Employer Brand Headlines: The "Senses Working Overtime" Edition (#70)
Even if your head is planning the big meal, here’s your weekly serving of smarter employer brand thinking.
In this edition:
Don’t try to be right
Put on your Mickey Mouse ears
Becoming self-directed
Reading (and listening) lists
The Big Idea
Part of our job is to convince leadership (define that however you need) that a change is necessary. Maybe you need to shift recruiting from transactional to relationship or pipeline-driven. Maybe you need to convince Comms leadership to expand its palette a little to include less precise but more emotional language. Maybe you need to convince your CEO that how they “see” and describe the company is outdated or isn’t differentiated enough.
If you decide to attack the problem head-on, if you focus on showing how you are “right,” you are doomed. In a fight between your idea and leadership’s idea, your idea will always fail. Don’t take it personally. Even in companies with “flat structures where the best idea always wins” cultures, its human nature to let the person who can fire others get an advantage.
You need a better strategy. My recommendation is to stop trying to win and focus on making the problem real.
This same way listing the features of a pain-killer won’t make anything happen until I remind you of the pain of a headache, define the problem and show the impact of the problem. Make them feel the pain.
The hard part is that leadership has worked REALLY HARD to not feel the pain. The system you are trying to change has systems and structures in place to minimize the pain, to make it less obvious. On top of that, leadership rarely sees EB/TA/Comms as changing ideas. There are rules passed down once every decade or so and we all treat them as gospel (this decade’s rules were written by Lazlo Block in a book that seems completely ignorant of EB thinking) until we realize they are wrong.
Your job: show where and how leadership is wrong. Break the ice around calcified thinking based on out-dated thinking. If transactional recruiting is so good at attracting, would any of the current leadership have applied to be subjected to such a process? No? Huh. Show comms how all your competition is using the exact same language (maybe show the language and get them to guess what company wrote it). Send the CEO (nicely, please!) an email that shows how much of your business hiring needs to be in a new area, one not part of their current description of the company.
Don’t prescribe. Don’t solve. Not yet. Just start ripping out the guts of old thinking and show it to leadership. You’ll be surprised how quickly leadership will end up in the same place you are, and your battle with be 10x easier.
On to the Headlines
James’s Note: (to be fair, everything here is my note, but I wanted to get meta for a second, and now I’ve taken it too far…) Here in the states, its Thanksgiving week, so there wasn’t nearly as much to share. I expect a flotilla of articles coming out in the next week or two as we round the corner to year-end pontification season.
It’s safe to say that a company like Disney knows a little something-something about content. While other companies (historically) have come to the gospel of content, Disney was born of it. It’s been part of Disney’s DNA effectively from the beginning, a point proven by the infamous 1957 diagram of how their content properties drove every single aspect of their business. And in this article from Stories Incorporated, that diagram is reinvented to show how employer brand stories can impact and drive virtually every aspect of how a company grows. This is worth sharing around your company. (h/t Recruiting Brainfood)
The concept of “self-directed organizations” isn’t strictly new, but as business leaders are looking at 2020 as an opportunity to build back better, the idea seems to be coming into vogue. Building an employer brand in a top-down org is relatively straight-forward. Building a brand in a more self-directed org is a whole different beast, so take a look at this model for how business can become more self-directed and start identifying places where you can influence the process and embed more brand thinking into it.
Quick Hits
10 best articles on Employer Branding in October 2020.
Key Measures Of Marketing Outcomes
10 Ways to Reimagine Your Brand
EB Tip Of The Week
We are entering that amazing period between Thanksgiving (US) and New Years when things… slow down. Yes, take time off. Yes, give thanks and appreciate your co-workers, friends and loved ones. But now is the best time to change things up. Read something different. Check out different podcasts. Open your mind a bit beyond the workaday world of impressions and Glassdoor reviews. I highly recommend the following:
The Knowledge Project #97 with Roger Martin (podcast)
Strategy Is Your Words by Mark Pollard (book)
Alchemy by Rory Sutherland (book)
Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead In Advertising by Thomas Kemeny (book)
Overthrow II by Adam Morgan (book)
Abstract (Netflix Series)
Anything Jasmine Bina does (podcast or writing)
Any interview with Brian Eno (search your podcast tool)
And Inside Your Fortune Cookie It Says...
“The twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.“
- Igor Stravinsky
Thanks, everyone!
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Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
I tried to write the best book ever written on employer branding. I don’t know if I completely succeeded, but for 99 cents, you can decide for yourself.
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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