Your Leadership Brand

To survive and prosper, a small company must establish a marketing presence based upon a sustainable competitive advantage.

Let's begin to explore this principle (which makes it easy for people to buy from you) by first defining some terms:

• Marketing presence is the message your business communicates to its prospect and customer base. To be effective, the message should be clear and simple -- and contain the key attributes you want associated with your business.

• Competitive advantage is the sum of those attributes that differentiate your business from its competitors. This is your core competence. You develop, build and enhance it through a clear understanding of your customers' wants and needs. You implement it through a strategic plan (a directional compass) that can help you quickly adapt to changes in their wants and needs.
• Sustainable means to keep in existence, to maintain and affirm the validity of, to support the spirit, vitality and resolution of, to encourage, to endure and withstand. Only through your continuous understanding of what makes your business competitive can your business survive and prosper.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once said, "If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete." 

The continuous question every CEO asks is: How can our company continue to differentiate itself from our competition?

One answer proposed by Dave Ulrich, co-author of "Leadership Brand" and professor at the University of Michigan, is to create a leadership brand of how your company wants to be known by its customers.  Translating your firm's product or service brand into a strong leadership brand can increase the market value of your corporation as reflected in the P/E (price/earnings) ratio of your company's stock. 

Having a clearly expressed leadership brand increases your marketing presence and focuses management on improving its individual and corporate leadership capabilities by:

Focusing on value from the outside/in by the impact of leadership (more than the activity of individual leaders)

Puts leadership into the business language of employees, shareholders and customers

Applies across all levels of leaders now and in the future---by identifing important and sustainable internal employee actions

Combines leadership code (those leadership attributes/competencies that are important across all organizations) and the leadership differentiators (specific to your company)

To get started in building your leadership brand, take the following steps of asking the right questions whose answers will determine the desired outcomes:

1. Who are our key customers for the future?  (Segment key customers who define and represent the future)
2. What do we want to be known for by our target customers in the future?  (A statement of firm identity or brand that can become the basis of our culture)
3. What leadership behaviors go with the firm's brand?  (A definition of leadership through the eyes of the customer)
4. How well do we do as a company and as individuals?  (A periodic audit of the quality of leaders and leadership)
5. How can we upgrade our leadership by personal coaching, assignments and experience? (A personal and organization leadership investment strategy and succession plan)
6. How well are we doing at building leadership?  (Continuous assessments of leadership investments and quality)

Dave Ulrich: Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value