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How to Bring a 2nd Generation of Evangelists into Building a Brand Values Baseline

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(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

What Three Values Drive Your Brand?

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

10-Point Plan — The Brand Values Baseline Defined

Three Reasons Get Us to the Task at Hand

Now the core team returns to discuss the feedback from the stakeholder leaders who’ve helped them identify the brand values baseline. Review the words each group has returned with and talk through the meaning until the group can roll up the short list to three words that stand for the foundational core values that drive the business. Try one from the head, one from the heart, and one from the long-term vision or meaning.

An example might be these three that drive SOBCon:

Delivering brilliance: We believe in intelligent, elegant connected ideas that raise us up to higher thinking.

Trusting fearlessness: We believe in authentic trust in ourselves and others that has no room for fear as it stand with our intelligent ideas.

Deep Strategic Vision: Our quest and our purpose is to move ourselves, our businesses, and those around us forward with leadership born of strategy and deep meaningful purpose.

Or brilliance, trust, vision. Those three words wrap up the sentences and make the an easy reference for every decision that drives our business. Other people on the core team can choose their synonyms and as long as they mean the same thing, we can trust in the variations and the mutations that will grow from them.

We have our values aligned.

What three values drive your business?

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

Create a Powerful Core Community by Building a Brand Values Baseline – PART 1

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(Updated in 2020)

10-Point Plan: Build a Brand Values Baseline PART 1

A Decision Model for All

Any time we interact, we have a chance to build and strengthen relationships. When we strengthen relationships with the people who love what we do, we strengthen our business. When we know the values on which those relationships stand, we can identify, attract, and connect with more people like them.

That’s the thinking behind building a brand values baseline.

Whether you’re a corporation or a solopreneur, you can start a power core community by finding 6 to 10 people who support and love what you do and bring them into this exercise.

  • Choose a location that is good for thinking and honors the participants. Think of the place you might take your most valued client or customer group to talk strategy and future relationships.
  • Invite 2 – 8 heroes — people you’ve identified as social stars, training stars, influence stars — to a meeting. The wider diversity of their skills, levels and backgrounds, the richer the experience will be. Also invite a trusted non-participant to record notes.
  • Explain that the room is designated a free conversation zone — that you’ve asked them to join you in a conversation because of their leadership skills and the respect they show for the people who work for the business. Let them know you’re counting learning from them so that the company might grow.
  • Without much talk or fanfare, ask them to reflect on the highest reason they might believe in the work your business does. Allow them time — as long as 10 minutes — to gather their thoughts as individuals. Encourage them to write words and phrases, draw images, or make a mind map of what comes
  • Allow each individual to share his or her thoughts with the group. As they speak, write notes for reference and track words that express values on a flip chart.
  • When the entire group has spoken, review what you heard and confirm that you’ve heard correctly what was said. Add your own thoughts. List your own values words to the flip chart.

Review the list of words, noting the similarities between them and poses these questions.

  • 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?
  • Should we distill down now and get their approval?
  • What process might we use to include everyone in this quest?
  • Who does everyone include?
  • How long will that take? What should each of us bring back to this meeting, if reaching a true values baseline is our goal?

As your heroes and champions get more interested in the values that underpin your business, so will the people who look up to them. A single meeting with the heroes and champions who love what you do can bring out the best in your company in less time than a whole team from a huge consulting firm.

Live your values and you’ll attract the people to your brand who value what you do.

How will you / did you find your brand values baseline?

Related
To follow the entire series: Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Will Your Customers Define Your Brand or Will You?

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

10-Point Plan: Build a Brand Values Baseline

Live Your Brand

Before the Internet, when we were silently niched by geographic markets the conversation with customers was one way. We wrote, televised, advertised to them. Then they read, watched, or saw our message and formed their ideas of what those messages said.

Customers decided who we are from the messages we sent.

When the Internet opened up the two-way conversation began. Now we’re finding more and better ways to listen talk, and interact with customers directly. We’re talking on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and social sites we make just for them.

Don’t miss the opportunity in how the social business web has changed brands.

This shift in the way we interact with our customers has a significant impact on the theory of how a brand is born and who determines the character of a brand. We now have a huge opportunity to demonstrate our brand values as we claim them.

We can now define our brand with much more clarity and control than before because we can include our customers as we do. In that way we have a huge opportunity to take our brands where we want them to be. Here’s how to take advantage of this new branding power …

  • Define the core values that your brand represents.
  • Communicate that set of core values — a brand values baseline — to everyone you work with and for.
  • Check every business decision against that values baseline.
  • Celebrate and reward anyone who demonstrates your brand’s values.
  • Choose evangelists who share those values and encourage them to share their ideas.

Live your values and you’ll attract the people to your brand who value what you do. Ask the people who are doing the work what would just one thing. As your heroes and champions get more interested in the values that underpin your business, so will the people who look up to them.

A single meeting with the heroes and champions who love what you do can bring out the best in your brand in less time than a whole team from a huge consulting firm.

Have you found the way to define your brand or are you letting your customers do all of that for you?

Related
To follow the entire series: Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

The 10 Point Plan to Build an Internal Community of Brand Loyal Fans

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(Updated in 2020)

Community Starts at Home

During my years in publishing, I was a serial community builder. It seems that every job I took included “rebuild the department, refocus the vision” in the role. I’m fairly certain that those two challenges are what attracted me.

Even as a teenager, explaining the quest, translating the context, and helping folks bring their best to what they’re doing has been my natural response. I’ve always done that. Not that I’ve always done it well. Still the failures and successes of the past have taught me what moves people to trust in a vision and to join in to build something they couldn’t build alone.

So I was the one they hired

  • to rebuild the company and the strategy for growth six months after the company had laid off 40% of the previous employees.
  • to re-establish the department identity when it had grown too quickly and lost its role within the organizational process.
  • to build a cross functional team that could function with professional ease and confidence from a crew of new hires when the start up started growing.
  • to establish a winning brand and a high performance product / marketing team from a single product offer and a squad of contract workers
  • to lead an ad hoc SWAT team of 60 professionals to reconceive and bring to market a product in crisis (in 1/6 the time originally budgeted for development.)

Every one of those jobs was the best job of my life while I was doing it, because we built teams that made outstanding things happen. Who doesn’t want to work with people who are “in with both feet,” working at their best level, and having fun?

The 10-Point Plan to Build an Internal Community of Brand Loyal Fans

Now I’m working with two new clients that very topic close to my heart and my business. Both are asking how they might get their teams to “raise a barn” rather than “build a coliseum.” Both companies want a to build an internal community of brand evangelists the expands from team to team, from department to department that will spread from inside to outside their company’s “walls.”

We’re going to use traditional interviews, a social tool called a “histogram,” and tested, collaborative instructional design to build an internal community of brand loyal fans. Here’s a 10-Point Plan to build an internal community of brand loyal fans. It’s exciting to offer a program and a process that grew out of the of the working model we use every year at SOBCon.

  1. Articulate a clearly defined vision.
  2. Negotiate a leadership commitment to live that vision.
  3. Assess and benchmark the current status.
  4. Identify and enlist a core team of champions to lead the quest.
  5. Build a brand values baseline by gathering the values that drive the brand.
  6. Challenge the brand teams to condense and clarify the brand values baseline by talking them through with stakeholder and bring back less than 7 words.
  7. Align your brand values with your brand value proposition
  8. Engage the brand teams in identifying and collecting cultural stories, signs, and rituals that exemplify the values of the brand values baseline.
  9. Move the process outward training teams in — a leadership team that focuses on departmental quality and performance and communications through persuasion.
  10. Exhibit leadership commitment by investing regular time and resources to ongoing collaborative brand values conversations to build decision models, communication models, and performance / hiring standards that align with the brand values baseline.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about each step in the process. We will explore what each step is; why it’s important; how to put it into action; and how to know whether it’s working in the way you intended. Then we’ll talk about how to connect that internal community to the community of customers, partners, and vendors who help your business grow from outside.

Any questions?

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

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash