Leadership Branding

Unleash the true power of your brand

A long-lasting, well-founded and authentic brand identity provides a company with a long-term orientation. However, if you only focus on external brand management, you will not be able to unleash the true power of your brand.

THE POWER OF A BRAND ALWAYS COMES FROM WITHIN.

Authentic, credible brands can only be created if brand values and internal management are in harmony. Without leaders and employees who live the brand, a brand cannot become strong. In other words, companies must live – on a day-to-day basis – the values they circulate in their employee mission statements and value catalogs, in job advertisements, on their websites and in their slogans.

Without leaders and employees who live the brand, a brand cannot become strong

Thorsten Czerwinski

Even companies that have operated successfully for years are realizing through the issue of a shortage of skilled workers that they need to communicate their brand essence much more actively through contradiction-free leadership: It’s about values and attitude.

It’s about:

• “What do we believe in?”
• “How do we perform?”
• “Why do we do what we do?”.

Leadership Branding

Leadership branding is a shared leadership attitude that is aligned with the corporate brand and its identity, with the aim of being able to provide orientation.

• It strengthens leaders in their attitude and integrity, which is necessary to live the brand credibly.
• In this way, brand-oriented leadership helps transport an effective and differentiating brand positioning into the company.
• It creates pride in the brand among employees and motivates them to think about themselves and their job as members of a brand community.
• Leadership branding teaches employees what contribution they can make to the brand promise and how they can fulfill their role as brand representatives on a very individual basis.

If managers manage to authentically exemplify the brand internally so that employees can align themselves with it, develop an emotional connection to the brand and fully identify with it, then something is created that will endure in good and bad times because it develops cohesion. Cohesion based on trust, respect and integrity.

Trust is the basis for employees to contribute and pass on their full expertise. The goal of every company must be to keep knowledge within the company and to promote exchange and transfer there. Because knowledge is power. And more knowledge means being able to act better, faster, and more concretely than the competition.

Sustainable internal brand management offers a great opportunity to build a priceless USP (unique selling point) for a company and position it uniquely. It helps to retain employees and keep their know-how in the company. At the same time, it makes the company “sexy” for new knowledge carriers.

Knowledge transfer leads to “regrowth” of knowledge by passing it on to younger team members who combine it with their own know-how or use the newly gained knowledge in their own way. New ideas, concepts and strategies are created. And that leads a company to success – in a sustainable way.

Conclusion

The leadership branding of a company is based on the brand and its values. A company can only be successful and positively influence the brand if leadership branding is consistently lived out internally by the leadership.

Thorsten Czerwinski has 24 years of experience in brand management, marketing (strategy, planning and implementation). He offers sustainable brand management with a focus on startups (corporate, product and employer branding). Check out his website for more information: https://www.markenleitfaden.com/

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Vocabulary

1. leadership brand: conveys your distinctiveness as a leader. It communicates the value you offer.
2. external brand management: the way that your customers see your business.
3. shared leadership: Shared leadership is a leadership style that broadly distributes leadership responsibility, such that people within a team and organization lead each other.
4. endure (verb): anhalten.
5. Cohesion (noun): Zusammenhalt
6. knowledge transfer: the practical problem of transferring knowledge from one part of the organization to another.

Discussion Questions

1. How can companies better attract skilled workers?
2. Does your company have a shared leadership model or what type of company structure do you work under?
3. Does your manager(s) live out the company values or do you as a leader live out the brand identity?
4. How much knowledge transfer occurs within your company?