What’s Your Connection? Emotion Good For Your Brand, Your Organization’s Talent Brand

Jody Ordioni can help with your personal brand and the talent brand of your company.

Women for generations have been penalized in the workforce for being too emotional. Or emotional at all.

But a new book contends that research shows emotional connections to your own personal brand and to the talent brand of your organization are very good things. Deciding on and cultivating your own brand as well as the talent brand of your workforce can not affect just your own trajectory, but the success of a company, organization or specific product.

The problem is, a lot of us don’t know how to identify or project our own brands or how to identify and nurture the talent brand of our organization.

Jody Ordioni, founder and chief branding officer of Brandemix and author of the new book, The Talent Brand: The Complete Guide To Creating Emotional Employee Buy-in For Your Organization.

“Author Jody Ordioni of #Brandemix offers tips on your personal brand and the talent brand of your company. #womenleaders”

“Brands are emotive, you want to feel something, you want to belong to something. There is emotional buy-in,” Ordioni says. “It’s universal best practice in a high performing culture.”

First, in claiming your own brand, Ordioni suggests you are thoughtful and intentional. “The reason for this is you only get one reputation,” writes Ordioni who founded Brandemix 12 years ago, to have “greater connectivity from advertising to marketing to talent acquisition.”

“Find out what your differentiators are, what are your unique pillars and curate all of them together,” Ordioni says. Decide how you will communicate those pillars– through social media, speaking, women’s leadership, mentoring—and be consistent, Ordioni advises.

“What do you think about when you think about somebody? Is there an alignment of their public persona with who they are?’ she asks. “If you are not curating what you are saying, communicating, representing and are aligned with, then figure out what your pillars are,” Ordioni says.

“At your highest purpose, what are all your accomplishments?” she asks.

The caveat though, is “Don’t drink your own Kool-Aid.” What she means is have a 360 team of advisors you know and trust who can “look objectively and compassionately at your personal brand,” Ordioni says. “You need outside facilitation.”

This is neither haphazard nor swift.

“Apply a certain rigor. All your efforts are focused on achieving these goals for your professional alignment,” says Ordioni, whose book won the gold medal in the the human resources category in the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards.

According to Dorie Clark, writing in Harvard Business Review, Research by Sylvia Ann Hewlett at the Center for Talent Innovation shows that cultivating your personal brand is one of the best ways to attract a sponsor — and professionals with sponsors are 23 percent more likely than their peers to be promoted. Your brand is also a powerful hedge against professional misfortune. If there are layoffs or cutbacks at your company, being recognized in your field makes it far more likely that you’ll be snapped up quickly by another firm.”

“Expanding your personal brand beyond your immediate circle is beneficial for #womenleaders.”

Expanding your personal brand beyond your immediate circle is beneficial for women leaders.

“When only a select group knows about your talents and abilities, you put yourself in jeopardy. You have fewer people who can speak to your contributions or provide support, whether that’s help in securing additional resources for an important project or moving up to a new role. And if your department is reorganized or your company has layoffs, the people who understand your talents won’t be in a position to help,” Clark writes.

Cultivating an accurate personal brand also means making sure you do not tarnish it. One way to do that is to be all talk and no action.

“Often, leaders focus on the theories and frameworks that underline a particular problem. But, most people look for insight into how to clarify and make sense of everyday complications and issues. The real value of thought leaders is in learning how to translate theories into practices that make a difference,” writes Rose Cartolari of Rose Cartolari Consulting in Forbes.

You also want to be sure you are not claiming that you are perfect. Mistakes make you a good leader.

“Leaders seeking to enhance their personal brands through thought leadership should remember there is strength in failures. Mistakes, mishaps and foibles are often teachable moments. In those bad times, we often learn some of our most important lessons about leadership, collaboration and innovation. Failing is human. Sharing failure stories reminds others that even big dogs have bad days,” – Stacey Staaterman of Stacey Staaterman Coaching & Consulting writes in Forbes.

“Just as your consumer brand tells the public what your brand stands for, or a personal brand reveals what you stand for, a talent brand has the greatest impact on how your organization is perceived by its talent,” Ordioni writes. The talent brand “servers as a point of entry for the larger promise within,” she writes.

Southwest Airlines wants you to have the “flight of your life.” Pepsi offers “possibilities.”

According to the 2018 Linked In Global Trends Report, “This new era of talent intelligence is a big step forward as it allows talent leaders to use data to influence future hiring.”

To build a company or organization’s talent brand, Ordioni suggests the framework of a house. The foundation is the talent brand vision, and on top of that are the culture pillars which are the things that make your company a desirable place to work.

“Building a company or organization’s talent brand is like building the framework of a house. #branding”

On top of that is the employer value proposition, an “expression of the benefits and expectation that come with working for your organization,” Ordioni writes. The roof is the positioning statement that “reinforces the value proposition for current and future employees and informs every employee message and action moving forward,” she writes.

Talent branding is not a quick fix and not a one and done proposition. Creating an organizations’ talent brand requires surveys, research and intention.

“When done the right way, people will self-select out,” says Ordioni. “You will communicate what the organization is like so there is not a lot of culturization that needs to happen in onboarding.”

Other experts agree.

“An effective employer value proposition is your shop window, an opportunity to showcase your organization’s values, personality and culture to highlight your business as a good employer and a great place to work,” Leanne Chambers, client solutions director for greenbean by NRG, told Insider.

“It is not only what the candidate can do for the company, but what the company can do for the candidate and a clearly defined EVP helps potential candidates easily identify what’s in it for them,” Chambers told Insider.

According to Insider, “Chambers added that responsibility for developing and reinforcing a company’s brand was the responsibility of everyone in a business, particularly senior management, especially as workforces can ‘either be your strongest brand ambassadors, or your biggest critics.’”

About the Author

Michele Weldon is editorial director of Take The Lead, an award-winning author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and a senior leader with The OpEd Project. @micheleweldonwww.micheleweldon.com