The benefits to your career of a strong personal brand are well documented. But does your team need to manage its reputation too? Yes, says executive coach Des Christofi, who believes any team can shine with the right approach.
Conduct a team capability analysis
A SWOT analysis isn’t just for individuals approaching a performance review – it’s just as useful for a collective to take a helicopter view of its combined strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. Start by documenting the ways the team is excelling, looking at targets met, feedback generated and stakeholder relationships. Now ask which of those strengths are essential to the team’s success, and which are not currently being utilised – could they be exploited for quick wins?
Next, turn your attention to the team’s limitations. Which relationships need improving? Where are there critical skills gaps? Work together to create a plan that will maximise use of the team’s strong points and limit the impact of its negatives.
What are they saying when your team’s not in the room?
Has your team become so multifunctional, its output so varied, that its forgotten its collective reason for existing, its point of differentiation? When Des is challenged with helping her corporate clients understand their teams’ uniqueness, she starts by inviting each member of the group to write down three adjectives they’d like others to use to describe them. That is its personal brand, or, what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos describes as “what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
In the debate that follows this exercise, it’s useful, for self-awareness purposes, to ask yourselves what would happen within the organisation if your team didn’t exist. Why do you do what you do? If your team were a business, what would its product or service be?
Every team needs to manage its reputation
Spend a few minutes thinking about which of the following three tasks you, as team leader, spend most of your time focussing on: performance (what your team is delivering); exposure (how visible your team is); and reputation (championing your team’s value far and wide). In an everywomanNetwork poll, the vast majority of managers (74%) said that managing the performance of tasks is their main area of focus. It might seem natural and right that most leaders would focus on what their teams ‘do’, but there’s little point, says Des, leading a team to excel if its triumphs are known only to its own members.
Before you can begin to manage your team’s reputation, you must first understand how it is currently perceived. Collect any positive feedback you might have received from stakeholders, asking if it’s in line with the team’s strengths, unique selling points and the personal brand it wants to project. Similarly, look at any negative feedback that might have come in from customers or partners: does this measure up with your own weakness and threats analysis?
If feedback is lacking, invite it. Find insight into your team’s uniqueness by asking your key partners what they’re currently getting from your team that they can’t get from anyone else, what impact your team has on them and their work, and what they’d recommend your team for and to whom.
Identify your team’s ambassadors
Your ambassadors are those individuals around the organisation who champion your team. They might talk about successes you’ve had with interested parties, make connections and even step in if they hear anything negative being said about the group. Your ambassadors may well double up as decision makers, influencers and opinion formers – important people to know and keep on side. Once you’ve identified them, make sure you continually keep them abreast of team events and successes, any needs you currently have and how they can help you spread positive messages about your team in the right directions. Keep attuned to any opportunities there are to continually generate exposure to your team before audiences of current or potential ambassadors.
Know your resistors too
Resistors are individuals or even entire teams who don’t understand the value of your team and its output. If these groups have influence or decision-making powers then they have the ability to impact your team’s reputation, so it’s crucial that you build relationships. Get to know the key individuals on a personal level, building bridges on neutral ground. Keep your eyes and ears open for quick win opportunities which both your team and your resistors will get something. Communicate openly any information that could benefit them, cherry-picking team success stories that their own teams could learn from.
