Reena Khullar Sharma, Founder of Agilis Executive Consulting, offers executive coaching and HR partnerships to organizations globally.
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In the pandemic-influenced world of work, leadership teams will be challenged to discover not only the brand identity of their organization but also the brand identities of their employees and how these identities contribute to the organization's momentum and success. This will include recognizing how every brand identity on a team represents and integrates into an organization’s design strategy.
The Key 'Brand' Qualities For Successful Employee Integration
There are several behaviors that can promote individual brand identities' integration with and alignment to your organization’s talent management practices. Some key characteristics of these team-oriented behaviors that complement strong leadership include:
Agility
Integrate behavioral interview questions into your recruitment strategy, including questions about situations that call for candidates to be agile in their roles, particularly when dealing with a diverse team. It will be important to take the lead and elaborate on how agility is used in your organization to perform tasks that have led you to success.
Persistence
Behavioral interview questions can also help candidates highlight when they used persistence to succeed in their roles. Encouraging the sharing of these stories and demonstrating that you are open to different paths to success allows you and your organization to highlight the diversity of your team members' skills, and how they performed their tasks in different ways without losing speed, time or momentum.
Resilience
Throughout the hiring process, it will be important for leaders to share their personal and professional stories and situations that required them to become resilient. This will also be a helpful exercise to promote the idea of personal brands to current and potential employees and encourage them to share their experiences in the same manner. Stories of overcoming obstacles can also help promote inclusive, equitable and diverse conversations.
Emotional Intelligence
I recommend incorporating situational interview questions into your recruitment process to help determine how candidates deal with ambiguity and the level of emotional agility that may be required for unexpected changes or challenges in a business setting. This will determine how candidates exhibit the qualities of unity and collaboration, both leading and following their team members.
Compassion
Encourage storytelling in interviews to let employees highlight how they exhibited compassion in a variety of circumstances. Compassion is a key behavioral characteristic that should be integrated into performance measures to ensure that collaboration and relationships remain a priority when introducing employees and their personal brands into an organization. Leadership teams should be aware of how to display compassion toward their employees and share stories in a safe setting, particularly stories that highlight employees’ journeys.
The Power Of Individual Brand Identities
Discovering individual brand identities should become a core competency in your organization’s design strategy, as it is essential to creating a more inclusive and collaborative work environment. Defining each employee’s brand identity helps you and your organization discover an employee’s purpose, which will help you accommodate and accept the varied needs, lifestyles and expertise of your workforce.
It is important to create a sense of belonging to help strengthen each person's brand identity and connection to your team, which includes their purpose and how it relates to shared goals. Everyone has a unique journey to share and an equally individualized lens through which they see the world. Life experiences and things we learn along the way all shape our personal brands. Implementing these individual brand identities into your organizational design strategy helps people respect and value one another more as well.
Organizations that offer opportunities for leaders to reflect on their leadership styles also allow themselves the opportunity to realign their retention practices around their organization’s core values. Retaining your team requires empowering your employees and leading them to form a recognition of their brand identities. Recognizing how their personal brands are integrated into your organization’s culture will, in turn, increase employee engagement.
Conclusion
When a brand identity is integrated into your organization’s design, and leadership teams are committed to recognizing how their own behaviors and personal brand represent their organization, then a talent strategy can work seamlessly and in alignment with every brand identity represented in the entire organization.
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