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Reimagining B2B Brand Awareness Through Real Faces: How it Benefits Organizations
Nurturing employees to be the voice of the brand sustains an ecosystem for innovation, bridging marketing efforts and connecting them with the stakeholders. Today’s post is by Dhanshi Kittusamy Murthi, Regional Head of US Marketing at Vuram, a global hyperautomation services company. Organizations across industries are exploring ways to shape a sustainable work culture that enables their people to perform at their highest levels. One way to do this is by presenting people with opportunities to be recognized for their expertise: this not only nurtures outstanding results by building confidence among employees but also boosts the visibility of the brand. Enabling employees to be the voice of the brand sustains an ecosystem for innovation and productivity, and content is the vital piece of the puzzle to achieving this. It boosts brand awareness and acts as a means through which an organization’s employees can showcase themselves. Generating Content that Represents the Brand: According to a 2021 Statista survey involving business-to-business (B2B) content marketing professionals, 91% of the organizations responded that creating brand awareness was one of the goals of their content marketing activities. While chalking out the marketing plan or budget for branding campaigns, marketers should factor in an essential segment that can champion the voice of the brand in the truest sense: its own people. Every growing, successful organization is driven by passionate people and a work culture that appreciates their efforts. When the employees love what they do, they take pride in what they learn and advocate the best practices. Encouraging them to share their expertise builds a repository of trustable knowledge and content that truly represents the brand. Building Trust-Based Stakeholder Relations: Showcasing people as the face of the brand allows businesses to communicate authentically while having a host of benefits. Beyond making an impact in the industry, […]
What is your assessment of your current immediate team?
Our reader poll today asks: What is your assessment of your current immediate team? We’re truly a high-performing team, well above all others 17.18% We’re a solidly performing team 50.77% We’re an average team 20.61% We’re a below-average team 6.10% We’re a dysfunctional team 5.34% Change your view of average. Almost 70% of poll respondents claim to be on an above-average team. Clearly that math doesn’t work. While the bias is natural to think your team is great, do you really have a clear view as to what average performance is and where your performance stands relative to that standard? When is the last time you went out and talked with other teams about what they’re doing well? Are you hitting the same performance levels as those teams? How can you improve your game? Don’t be satisfied with simply saying you’re above average. Go validate that performance and objectively assess how well you’re doing. There’s always room for improvement. Bias and complacency might be holding you back from achieving greatness. And if you’re in the 11% who said you’re below average or dysfunctional, you’re probably right and you need to put an action plan together immediately. Go benchmark great teams, pick one or two small tasks you can improve, and start a gradual performance improvement program. – Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
Establishing Your Ethical Code
Establishing an ethical code helps you behave in a manner that is consistent with the type of leader you want to be. As a leader, it’s important to set guidelines. We’ve all made bad decisions at some point. Wouldn’t it be great to have something that can prevent us from making a bad decision before it actually happens? So a leadership maxim designed to say, “Here are my rules of the road. Here are the things that are non-negotiable for me and decisions I won’t make outside of this set of boundaries.” I’ve had two maxims over the years. The first, “It’s hard to shave if you can’t look yourself in the mirror.” Now, with this goatee, I have to look in the mirror every single day, but the way this maxim reminds me to make good decisions is, I need to be okay with the guy that’s looking back at me in the mirror every single morning. There have been times where I had two choices, and I could easily logic my way into making a wrong one. This maxim has made me pause for a second and say, “How are you going to feel about this tomorrow?” And the answer was not so great, so I made the more difficult choice. Now, in terms of emotional resonance, that maxim resonated for me for a while, but ultimately, I changed my maxim to, “What would Nana say?” Nana was my grandmother, and I’m the firstborn grandson in an Italian family, so Nana and I had a very special relationship. I sit there and I think about, well, what would my Nana say if she saw me doing what I’m doing right now? She would either be really proud of me and happy with it or she’d start saying things […]
Ultimate Influence Via the Parry
Use this tactic of deflection to avoid needless conflicts and turn your adversaries into allies. Today’s post is by Bob Burg, author of Adversaries into Allies: Win People Over Without Manipulation or Coercion (CLICK HERE to get your copy). “Who is mighty? That person who can control their own emotions and make, of an enemy, a friend.” – Talmud Our 16th U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln, was one of the best when it came to turning adversaries into allies. “…{On one occasion}, when another official sharply criticized Lincoln’s judgment, the president responded to a reporter’s interrogation by saying he had great respect for the other man, and if this official had concerns about him, there must be some truth to it. Such discretion disarmed divisiveness that was intended to draw Lincoln into side-skirmishes, it won the hearts of his friends and foes and it allowed Lincoln to maintain focus on more important issues.” What Lincoln did was to utilize the tactic of “deflection.” This means to softly “parry” a challenge or accusation, deflecting it into another direction where it misses entirely. This is actually a common boxing move. When one fighter throws a jab, the intended target will, very coolly, simply wait until the punch almost reaches him. He’ll then just parry it away with a very slight flick of the wrist. Harmless. Lincoln did it. You can too. Use the Other Person’s Force…To Your Advantage
