Leadership? 🔬 (EBH#172: Happy Hour)
Are you a leader or are you mostly doing as you're told?
Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd.
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First…
If you’re budgeting for an employer brand or EVP in 2023, maybe you should think about building your own. The next two cohorts start January 10th.
The Big Idea
Let’s talk about the box.
In being hired as an employer brand owner, lead or manager, you are given a box. Usually by your boss. The box is where you live. It is where you work. It is your area of responsibility, your focal area, your functional area. Not your domain, because that implies ownership and agency, but the stuff
This box isn’t yours. It is owned by your boss. Your job (according to our boss) is to stay in the box and optimize processes, to maximize outcomes, provided they are primarily within the box. Do that, and your boss will give you kudos and maybe eventually a small promotion, where your box will get just a little bigger.
Of course, there’s no actual box, but it provides a nice dividing line. When you think about your job, when you are doing your job, are you a manager working in the box? Or are you a leader working beyond the box?
Managers are there to accept constraints as given and optimize and maximize within them. Managers are what make the trains run on time. Managers check boxes and make sure all the other boxes are checked.
[The worst is when managers are managed by managers. You know who I mean: the ones more interested in spell-checking the deck a third time than whether the content drives action. The ones who are putting you in a box because someone put them in a box.]
Because if we manage, we allow others (generally people who don’t have a very wide perspective of what employer brand can be or the impact it can make) to define the box for us. And that forces you to see your situation (and your job) through a drinking straw. And you can’t make an impact that way. Do great work as a manager and you’ll have the shiniest handrails on the Titanic.
Brands are built not by managers, but by leaders. You can’t create a brand by managing it. You have to find an insight about your audience. You need to think how that insight changes the game, and how to engage with people (especially those who are defying their own boxes) to add value. To create value.
Brands are a creation. They come from nothing and change how people see the world. You don’t do that by following a to-do list. You don’t do that by coloring within the lines. You do that by leading: leading an idea, leading attention, leading work. You may never lead people directly, but when you lead an idea forward, when you’re willing to stand in the room and bang the drum about your idea, a leader will soon have people following.
You don’t need a leader title to lead. It starts by refusing to be boxes in. It starts by seeing your issues from a higher perspective. It comes from seeing the whole board and being willing to create value for others.
Being a leader isn’t easy, and it comes with a whole new set of problems. Others will think you’re being political by refusing to stay in your box. Or being ostentatious. Or just “a bad fit.”
But being a leader is the only way to create and build brands.
Strategy Idea
The “Anti” strategy. One of the clearest and fastest way to design and communicate your brand is to say what you aren’t. In fact, you can build a great brand by being the “anti-” something. The Anti-Amazon strategy? Enabling companies of any size to build and manage their own commerce site without having to feel like their products are commoditized on someone else’s shelf (see: Shopify). What is the opposite of what you have to offer? Can you define what you are against? It will frame your brand very quickly and offer coattails to potentially ride.
The Employer Brand Minute
Daily publishing continues with videos about advocacy, who owns your brand, managing your personal brand, and today’s episode on… well, I think the title speaks for itself.
Headlines
I don’t mean to pile on Twitter, as I have friends who work there (I think. What time is it?), but you can’t deny that the last three weeks provide an amazing case study in bad brand management. Especially as the Greatest Twit fuses his own brand to Twitter’s. There’s a decent write up of looking at the situation from a consumer brand perception, but this is the story you tell a leader at your company who refuses to believe that everything your company does (good and bad) impacts the employer brand and your ability to attract talent.
Also:
Brand Tribalism: The Good, the Bad, and the Somewhere In-Between
Branding color psychology is mostly (but not entirely) bullshit
“Any ad that doesn't cause a ruckus is a lousy ad.” - Ed McCabe
Whenever you’re ready, I have a few ways I can help you:
EVP Masterclass: Develop your own Employer Brand/EVP alongside other recruiting leaders in my next guided cohort.
Employer Brand for Recruiters: Video on demand to teach recruiters how using their employer brand properly makes them more effective. Group rates available.
Coaching and support: Email me and we’ll set up time to talk 1:1 about how I can help you or your company take advantage of your employer brand.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn)
Resources:
Search all 1,700+ links historically referenced in the article archive.
Download 105 free (or almost free) ways to activate your employer brand.
Read Talent Chooses You for free from this open source Google Doc.
Here’s the 2022 version of The Employer Brand Manifesto.
220+ episodes of The Talent Cast podcast.
Where the subject line came from:
The Housemartins - Happy Hour
There’s something supremely inspiring to see such absolute dorks form a band and record some really fun music. The Housemartins aren’t attractive. They really aren’t cool. And (as this video proves) they can’t even dance. But you can’t resist this song. A classic “sounds happy but the lyrics read as dour” song from the mid-80’s new wave of Brit bands (alongside the Blow Monkeys, The Lightning Seeds and Lloyd Cole), Happy Hour needs only one listen (at only 2:34, how can you say no?) to make it clear that nerds and dorks can make create pop music. Enjoy!
If you are enjoying the music, congratulations, you have great taste in music and/or you’re old! Just for you, I made a Spotify playlist of all the subject line 80’s songs I’ve referenced over the last year and a half. You don’t even need hairspray to enjoy it:
