(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Arthur Lugovoy on Unsplash

10-Point Plan: Build a Brand Values Baseline — PART 2

One Ripple on a Bungee Cord

Master teachers and trainers will tell you that the most lasting understanding is that which builds on what we know and takes form from our experience of what we are learning. The most powerful method for moving a person, a team, or a group of volunteers to share the vision and values of a project or a brand in a deep thoughtful and feeling way is to let them follow the path to their learning as much as possible.

Anyone who’s sat watching someone who moves a mouse around a keyboard showing us how to use a web tool knows that method is not nearly as effective as when someone hands us the mouse and asks us to do the same motions to see the results.

If we want our new volunteer, new employee, new team or group to take on, understand and internalize the values that ARE our brands letting them own their own learning is by far the best way to go.

Two weeks ago, we collected the values words behind the higher purpose that brings our teams to the quest — what we’re building together that we can’t build alone. We talked about the idea of sending them them off with a challenge to condense that list of words into 5 words that might stand up and stand alone as a foundation for what we do. I offered some about the huge list of value words.

How might we take this list back to entire company to distill it down to no more than five words — a values baseline — that describes the values that drive what we do?

Last week, we talked about how to find the leaders in the pack of people around us.

Send out the first generation of evangelists to interact with stakeholder leaders. But make sure that the message you send doesn’t get smaller and smaller — like a ripple in the water. Instead imagine that the first ripple — the core team of 8-12 people — are attached to the quest a fine thin bungee cord. Have them go out, learn and come back again.

How to Bring a Second Generation of Evangelists into Building a Brand Values Baseline

The goal or objective of sharing at this moment is to invite and include the people who help our business thrive at the earliest point in the process.

• Work with the core group to help them identify leaders who want to build something that they can’t build alone.
• Determine a strategy of selecting 2-4 per core team member that will move outward from the core group to include core people in adjacent groups with similar needs. For example, marketing might reach to sales, pr, communications.
• Invite those individuals to listen into a report of what the core group has been doing and ask their help in reviewing the core values baseline words when the team has reached 5 or fewer. (keep this informal and conversational.)

As the new stakeholder leaders are invited to be part of the review process give them room to ask questions and offer to participate. Let them know you’re preparing a formal method to move the process out to a second generation. Meanwhile ask them to …

• be an active part of what the group doing
• be the eyes on the outside of the conversation checking that we’re not missing or skipping important ideas
• offer insights, questions, mutations, and new visions,
• add energy and experience missing from the group.

How do we do that?
To build trust and a solid brand values baseline, strategy needs to underpin how this goes. Each core team of champions and heroes from the first meeting needs to champion a group or team that will become their shareholders network — the second-generation ripple. Inside that second ripple, the core team can identify 4-8 people that seem most interested and qualified to enlist in participating in ‘building something we can’t build alone.” The core teams can hold 1-2 small meetings of 3-4 people and place the task of distilling the words down to a short together with them.

In two to four weeks, the core teams can meet again with a single short list and a depth of comments from the individuals with whom they’ve met and discussed the values underpinning the brand values baseline.

When the core teams meet together, the discussion then revolves around how to serve the thoughtful, heartfelt needs of the higher cause of both the first and second generation as we clarify and condense the values baseline to fewer than 5 words.

Can you name the values that drive your business? Are you sure that everyone who helps your business thrive would agree on those five words

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss