Humanizing Brands

Where government leadership has failed, Corporate America has an opportunity to lead.

Humanizing your brand is about more than just a catchy tagline or a visionary statement, it’s about action. And when done correctly, it should reorient your entire business strategy to hold a meaningful place in the world.

In a post COVID-19 world — if, in fact, there will be such a thing — corporate leadership is being summoned to a new depth of relationship with both consumers and employees. Facebook employees walk out. Consumers boycott. Thousands fill the streets. And in this grassroots movement, brands are being drawn into the conversation to take a stand by taking action.

The lines between marketing content and social content are already blurred. Powerpoint has a new power by being repurposed from sales projections to a publicly living document that outlines how brands have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a way nobody saw coming, the pandemic created a forced timeout while simultaneously accelerating change that is already underway, such as self-employment, remote work, healthcare access and social justice. This combination has fomented a societal reset for a disillusioned populace. We are in a point of inflection. And corporate leaders need to take this seriously.

Who is going to step up and lead?

There are bodies in the White House, but there is no leadership.

In the context of such a vacuum, corporate leadership is being forced out of its siloed world of financial reports. Brands can’t hide in the shadows. We are, after all, in the Age of Transparency, and people are looking for and demanding action.

It all starts from the top, with the CEO.

As I have often written, humanizing a brand starts from the top. A type of trickle-down humanity.

This is more important than ever within the perpetually dynamic reality of new technology and industry disrupters. With new players and new models constantly impacting the landscape, CEOs need to cultivate a brand that’s immune to disruption and irrelevance.

But how can an earnest leader navigate the fog of excess data without being paralyzed by it?

By being human.

Understanding Context: Family, Organization, Society

I came across Edwin H. Friedman, a rabbi and a therapist in the field of organizational leadership. In his book, A Failure of Nerve, he outlines the similarities that overlap between families, organizations, and society at large.

“The characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society — reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership — will always be descriptive of a regressed institution.”

- Edwin H. Friedman

Does this hit home? Do these symptoms seem present in your organization? Friedman expands on four similarities he sees across the layers, that impacts leadership:

1. A regressive, counter-evolutionary trend in which the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas and where adaptation is constantly toward weakness rather than strength, thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of an institution rather than toward the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the motivated.
2. A devaluation of the process of individuation so that leaders tend to rely more on expertise than on their own capacity to be decisive. Consultants (to both families and organizations) contribute further to this denial of individuation by offering solutions instead of promoting their clients’ capacity to define themselves more clearly.
3. An obsession with data and technique that has become a form of addiction and turns professionals into data junkies and their information into data junkyards. As a result, decision-makers avoid or deny the very emotional process within their families, their institutions, and within society itself that might contribute to their institution’s “persistence of form.” (This phrase is borrowed from biology, which tries to understand the uncanny self-organizing ability of some embryos that duplicate themselves even after some of their parts have been rearranged or cut away.)
4. A widespread misunderstanding about relational nature of destructive processes in families and institutions that leads leaders to assume that toxic forces can be regulated through reasonableness, love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values, and striving for consensus. It prevents them from taking the kind of stands that set limits to the invasiveness of those who lack self-regulation.

A new kind of CEO.

The new CEO is not an algorithm, but quite the opposite — a human who understands society, and is able to connect with people in a meaningful way. One who is focused on creating value, instead of just extracting it for the bottom line.

Friedman also makes an interesting observation about the original world explorers and five attributes that differentiated the successful ones from the ones that failed:

1. A capacity to get outside the emotional climate of the day.
2. A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable.
3. Persistence in the face of resistance and downright rejection.
4. Stamina in the face of sabotage along the way.
5. Being “headstrong” and “ruthless”.

This is the very leadership we need in this age of The Quick Fix.

Understanding requires you to act.

Self-realization is critical, but understanding the societal context and the leadership requirements leaves you with two choices. You either step up to the challenge, or watch your organization remain complacent, ultimately becoming irrelevant in the eyes of consumers and employees.

1. Responding vs reacting. Your value hierarchy needs to be already in place to bring insight and direction to flux. The necessary rudder to navigate the whitewater of events. Stay the course. Did Magellan turn around?
2. see Brene Brown. Twenty-one million people have.
3. The tensile strength to persevere comes from the strength of your beliefs. Get those set or you’ll be a punching bag. And remember, you are human. So surround yourself with others who can affirm the organization’s beliefs when you’re losing heart. This is the essence of community: People gathered around a promise, confirming to each other that something is indeed happening. (Henri Nouwen) We have to be careful here. I’m not talking about The Emperor’s New Clothes… I’m talking about strength and support, not delusion. Even the most visionary and charismatic leaders need people in their corner. Doubt and discouragement are indiscriminate.
4. Just as beliefs are fed by conviction, stamina is fed by clarity of vision. As a CEO, your vision needs to be crystal clear — not just to you, but to your entire organization. For a vision to have galvanizing power, it has to be shared. And for it to be shared, it has to have substance. Yet, even with good vision casting, there will be saboteurs. Some will be driven by envy… some by fear… and often circumstances will undermine the best laid plans. A leader of character faces these head on while never losing his/her resolution toward the greater goal. There is a beautiful sobriety here that evokes the Stockdale Paradox of being able to simultaneously hold a vivid picture of your future destination alongside an utterly realistic assessment of just how bad things presently are. In this rare mind-space, the things that challenge you actually become motivators to forge ahead.
5. “Headstrong” and “ruthless” are intense words. But Freidman is doing this to make a point. Along the path of any visionary journey, one must draw on sheer determination to stay the course. It would be naive to think this moment will not come. And when it does, it will test the strength of your conviction: the authenticity of your belief and the clarity of vision.

This meditation on Freidman’s work explains why we start all our potential business relationships with a simple question:

Can you state the goal of your company, without using numbers or dollar signs?

If you are ready to start a conversation, we’d love to learn about your business and discuss how to find deeper meaning in a world that is looking for it. Or, if your curiosity is piqued, here’s a short piece about what it means to be meaningful.

What it means to be meaningful.

Thanks for taking the few minutes to read my thoughts. Tell me what you think below, or hit me up on Twitter