Welcome back!
Car Brand Applied to Leadership
In the later part of the twentieth century, many HR executives busied themselves developing leadership competency frameworks for their organisations. The idea that effective leadership could be broken down into learnable competencies was appealing and even somewhat revolutionary. It countered the prevailing belief that leadership style and effectiveness were predetermined by the innate traits of the leader.
However, as our understanding of leadership grew, we began to see the limitations of the competency approach. No list of competencies, no matter how long, could fully capture the complexity of a leader’s work. Furthermore, such simplistic lists ignore context, and we know that the best way to lead is often dependent upon the situation at the time. Truly effective leaders are highly skilled, but they also have the nous needed to read the situation and make wise judgement about how best to proceed.
HR answered the challenge by rallying around the new notion of capability frameworks. You may be wondering how competencies differ from capabilities. Being competent involves mastering a certain skill or technique; being capable involves being able to judge the correct response for the situation and utilize the relevant skills in a contextually appropriate way. Capabilities are therefore broad enough that they can be enacted in different ways. As a result, a capability framework is shorter but broader than a competency framework.
Think about BMW and you are likely to envisage quality and prestige
The idea of a leadership brand goes one step further. We are all familiar with product and company brands. They invoke an intuitive, highly emotional sense of what the company stands for. For example, think about BMW and you are likely to envisage quality and prestige. Creating a strong leadership brand has the same effect. Leadership brand is the identity and reputation your leaders have within your organisation. It exists whether you want it to or not, and like company or product brands, it can be carefully and consciously created. Creating such a brand requires thinking about leadership in new ways, using images, metaphors and memorable language to describe what it means to lead well in your organisation. Examples of such branding include the GE Way and HP’s Rules of the Garage. Your concise, broad and personalized leadership brand can then be easily enacted in different ways by different managers, depending on their role and the situation at hand.
