When ‘Work’ is no longer work

Enablers and Inhibitors: Reputation & Brand

Enabler / Inhibitor — Reputation & Brand

Definition

The concept of Reputation and Brand will evolve with the rise of Talent Marketplaces. While historically, a brand was created and owned by an organization (or an individual), in the marketplace environment a brand will be influenced and validated through the network. It will be composed of the reputation of each individual working with and associated with the brand. Equally, the reputation of individuals will become their “currency” in the marketplace, the “admission ticket” to assignments, and the reputation of an organization will become it “admission ticket” to talent.

Through the marketplace platform, reputation will be transparent within organizations and also visible externally. By making all opportunities and market-players visible, the marketplace will provide a lot more choices for the organization and for the individual, and the reputation of both, individuals and the organization, will significantly influence how these choices will be made.

Dimensions

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or other feature that distinguishes one organization’s value proposition from those of others. A brand can also be used as a synonym for an organization or an individual owning the brand. Brand identity — the outward expression of a brand — reflects how the owner wants customers to perceive the brand; whereas brand image describes the customer’s mental picture, the emotional association with the brand. A brand is focused on how one wants to be perceived whereas reputation is all about how one is actually perceived. Therefore, a strong brand does not necessarily equate with a good reputation. And a solid reputation does not automatically result in a strong brand.

Professional reputation of an individual can be described as a combination of three facets:

• The charter and recognition-at-large organizations — and in general social entities — attribute to the individual;
• The personal experience, achievements and outcomes, strengths (skills and expertise) recognized by peers and leaders;
• The experience the individual is creating in the view of others when collaborating, working in a team and achieving a shared purpose together; or — regarding team leaders — the experience in forming, leading and growing a team. Simply stated: would people choose to work over and over again with that individual?

We recognize a fundamental human and social element in reputation, which overlays people’s skills, expertise and experience.

Therefore, reputation in the talent marketplace has two key dimensions:

• Digital dimension –- reputation as a graph: inferred from the professional traces left by the individual, such as the creation of organizational value in the past — e.g. the success and relevance of previous assignments — the decisions and actions organizations undertook to reward and recognize an individual’s achievements, along with the ‘professional graph’ of an individual in executing assignments and collaborating with customers, peers and leaders.
• Human dimension — reputation as a figure: derived from other’s (e.g. team peers, partners, customers) who got a direct experience of the professional value the individual created, and how he/she achieved it as a team member, a partner/supplier or a team leader. For example, how others perceived when the individual was working on an assignment and how the assignment goals were achieved with and through others.

These dimensions are connected by a fundamental integrator

• Personal Network: individual reputation’s dimensions and related social capital are always relational, i.e. dependent on the number and strength of relationships people have in organizations as well as the breadth, size and diversity of their professional network. Surfacing reputation will take into account and leverage each individual’s network and social reach.

Reputation & Brand in an Agile Environment

The ability to navigate agile environments requires instant access to timely, relevant and reliable information about the environment; most importantly (but not limited to) information about the people acting in this environment. Therefore, agile environments are going to foster the reputation of individuals and organizations to become much more transparent and accessible. As a consequence, brand ownership will shift from a centralized, “by design” approach made for stable environments to a much more dynamic “open-source” play. In the future a brand will be composed by and therefore become dependent on the network it is embedded in to a much larger degree.

The benefits for individual include

• Higher visibility of professional reputation across the organization and beyond — and therefore more chances to be approached for work that fits personal aspirations and strengths
• Increased transparency about the professional reputation of peers and leaders one collaborates with / is looking to collaborate with
• Ability to own (better understand and more actively develop) personal professional reputation
• Co-constituency of an organizational brand, which creates a stronger sense of belonging

The benefits for the organization include

• Involvement of network stakeholders in constituting the brand allows for a more intimate and sustainable customer relationship
• Increased brand reach and impact
• Instant access to the professional reputation of everyone within the organization — and therefore a much higher chance to identify individuals that fit best to a given assignment in a faster and more precise way
• Transparency of reputation is going to create a culture of trust (in the organization, its people and the talent marketplace itself)

What will it take to transition your organization?

It is important for an organization to understand where it currently falls and desires to be on a spectrum of levers that impact how the transition to an environment that will be shaped. Below are a few areas to consider and our view on their evolution’s direction from a stable into the agile future state. The future state depends mainly on the business model, business strategy and the market environment of the organization.

The Intertwined Nature of Enablers and Inhibitors

Reputation and Brand by themselves, however, do not make an agile environment. Interdependencies with other enables and inhibitors are a given. How you approach reputation and brand influences and is influenced by these — with differing levels of impact. Below is a guide to the relative importance and interaction of both internal and external enablers/inhibitors. A company’s journey and current environment may impact where it wishes to focus to become more agile in its approach to reputation and brand.

