personality

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you will get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Leslie Everett, a specialist in personal branding and creating the personality of the corporate brand. She's an award-winning international speaker, an executive brand coach, and an author. Leslie helps people all over the world. I've recently found out that global organizations on 5 continents use her professional expertise and her executive brand programs. So welcome to the show, Leslie. Leslie, I'm so glad you could be with us.

Thank you very much, Erika. I'm pleased to be here.

Yeah. So Leslie, you and I attended a conference together recently, and it really caught my attention when you mentioned that you help leaders create brand personality. And since having a powerful and resonant brand, I think, is so key to success these days, and obviously you do too, I thought that was just a great kind of take on branding that I'd love for our listeners to hear about. Let's just roll into that if it's okay with you. So I want to start by making sure that we understand your core point. So could you explain a little bit about what you mean by creating brand personality?

Yeah, sure. I think companies today spend millions of dollars on creating their brand with logos, and websites, and all the marketing collateral, which of course is needed to create the brand awareness. But I truly believe today that the brand is created through the experiences that customers, and clients, and guests have with the brand. And that experience will always come through a personal interaction. So our work is very much focused on creating that authentic personality through people behaviors and mindset and culture. And we do that by getting to the heart of the individual and providing them a program that helps them create their personal brand uniquely in alignment with reinforcing the, the corporate brand. So you get this sort of double-take synergy of a powerful personal development tool, but also a tool that truly gets to the heart of the corporate brand and allows people individually to internalize and interpret what the company is about.

Oh, that's interesting. So if I'm understanding you correctly, you start with the leader or leaders and helping them understand what their personal brand is, and then aligning that with creating a personality for their corporate brand.

A lot of our clients we now find are coming at it from the other angle where they've refocused on their brand. They want to reenergize their brand as an organization. So we'll take the brand messaging and the values that they have, create a program that addresses this by developing the personal branding walking tall program that we have. So we will start with the leadership team, the executive team, and the program can run all the way through the organization, primarily focusing on the management to start with, but can be frontline people as well. It can be just a personal development tool, or it's just looking at the company as a whole and their value set and using that as the umbrella.

Okay. So I'd love to, if you can just sort of walk us through this a little bit, I'd love to understand a little bit about how that works. Like how do you help leaders and people of the rest of the organization get clear about and create a personality for their brand, for their corporate brand?

Yeah, sure. It tends to be different for every client, and we work across all sectors. I've been doing a lot recently in the luxury brand space and in hospitality. So these types of companies will focus very much on exceptional guest experience.

Mm-hmm.

So whatever business we're in, customer service, the basic customer service really is nowhere near enough anymore. And often I believe that the customer experience that companies provide is not enough. And we need to create this extra layer of personalization personality that really creates the brand more powerfully than anywhere else. So to start with, there would be some consultancy generally involved to look at all of the insights and data that companies have, to look at employee engagement, to look at customer satisfaction surveys, any data we've got to look at where the real gaps are in terms of where we could improve with our brand impact and brand engagement. Then we'd look at putting together a program that first of all starts with the executive team and looks at how they're getting their authentic personality out there, out of the boardroom, getting out there in the media, getting out there at local events and panels and speaking more and really developing their personal brand and profile and visibility in alignment with the corporate messages. And then the next level down might be the senior leadership team and we would create a similar program for them. And it might go all the way down to very front of house, front of office people or technology departments or whatever it might be to look at how those individuals can develop their confidence and their personal brand to empower them to give this exceptional guest or customer experience every time. So, typically the rollout program will be different for different populations within the business, but it's all centered around how my personal brand authentically can support the company messaging.

I'd love to— this is just fascinating, and I can see how this would be really powerful. I'd love to hear a story. I think our listeners would appreciate that, like an example of how this has happened that you thought was particularly useful or powerful.

