Leadership Brand

‘Leadership Brand’ by Dave Ulrich & Norm Smallwood (HBS, 2007) defines leadership brand as – understanding customer expectations and translating the same in employee behaviour. The point takes us to asking what a firm’s identity is and what is their leadership identity? For example – Wal-Mart is known for everyday low prices (firm’s identity) and its leader’s are known for managing costs and optimizing resources (leadership identity). Similarly Apple is known for innovation (firm’s identity) and its leaders are known for creating an entrepreneurial mindset amongst people (leadership identity).

It is very important for the firm’s to ask themselves what their firm’s identity is & consequently what their leadership identity is and continuously introspect the same. Can firm and leadership identity change? Yes, they can but for that the identities must be shared, debated and practiced.

One company that got it amazingly right and then terribly wrong is Toyota. Toyota is known for quality (firm’s identity). They actually pride themselves in the same, their punch line reads – ‘Quality Revolution’. Their leaders are known for continuous improvement (leadership identity) that comes from their legendary ‘TPS’ or Toyota Production System. TPS embraces continuous experimentation and improvements as a part of the work. Sometime back when they started to get complaints of faulty foot mat & brakes and cases of ‘unintended acceleration’ the leadership forgot for sometime what they are best known for and that is continuous improvement. For a company that prided itself on quality, it probably thought it was an embarrassment to accept that they got the same damn thing wrong! As a result they forgot their leadership identity and that in turn violated their firm’s identity (quality). By the time they reconciled and accepted the problem, much of the damage had been done.

Leadership is much used and almost an abused term. Everyone preaches and claims to know something on leadership. But the truth is that there is a serious dearth of leadership, although there are many leaders. The bottom-line is that leadership has to outlast the leaders in an organization and that happens through embedding an engagement with the external (customers, investors) and translating that into an engagement with the internal (employee behaviour).