An agile environment based on a new approach to reputation and brand will

• Turn traditional reward and recognition systems upside-down, since professional reputation as the main marketplace “currency” will be the key determinant of the market-player value vs. rewards tied to grading systems based on job-role evaluations.
• Support a shift to “swarm-defined” assignments of various forms. Team reputation will be distributed per individual contribution on an assignment; with brand providing the broader purpose for the team.
• Account for a radically new definition of people attributes. We will see a renaissance of the Master Artisan, passionate in what they do, with a clear purpose and ethos, owning their personal brand and being proud of their public reputation.
• Stimulate a self-driven learning attitude, lifelong and ad-hoc learning as a secondary influencer of the overall brand one belongs to.
• Replace the traditional linear employee lifecycle. With a strong personal brand and public reputation, people will be able to navigate their professional journey within a single and across multiple organizations — choosing their own timeline
• Heavily influence new requirements for managerial roles — including: brand mentorship, tribal team leadership, building a leadership brand, and reputation
• Feed an evolutionary “viral” culture that is composed of organic, micro-branded moments and a culture of transparency that requires and drives trust and honesty

And a strong brand will be anchored and protected through the transparent swarm of people constituting the organization. This may put the organization under pressure short-term, but will in the long run immunize against weaker leaders.

Three external drivers are strongly influencing reputation and brand-based environments:

• The role of networks can’t be overestimated: They allow for brands to instantaneously morph to different meanings, relative to a specific situation, the needs of an individual and the network as such. And they will be the most important breeding ground for the key information feeding into the professional reputation.
• Digitalization means Glocalization: allowing brands on the one hand to adopt to individual fit, e.g. in different life phases. And — on the other hand — putting the spotlight on organizations to take on responsibility for the full (global) supply-chain. Moreover, reputation going glocal means a huge increase of reach and flexibility for individuals.
• Digitalization massively drives an increasing convergence of digital and physical brand presence. Opening up the physical presence to an even greater variety of hybrid multi-dimensional spaces.

Potential Hazards to Guard Against

It is equally important to assess hazards and hinge factors that could disrupt a re-imagined reputation and brand-based marketplace approach. It provides potential risks mainly with regard to the organizational culture required to make it work. Here are some key areas for consideration:

• Organizations will have to work more proactively to develop customer and thus talent perceptions that accurately reflect the brand, or the brand is doomed to limited growth potential.
• If a brand doesn’t meet customer and talent expectations in every interaction, there is a risk that they will look for other brands better meeting their expectations in every “moment that matters”.
• Becoming an “open-source” brand provides the risk of not being able to manage brand-damage caused by network stakeholders.
• A reputation-based culture could be a scary and stressful place to live in. Organizations will need to properly measure an individual’s aggregated reputation and carefully position the value and benefit of reputation to the individual. The cultural human side is the most important element to consider in introducing transparent professional reputation.

Surfacing reputation comes along with a variety of potential risks:

• Reputation is based on (an aggregation of) subjective beliefs or opinions of others. It provides the risk that it is based on misconception, prejudice or even intentional misinterpretation.
• Reputation is dynamic and changes over time plus takes time to build up. The risk that a single action can harm or even destroy a reputation that was built over a long period needs to be taken into account.
• Reputation is fragile and sensitive; it needs to be protected in order to preserve credibility and trust — and it needs a culture of trust as a prerequisite to make it transparent.

Transformational Trajectory

How could the journey from a stable world into an agile one unfold?

The key states and the related activities are:

Environment

• Assess how hierarchical and top-down is your brand definition
• Identify stakeholder-value drivers in your brand
• Understand and take into account Gen X leadership, preference to be protective and risk-averse
• Implement controlled innovation — quality driven
• Analyze the characteristic of your internal Talent Marketplace
• Understand how much Reputation is leveraged and used in a hidden manner
• Take into account the impact of external driving forces: technology, digitalization, glocalization, demographics

Diagnosis

• Assess your consumer-focused brand
• Assess your social media brands
• Assess your brand internally through your employee engagement survey
• Perform multichannel brands, channel segmentation (sales data) analysis
• Research transformative brands
• Leverage big-data and an analytics-driven approach
• Identify the key reputation components / drivers in your organization

Incubation

• VUCA realization and its impact on your organization
• Implement a strong employee-focus approach
• Enable employees to shape brand responsibility
• Create a risk-taking, experimental-friendly environment
• Explore network extension, democratized brand ownership, ownership transfer
• Initiate with an opt-in reputation policy for transparency
• Co-creation of reputation graph

Transformation

• Experiment with a more open brand approach
• Collective ownership and individual reputation
• Generate trust, enablement
• Implement network extension, brand extension
• Re-define the concept of «employee» in your enterprise
• Live the new work: utilize reputation as a currency
• Consider Brand as partner, brand as enabler

2020+

• Change ‘on board’
• Implement a permanent transition/evolution mindset
• Employees and partners collaborate
• Everyone is a brand — everyone is the brand
• Wirearchy
• Brand as network of networks

Questions to Get Started

In an environment where many factors are changing at once, here are a few simple questions to help assess whether moving to a reputation and brand-based environment is a primary area for an organization to focus on or if other enablers and inhibitors must be addressed first…

Customer / Business Strategy

What level of agility and flexibility does your business model / your business strategy require from your workforce? Are you facing an increased number of short-term high-priority customer requests? What level of cross-functional / cross-geo collaboration and innovation does your business model / your business strategy require?

Organization

Do you know what your employees are good at? Are you able to identify the ten strongest employees in a certain area within a day? Are you facing an increasing number of reorganizations? How long does it take to create a cross-functional team to address a specific customer demand? What are the efficiency metrics of your internal hiring process? Are you hiring externals whilst laying off internals with similar qualifications at the same point in time?

Employee Experience

Do you have full transparency on all open jobs/assignments across the organization? Is it easier to find a new role within the organization vs. externally? How often did you get a call from an internal leader looking for talent vs. a headhunter?

There are 7 other fundamental factors that will enable or inhibit the transformation… View the entire article here