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The Business Case for Trust: How Leaders Can Unlock the Full Power of Trust

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Trust Pays Off

The business case for trust is straightforward and continues to grow. Each year, the data shows that companies with a culture of trust are more profitable than those without it. A culture of trust is not just a “nice-to-have.” It’s good business. Trust culture companies have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of three, and high-trust companies “are more than 2½ times more likely to be high performing revenue organizations” than lower-trust companies.

Why?

It turns out we come with an evolutionary hard-wired attraction to people we can trust and a visceral aversion to those we don’t.

People are drawn to and prefer to do business with organizations that have earned their trust, which results in greater productivity, higher sales and wider margins. Trust attracts and engages people, says David Rock who focuses on applying neuroscience insights to management. In SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others published by the NeuroLeadership Journal, he lays out not just the benefits of trust within an organization but a framework for establishing and building it:

“Indeed, the ability to intentionally address the social brain in the service of optimal performance will be a distinguishing leadership capability in the years ahead…

The impact of this neural dynamic is often visible in organizations. For example, when leaders trigger a threat response, employees’ brains become much less efficient. But when leaders make people feel good about themselves, clearly communicate their expectations, give employees latitude to make decisions, support people’s efforts to build good relationships, and treat the whole organization fairly, it prompts a reward response.

Others in the organization become more effective, more open to ideas and more creative. They notice the kind of information that passes them by when fear or resentment makes it difficult to focus their attention. They are less susceptible to burnout because they are able to manage their stress. The feel intrinsically rewarded…If you are a leader, every action you take and every decision you make either supports or undermines the perceived levels of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness in your enterprise. In fact, this is why leading is so difficult.”

Building Trust Starts with Behavior

In business, leadership behavior is what matters. The actions of leaders shape expectations. Each decision and action either reduces or builds trust.

We’ve consolidated the factors that build trust from a review of management literature. Through our analysis we found a consistent set of behaviors that trusted leaders demonstrate.

Clarity and transparency: People trust the clear, and mistrust or doubt unnecessary complexity. Be crystal clear about your purpose, expectations, and priorities. Tell the truth in a way people can verify. Be authentic and lean in on disclosure.

Empower with empathy: People learn to trust those that operate beyond their own self-interest; that show respect for others’ points of view, skills and expertise. People want to be great. Tune in to their abilities. Be the leader that lets others be great.

Consistently demonstrate integrity: People notice those who do the right thing for the right reason. Be true to yourself, your purpose, and your values.

Keep commitments and contribute: Few things build trust quicker than actual results. At the end of the day, people need to see outcomes. Empathy and integrity aren’t enough, unless combined with delivering on commitments. Be the most useful person in the room. Be consistent delivering results.

Keep current: People have confidence in those who stay up to date, relevant, and sharp. Stay curious and keep learning. Be an enthusiastic teacher and learner. Be known for seeking out new ways of doing things, ideas, and trends.

Be open and cultivate connection: Trust requires a relationship, and it is through its relationship with you that your team expresses its trust. Openness is essential to build these relationships. If people can’t get to know you, then they probably can’t get to trust you, either. With openness comes the requirement for a certain vulnerability.  Be available and present. Be the type of leader that ‘puts yourself out there’ and make the first move to make a connection.

Trust Takes Time

“Every action you take and every decision you make either supports or undermines the perceived levels of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness in your enterprise.” – David Rock

So take it one moment at a time. Trust can’t be built overnight. It requires time, effort, focus, and consistency. Inspiring trust requires authenticity and effort. But if you think of these elements as skills to work on and challenge yourself to think of every action or decision as an opportunity to demonstrate one or more, you will be on your way to building trust that will drive results and improve both the top and bottom lines.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

If You Want a Meaningful Brand, Make a Meaningful Impact

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Being a Meaningful Brand

The data is in, and to be a meaningful brand, you must make meaningful impact. It is inescapable. The most powerful and profitable brands – regardless of sector – are brands that enhance well-being and enrich peoples’ lives.

The Center for Positive Marketing at Fordham University recently published “The V-Positive Report,” which ranks brands according to how they affect consumers along seven dimensions of human needs and wants. The dimensions of the study span from basic physical function to the capacity for building relationships. The most “V-positive” brand in 2015 was Google, and every member of the top 10 were household names –brands you would recognize as leaders. According to the researchers at Fordham, these are great brands, in part, because they enrich lives and add meaning to lives.

Another data point suggests why failing to be meaningful and emotive is so dangerous for brands. Havas’ “Meaningful Brands Survey 2017,” which sampled 1,500 global brands, more than 300,000 people, 33 countries and 15 different industry sectors, found that a mere 20% of the brands people interact with have a positive impact on their lives. This means that the vast majority of brands could disappear entirely and most people wouldn’t even notice.

So what does this mean for companies and brands?

It’s simple to say and harder to execute, but for a brand to be truly meaningful, it must, in the language of academics, have a “positive impact on societal well-being.” In the language of Emotive Brand, a brand must exude meaning and elicit emotion from its core.

