You want your leaders to be Building a Leadership Brand

1 Building a Leadership Brand by Dave ulrich and Norm Smallwood Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:The Idea in Brief the core ideaThe Idea in Practice putting the idea to work 1 Article Summary 2 Building a Leadership BrandA list of related materials, with annotations to guide furtherexploration of the article s ideas and applications 11 Further Reading Yo u w a n t your leaders to be the kind of people who embody the promises your company makes to its customers. To build this capability, follow these five principles. Reprint R0707G Building a Leadership Brand page 1 The Idea in BriefThe Idea in Practice COPYRIGHT 2007 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION.

2 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Thousands of companies spend millions on Leadership development only to get luke-warm results. Why? They rely on Leadership competency models that identify generic traits (vision, direction, energy). Then they try to find and build next-generation lead-ers who fit the model. Result? Vanilla man-agers and executives who aren t equipped to manage their firm s unique s a better way, say ulrich and Small-wood. Build a Leadership Brand : a shared identity among your organization s leaders that differentiates what they can do from what your rivals leaders can build your Leadership Brand , first articu-late what you want your firm to be known for by your best customers.

3 Then link those qualities to specific managerial traits and activities. For example, Wal-Mart wants to be known for its everyday low prices. So it strives to hire and develop managers who are frugal and unassuming and who can drive a hard your firm s Leadership and you deliver unique value for investors, customers, and employees elevating market value and sharpening your competitive and Smallwood recommend these practices for Building your Leadership Brand : NAIL Leadership FUNDAMENTALS Though generic Leadership competencies won t differentiate your firm from others, they re still important baseline skills for all leaders . Train your firm s leaders to master these five fundamentals: Strategy: developing a point of view about the future and positioning the firm for con-tinued success Execution: Building organizational systems that deliver results and make change hap-pen Talent management: motivating, engag-ing, and communicating with employees Talent development: grooming employees for future Leadership Personal proficiency.

4 Acting with integrity, exercising social and emotional intelli-gence, making bold decisions, and engen-dering trust CONNECT EXECUTIVES ABILITIES TO YOUR DESIRED REPUTATIOND ecide what you want your firm to be known for, then link those Brand attributes with spe-cific Leadership skills and behavior. For exam-ple, pharmaceutical company Teva s Brand qualities included integrity, which managers embodied by ensuring employees delivered products on time. ASSESS leaders AGAINST YOUR Leadership Brand To ensure leaders are living up to your leader-ship Brand , regularly assess their actions and accomplishments from an external point of view. Invite key customers, investors, and community leaders to periodically evaluate your leaders through surveys, interviews, and focus CUSTOMERS AND INVESTORS TEACHI ncorporate external expectations into your Leadership -development efforts by: Giving customers a voice in training-program design Making sure customer expectations inform every aspect of Leadership courses Using customers and investors to observe training sessions and to offer feedback about the content s relevancy or act as expert faculty for certain training programs Giving managers assignments that demand a customer lens Example.

5 Procter & Gamble helps its leaders gain a consumer and P&L perspective early. In-stead of assigning new hires to positions in individual departments such as finance, marketing, or HR, it places them with cross-unit Brand teams who are responsible for meeting customer expectations. TRACK THE LONG-TERM SUCCESS OF YOUR Leadership Brand A strong Leadership Brand translates into su-perior financial performance. Evaluate the success of your Leadership Brand by consider-ing how much confidence investors have in your future earnings (as expressed by your company s price/earnings ratio) and how much customers value your Brand (as expressed by market share).

6 Building a Leadership Brand by Dave ulrich and Norm Smallwood harvard business review managing for the long term july august 2007page 2 COPYRIGHT 2007 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Yo u w a n t your leaders to be the kind of people who embody the promises your company makes to its customers. To build this capability, follow these five principles. Quick: What do the following firms havein common?General Electric, whose motto is imagina-tion at work, is a diversified company with$163 billion in annual revenue. It is famous fordeveloping leaders who are dedicated to turn-ing imaginative ideas into leading productsand services.

7 A GE manager can be trusted tobe a strong conceptualist as well as a decisivethinker; an inclusive, competent team leader;and a confident expert in his & Johnson, whose credo begins, We believe our first responsibility is to thedoctors, nurses and patients, to mothers andfathers and all others who use our productsand services, earned $53 billion in revenue lastyear. It is celebrated for developing leaderswho provide scientifically sound, high-qualityproducts and services that help heal andcure disease and improve the quality of life. AJ&J manager is known for being socially re-sponsible and a stickler for product develop-ment and differentiation.

8 She takes a productto market in a disciplined way; she is commit-ted to Building consumer trust, to productquality, and to safety. Good help to those in need is the missionof Bon Secours Health System, a nonprofithealth care firm based in Marriottsville, Mary-land, that operates a variety of hospitals andnursing care facilities. Consistent with its pur-pose as a Catholic health care ministry, the19,000-person organization develops leaderswho put a premium on reflective integration. That means Bon Secours expects its managersto do more than just run health care must also balance the business of healthcare with compassion and up?

9 One obvious connection amongthese firms and others such as PepsiCo, Gold-man Sachs, Disney, Boeing, and HermanMiller is that they turn out strong leaders , insome cases becoming leader feeder firms,whose managers are well equipped to runother organizations. But there s a less obviousanswer as well: These companies go beyondstandard-issue leader training, doing some-thing they themselves aren t even necessarily Building a Leadership Brand harvard business review managing for the long term july august 2007page 3 aware of. Instead of merely strengthening theabilities of individual leaders , these companiesfocus on Building a more general leadershipcapability.

10 Specifically, they build what we callleadership Brand is a reputation for develop-ing exceptional managers with a distinct set oftalents that are uniquely geared to fulfill cus-tomers and investors expectations. A companywith a Leadership Brand inspires faith that em-ployees and managers will consistently makegood on the firm s promises. A Nordstrom cus-tomer knows that the retailer s employees andmanagers will give her white glove service. Par-ents who take their kids to a Disney theme parkassume that ride operators and restaurant per-sonnel will be upbeat, friendly, and clients understand that smart, well-educated consultants will bring the latest man-agement knowledge to bear on their Leadership Brand is also embedded in the or-ganization s culture, through its policies and itsrequirements for employees.