Discovering Your Personal Inspiration
Understanding what inspires you to do your best work is one of the first steps in developing your leadership philosophy. As you begin articulating your leadership philosophy, the first place to start is leading yourself. You need to know why you’re excited to go to work every day. Why do you get out of bed every day? Because as leaders, we’re there to inspire and motivate the members of our team. For us to do so, we should probably be motivated first and foremost. Now, in terms of a maxim, a maxim is a trigger to remind you of a story or something that’s emotionally resonant. My maxim, in terms of why do I get out of bed every day, is light bulbs. Two words, light bulbs. That might not mean a lot to you, but it means the world to me because the type of work that I love to do, the best moments in my career, are moments where I’m teaching, where I’m doing something like I’m doing right now. When I teach and I see a participant struggling with an idea, but then I’m able to explain it in a manner that I see that light bulb go off—I see their face light up—that’s so exciting for me, and so fulfilling. That’s the type of work that I love to do. There’s huge emotional resonance in the notion of light bulbs for me. Maxims should drive behavior. Let me show you how maxims can drive my behavior when I think about light bulbs. Imagine a situation where a client comes to me and they say, “Mike, we’ve got two pieces of work for you. You can only do one. One is going off into a cubicle and working by yourself on an Excel model. The other piece of work is writing a new leadership training course for us and delivering it to our high-potential associates.” As I think about light bulbs, it becomes very clear to me that I should walk away from the Excel […]
Be a Better Leader by Wagging Your Tail
Dogs can teach us a thing or two. Have you ever thought about how to apply canine behavior to your leadership style? There are interesting approaches your dog would encourage you to try if you want to be a better leader. Today’s post is by Krissi Barr, co-author of The Fido Factor: How to Get a Leg Up at Work. If you’re like most Americans you love dogs. Unlike a goldfish won at a church festival, people form deep and meaningful relationships with their canine pals. So what does any of this have to do with leadership? As it turns out, a lot. Leadership is more art than science, and more emotion than logic. The actions and behaviors that roll up to form an effective leader, when you boil them down, are actually pretty simple. And they are very similar to why we love dogs so darn much. Dogs are faithful, inspirational, determined and observant. These four core qualities—the Fido Factors—are the basis of the unexpected reason why we can learn leadership lessons from dogs. Take a dog’s tail. It’s a crystal clear barometer of how they are feeling. Happy and it wags like crazy, guilty and it curls under out of shame. Dogs are simply incapable of hiding how they feel. They can’t lie. Not so much with humans. Like a professional poker player, most of us have gotten very good at hiding our emotions in the workplace. And while there are times when that’s a good thing, more often than not we’d benefit from wagging our tail a little more. Dogs don’t hide how they feel. Take a typical day coming home after work. There to greet you at the front door is your dog. His smiling face, a slobbery tennis ball in the mouth and a wagging […]
The Four Aspects of Leadership
Internalizing these four aspects of leadership is a great first step in developing your personal leadership philosophy. When articulating your leadership philosophy, you need to think beyond the leader led diad. A lot of times we get focused on, “Well, this is how I interact with a person and that’s what leadership is about.” As a leader, you need to look at yourself more completely as an individual in a variety of domains. As I’ve looked at leadership and tried to be more complete in the thinking about it, there are really four aspects of leadership that I invite you to think about: Leading Yourself First is leading yourself. Where are you going? What’s important to you? What are your personal ethical standards? What are the beliefs that underpin how you’re going to interact with the members of your team? Leading the Thinking Next is leading the thinking. As the leader, you need to set the direction for where the team is headed. You need to articulate behavioral standards for what you will and won’t stand for from the members of your team. Leading Your People Next is leading your people, and we need to lead people as individuals. You can’t treat them as faceless cogs in the machine because that won’t inspire them or get the best performance out of them. Leading your people is all about understanding what their personal wants and needs are and what motivates them. Leading a Balanced Life The last aspect of leadership is leading a balanced life because if you’re burned out, you’re worthless to the members of your team. Additionally, as a leader, you set the tone, so you’re going to set an example on balance. Making sure that you stay in balance is important to making sure the team stays in balance. Developing Your Leaderships Maxims Now, […]