A truly meaningful brand must enhance the vibrancy and vitality of what we feel in our day-to-day lives. It must have an impact that transcends product attributes, price, or performance. It must make people feel. It must make people feel something positive.

The key is understanding exactly how your brand can help people and communities become and feel smarter, healthier, stronger, safer, and or more connected.

According to Martin Seligman, one of the leading lights of the positive psychology movement, positive emotions are directly linked to a person’s sense of significance, social engagement, interest, and purpose in life. Seligman’s research proves that positive emotions have a demonstrable effect on nearly all areas of a person’s life. Brands that generate positive emotions among consumers will be rewarded in all the normal ways, such as growth in market share and in shareholder value, while positively contributing to society as a whole. In short, more positivity generates more good.

Finding and evoking this kind of emotional resonance is our mission at Emotive Brand. We help our clients discover the real essence of their brand promise and emotional impact. We help companies lead with purpose and empathy and believe that empathetic brands are more adept at recognizing and connecting with the values, interests, hopes, and dreams of their customers, prospects, employees, and partners – brands that naturally inhabit Seligman’s “sweet spot of emotional resonance.”

To us, data and findings from Fordham and Havas demonstrate what Emotive Brand has always known: for a brand to be meaningful and successful, it must positively impact people’s lives. If your brand can do that, it will improve your business performance, build your company’s fortunes, and enrich your customers’ lives.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design consultancy

Purpose-led Brands and the Role of the CEO

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-led leaders lead thriving businesses.

If you are a marketer faced with the task of re-branding or leading a brand strategy for your business, think about the person most influential to its success. Wondering who is essential to be part of the team? Ask yourself:

  • Who has the greatest insight into where your business needs to go?
  • Who can make sure that the company’s brand strategy embodies, and brings to life, this vision?
  • Who sees how the people, processes and policies of the business need to evolve to address future issues and opportunities?
  • Who is the best person to lead the organization forward in a focused, unified and purposeful manner?
  • Who do you need to ensure is on the team and willing to lead this project by your side?

The CEO

Yet, how many CEOs play a vital role in the development of brand strategy – that is, to the point where they achieve real feeling of ownership of the strategy’s ambition? Going further, what does this mean to the successful deployment  and socialization of the brand strategy across the business?

Unfortunately, all too often, branding is seen as a subset of the business, a line-item in the overall business strategy, and the responsibility of a team (and their agency) reporting to the CMO.

In many cases, the resulting “brand book” invariably features an introduction from the CEO, in which there are a series of predictable, jargon-filled and corporately-safe comments. It may have the signature of the CEO below it, but few honestly believe the CEO has written, or even read, this letter.

Delegated activity, not a transformative business strategy

Indeed, for the CEO, the “brand” often is a mystery and something better left to others. It is something to be delegated and not to be owned. As such, to the CEO it is more of activity resulting in a document, than a key element of a transformative business strategy.

This state of affairs leaves any brand strategy, however meaningful, out on a limb. While the brand team will be passionate advocates of the strategy, everyone else in the company will, like the CEO, think of the brand as “someone else’s job”.

And this, sadly, is where many brand strategies crumble to pieces.

  • A brand strategy becomes a new logo and guidelines.
  • A strong brand promise is created, but it is not clear what it means or why it matters.
  • The brand strategy, while the right one, lives in a file cabinet drawer, or on the wall as a poster.
  • Or worse yet, a brand strategy is developed, yet never fulfilled on.

The brand strategy fails because it was neither truly “top-down” (it came from another “department”, not from the big honcho), nor “bottom-up” (because employees beyond the brand team didn’t see it as their job to do).

The value of CEO ownership

When a CEO is urged, encouraged and, if need be, prodded to take a lead in the brand strategy process, a different result is experienced. It’s not at all that the CEO develops or writes the strategy. Rather, the CEO comes to see how his or her vision is embodied in the brand strategy, and how it can be used as a tool to transform the organization so that it can be stronger today, and better fit for the future.

When a CEO is seen as the chief proponent of, and supporting voice for, the strategy, employees throughout the organization see the strategy as more core to the business, and what they do within that business. They pay attention to strategy (assuming its delivered to them in a personally relevant and emotionally important way) and absorb it’s intent into their work practices (again, assuming they are shown how to do just that).

The value of across-the-board brand activation

Truly purpose-led brands stand out because they not only enjoy top-down support starting at the CEO, but because the brand strategy doesn’t stop at communications to the external world.

In this bottom-up mode, purpose-led brands take an holistic role in transforming how the brand is experienced, both inside and outside the business. No one in the business is left behind, as the brand strategy is deployed and socialized in a way that makes it the company’s “way of being”. Where employees are taught what it means to “Live the brand” each and every day.

When they feel purpose-driven, focused and gratified, employees work individually and in teams to create an energy that attracts the best customers, the most talented recruits, the most potent partners and the right investors. And your business thrives.

Top-down, bottom-up brand purpose-led strategies for better results overall

Brand strategies that embrace this “top-down, bottom-up” thinking aren’t relegated to the sidelines by the organization. Rather, as CEO-empowered forces, the relevant ambitions of the strategy become ideas which shape employee attitudes and behavior across the business.