Yeah, sure. One example would be with the Grosvenor House Hotel, JW Marriott Hotel in Park Lane in London. And being a luxury hotel, they typically have great staff. great customer experience anyway, but they're always looking to improve. And I often find this with— I worked with JetBlue recently, and they have a fantastic, strong, values-driven company, and they still manage to— and they get that out there. They talk about it internally and they get it out there. And when you experience JetBlue, you pretty much experience what they talk about internally.

Mm-hmm.

So we tend to work with companies who are doing it really well. And at Grosvenor House, they wanted to just keep improving and keep improving their TripAdvisor scores and their guest experience scores and get to number one on Park Lane, which is their particular category. So, we put together a program which went from the executive team all the way down to all the casual staff and concierges, front of house, and developed a program that everybody experienced. So much so that it embedded it within their core values. So, it becomes part of— become part of the ethos of the hotel, and they all have their little reminder keycards that they carry around on how they live and breathe the values every day through their personal brand. And with that, we had massive success in that we recognized a 5% increase in employee engagement, which they put down totally to the program.

Oh, wow.

It was a massive success. But also—

That's lovely, yeah.

Guest experience being warm and hospitable was a metric that they love and they focus on, and we had a massive 15.9% increase in that particular metric.

Wow. Wow. That's very cool. Well, so I love all of this, and it's And I love hearing about it. It makes sense to me on an intuitive level, but then I love hearing about the actual practical outcomes of metrics improving, which is great. So what advice do you have for leaders to think about brand in this way, or to get better at thinking about their brand in this way?

I think the first thing is take notice of all the data you've got. Take notice of employee engagement scores and look at how you can improve them. Don't just ignore it. Don't just think that we need to just provide more training, or we need to do this, or whatever. Just really look at where the gaps are in how you can improve that personality.

Mm-hmm.

And I would say start with looking at your leadership team, because it's no longer good enough for senior leaders to just be in their offices every day. The personality of a company comes directly from that leadership team, and millennials today are really looking to, you know, what type of company is this that I'm going to be working for, or buying from or whatever. So they want to know who the personalities are behind that.

So any— Oh, that's great. Yeah, the leaders really need to be sort of living models of that brand personality. It has to be that people inside the organization or outside the organization can look at them and go, oh, I get it. This is what this company is about.

Yes, and the more authentic the better. The real life stories that these leaders have experienced and can share that really reinforce their values. If a company is talking about corporate social responsibility and and that they're a caring company. We want to know that those aren't just words. We want to know that those people truly do care and that their personality supports that. Otherwise, we don't trust. And so I think one of the key things today for leaders and CEOs and exec teams to do is to really look at themselves and say, how are we personally projecting these values? And start at that point.

Yes. And also, I would, as I'm, you know, kind of inferring from what you're saying, to make sure that their own personal values really are lined up, because you can't authentically express values you don't believe in. So it's important for leaders to make sure that their values really are aligned with what they're saying their corporate values are.

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you find they're not, so you're in the wrong place. But an exercise that I'll often run with a lot of my clients is we'll take the corporate values. If I'm doing a keynote presentation, we can test this out. So you might take a value of integrity, and everybody has a different view of what integrity might mean. So I'll get them to write down 3 words that will describe the word integrity to them, and you can guarantee in a room full of people you won't get 2 people with the same 3 words.

Hmm.

So the point being that integrity, we think we know what it means, but until we really analyze it and say, well, what does it mean to me, and what kind of— how is that reflected in my day-to-day behaviors and mindset? then we don't really engage with the values. So your point is very accurate there, is as individuals we need to make sure that we understand what the values mean and what do I do every day that supports that in my own way.

That's great. So thank you so much, Lesley. This is, we could go on and on, and I always promise my listeners that it will be short and sweet. But this is really useful and thought-provoking both, and it's a great combination. And listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about this topic, I can recommend Lesley's most recent book, which is called Corporate Values: Brand Personality. It's available on Amazon and everywhere you buy books. So thank you again, Leslie, for coming on. This has been great.

It's an absolute pleasure, Erika. I'd love to talk more, but I hope that's been useful in some ways.

Yes.

Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Yeah, great insights. And thank you for listening, everybody. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

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