In order to maximise the impact your team can have on the world around it, and to gain greater results, you need to implement a strong brand that can be lived by the whole team, not just you or one or two team members.
To begin, you need to do a little analysis. This forms stage one of the team brand development process (take a look at Developing and Influential Team Brand if you haven’t already see it).
In this article, I outline the next vital steps to implementing your new team brand.
- Optimise Brand Values. Based on the translation of your purpose, what brand values/behaviours would maximise your ability to deliver? Also do a reality check, is it feasible that you team will be able to live up to these values?
- Gain Team Buy-in. Because your team is so involved in the delivery of your service, they have to be totally bought-in to the impression you want them to create. The best way to do this is to involve them throughout this process and to make them part of the major decisions.
- Define Behaviours. Aside from the necessary behaviours, try to capture how these are achieved/conveyed (enthusiasm, pragmatism, empathy, friendliness, etc.). The more accurately you can define behaviours, the easier it is for your team to know what is expected of them and the easier it is to see them doing it.
- Consider Collateral. You might consider buying everyone a branded team t-shirt, although that may be a little extreme. Instead think of images, documents, signatures and presentations which can be used consistently to reinforce the team brand.
- Determine Measurement. If you’ve defined the behaviours well you will already know what you need to measure, but when and how are you going to do this? Unless you establish the mechanism for monitoring your team’s progress it will not get done and your efforts to develop your team brand will be lost within a month or two.
- Agree Actions. What have you (and they) got to do to begin to implement your team brand? Spread the workload and ensure team members remain accountable to the rest of the team.
- Review and Adjust. Celebrate evidence-based success at implementing the team brand and continuously adjust it to make it even better.
Developing your team brand is not an option if you want your team to maximise their success. If your brand is strong and positive not only will the rest of the organisation react more favourably to it, it will also foster a greater degree of identity, cohesion and team spirit. With greater sharing within the team, individual performance will rise even further and, together, they will be able to meet challenges far more effectively. Don’t allow team brand building to fall into the ‘nice to do’ list.
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