Being based in the CEO’s vision, these purpose-led brand strategies work harder to point the business in the right direction, move it ahead with greater speed and agility, and lift it to a higher, more meaningful level in the hearts and minds of people.

Interested in learning more about a purpose-led brand strategy? Curious how to transform your business with a brand strategy? Download our white paper below.

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Emotive Brand works with CEO”s to help create purpose-led brand strategies that transform business.

Leadership Is What Leadership Means

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Gianpiero Petriglieri is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, a regular contributor to the HBR blog, and a prolific and insightful tweeter. Indeed, the title of this old, but relevant post is taken from one of his tweets promoting his piece on HBR, “There is no shortage of leaders.”

Professor Petriglieri’s main point is that the methods and goals of leadership are misplaced.  He suggests that the current narrow view of leadership development and practice is falling short of what’s needed in today’s world.

“There is no shortage of leadership at all.”

“There are plenty of strong leaders. Eagerly and effectively pursuing the goals they are selected and rewarded to pursue—in the ways they are trained and expected to.”

“Those goals are simply not aligned with the changes most of us wish to see, and their pursuit benefits only narrow circles on whose approval those leaders depend.”

A crisis of purpose

The result of these misplaced leadership methods and goals is nothing short of a crisis of purpose, according to Professor Petriglieri.

“There is no shortage of leaders, and perhaps not even a crisis of leadership. There is a shrinking of collective imagination, a crisis of purpose—and much leadership development, with its overemphasis on leaders’ skills and styles, is complicit in it.”

“When it focuses on skills alone, the leadership-industrial complex demonstrates the same self-interested narrow mindedness of the leaders it chastises. The emphasis on leading right lets us avoid the harder question—what we are leading towards.”

“While leadership remains a synonym of getting our way while conforming to the latest etiquette manual, we shall continue cultivating stylish instrumentality. To stop doing so, we must help leaders help us redefine the expectations, norms, and structures we labor within—and the ends they are designed to pursue.”

What does this say about your leadership style?

Have you focused solely on developing more effective skills and styles of leadership? Have you allowed yourself to work only in service of the goals others have selected for you, and for the rewards they offer when you achieve them? Have you let your sense of purpose and meaning take a back seat?

Little wonder if you have, given the pressures on performance in today’s world. But, given what your leadership can mean in this world – to your bosses, your followers, society, and yourself – leading “right” isn’t enough.

Ask yourself the most important leadership question, “What is my purpose beyond just doing what is expected?” Consider how by raising your sights, opening your heart, and freeing your mind, you can answer the question you’ve been avoiding: “What are you leading towards?” Finally, rethink your approach to leadership with this thought: “Leadership is what leadership means.”

For our White Paper on Successful Leaders for the 21st Century, please download below.

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Emotive Brand is an Oakland based brand strategy and creative agency

Leadership in a Time of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We’ve often referred to Stowe Boyd and his musings. Awhile back, we referenced the implications of social business networking based on Stowe Boyd’s presentation on “Postnormal Business“.

Let’s now explore the four drivers of the Postnormal era: the VUCA syndrome.

Volatility – Things are moving, evolving, changing, and disappearing faster and faster all the time.

Uncertainty – It’s harder to predict what is coming, what to do, and what the results will be.

Complexity – The business world is becoming far more complex, media is highly fragmented, and it’s harder to see the woods for the trees.

Ambiguity – Decision makers are less decisive, issues are less clear, and choices are less obvious.

As a business leader, what can you do to cope with – indeed, prevail – in this turbulent environment? Here’s what Stowe Boyd suggests:

Counter Volatility with Vision.

Neuter Uncertainty through Understanding.

Master Complexity through Clarity.

Resolve Ambiguity through Agility.

To take these leadership challenges a few steps further, ask yourself:

Do you have a clear and compelling vision? Have you taken the time and effort to ensure everyone in your organization understands your vision, why it matters to them, and how they individually can help you achieve it?

Do you really understand what drives people to act in this environment? Remember, your employees, customers, prospects, shareholders, and partners are also experiencing VUCA in their personal and professional lives. Having empathy for them goes a long way to determining what you need to do in order to get them to help you make the changes you need.

Do you see things with clarity, or do they become increasingly complex with every meeting, every conference call, or every customer meeting? It pays to bring in people from the outside to help you get a better grip on the dynamic world around you, but it won’t help if they’re people just like you. Bring in people with a fresh perspective that will help you see the forest for the trees.

Do you run an agile organization, or are traditions, processes, second guesses, and doubts keeping your company from being able to jump over hurdles as they are encountered? Analyze information flows and behavior patterns to identify blockages and stumbling blocks in the progress.

VUCA promotes undesirable attitudes and behaviors in organizations. Uncertain, confused, and slow-to-respond businesses lose customers, employees, partners, investors, and reputation.

Many leaders are seeing that the effects of VUCA can be countered by defining a compelling and accessible purpose beyond profit that drives new attitudes and behaviors within the business. This new meaning-based way of being resonates with customers and prospects, making them more likely to admire, respect, and buy from the business.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland based brand strategy and creative agency.