Brand values - making a pact
Brand culture is set from the top down. It is up to the founding team to establish the principles and values for a new business and brand. This is not as easy as it sounds, but by giving careful consideration to how the team engages with each other, it will enable the business to achieve substantial productivity gains. A team starting out with mutual respect, a focus on the shared goal, and appreciation for each other’s role in the team, has the best chance to succeed. Often, how a team starts out determines how it will go on.
In stark contrast, a team trying to operate within a toxic environment will struggle to reset and positively build, unless the underlying principles that set the environment are completely eradicated. The end game for this situation is that the attitudes directed internally will end up on the outside of the business, projecting a negative brand to customers, recruiters, investors and commercial partners.
Signs of a toxic environment include:
The executive feel disempowered in daily decision making, rather than enabled to perform
There appears to be a constant need to defend and jockey for position, rather than freedom to make mistakes and learn quickly
Specialist team members are not treated as credible, rather than being invaluable guidance
Incentives are not aligned, or worse, in conflict, rather than reinforcing a shared goal
Every day people go home emotionally exhausted, rather than reinforced
Sound familiar? Have the capacity to make change?
It all comes down to team values.
When companies talk about their values, what does this really mean in practice? And where they are deciding on appropriate values for the team, how can they know they’re on the right track? Are they establishing a framework that is realistic to uphold, or is it more an aspirational statement of how they hope the company will behave?
One way to frame the foundation block of brand is to think of values like a pact made between the core founding team. Founding teams go through sometimes intense frustrations that come with establishing structures, policies and engaging various institutions to support on legal and financial matters. They need to ensure they not only get over the line, but they still respect each other at the point of success.
Start by asking, “What are the 3 rules of engagement that we always follow when working through difficult conversations and decision-making as a team?” These rules may not be the same for each team. Certainly there are basic courtesies of being polite, punctual and constructive, but what about the more challenging rules, for example, how decisions are made, level of transparency of shared information, or how arguments are resolved?
As an example, a science-based technical team will approach these issues differently from a creative team or a people management team. But they don’t have to. All three teams can make decisions based on hypothesis, analysis, argument to support the hypothesis, and an action plan with follow up review. The agreed method is important. How the team conducts themselves through the process is just as important.
In practice, sticking to the values that are most critical for team success can sometimes require putting oneself in a vulnerable position; being humble, seeing another view, trusting in the views of each individual team member, staying focussed on the goal, and not managing one’s position within the team, as it’s often tempting to do. Stick to and nurture the pact and what results is, not only will the team become more trusting as a unit, it will enable quicker decision making and speed of execution.
How a team behaves toward each other will inevitably be reflected in the way they treat external stakeholders; customers, partners, investors. If the team is treated with contempt, then that attitude will spill over to become the company brand. And then even the most dominant brands become short-lived.
