🎨 People Are the X Factor
🥾 Managers Stifle Ideas
🏒 Teams Build Brands
🎨 People Are the X Factor
All great brands are built by people — smart, ambitious, creative people.
People like you and I that care deeply about our businesses, products, customers, and colleagues. Growing a Sticky Brand is what we strive to do! 🙌🏻
The people who build remarkable brands have a few common traits:
- Personal Commitment: It’s more than a job, it’s a way of life. The people who build great brands have a personal commitment to lead and execute the vision of their company.
- Focused on the Present: Their heads aren’t in the clouds or dreaming of better days. They’re focused on the here and now.
- Embrace Change: Growing a Sticky Brand requires change. They push for change. They encourage it. They accept the tension and conflict that arises out of change.
- Love No: The people who grow great brands are not swayed by resistance. They may hear “no” often, but that doesn’t stop them. They push for what they know is right for the brand.
These are not personality traits. They are values and beliefs that are driven by a deep commitment to the vision of your brand.
It’s not just one person either. Brand building is a team sport!
Great brands are built with a team — a team with a shared vision, and the passion, commitment, and creativity to not settle for anything less than greatness.
One Stat to Watch
72.1%
of employers are very optimistic or somewhat optimistic about their future outlook over the next 12 months, according to Statistics Canada (StatCan).
🥾 Managers Stifle Ideas
Ideas are delicate. They need to be defended, nurtured, and celebrated.
Instead, ideas get judged, criticized, and crushed. When a manager stamps on an employee’s ideas enough times they stop contributing. Worse, they stop believing they are creative. It’s tragic!
Managers are crushing their employees’ ideas (and spirits), and many don’t even realize it.
We can lament all day about the failures of leaders, but let’s change the narrative. What managers and leaders really need to ask, “How do I harness the ideas and creativity of my team?”
Creativity is a muscle that grows and gets stronger. Albert Einstein once said, “Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” That’s our cue.
When your people feel empowered and safe to contribute it creates a multiplier effect:
- More ideas
- Better ideas
- More useful ideas that fit your business needs
Even more importantly, honoring your employees’ creativity is a form of psychic income. It garners higher degrees of loyalty and engagement.
As a leader, harness, nurture, and encourage other people’s ideas. The approach or tactics you leverage may differ for each person on your team, but the results will more than pay for themselves.
🏒 Teams Build Brands
The lone genius is a powerful storyline. The founder, the creator, or the inventor has a breakthrough idea and builds a company to exploit their genius. But that doesn’t really happen.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, explains, “While it’s true that some people are much better at idea generation than others, it’s always better to have a number of people working on ideas simultaneously. The best idea may come from person number eighty-nine. And you can’t always predict where the good ideas will come from.”
Teams generate more breakthrough ideas for two reasons.
- Volume leads to originality. The more ideas you can generate, the more likely you’ll find an idea or strategy that is truly brilliant.
- Ideas build off other ideas. It’s the process of molding, pushing, and adding to an idea that makes it transformative.
It’s in these team dynamics that you can grow a remarkable brand.
Inside your organization is an immense and often untapped resource: creativity. Your team is creative. Your team has the potential to innovate and find solutions you never imagined. And that’s the kind of resource you want to harness to grow your company into a Sticky Brand.
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