Your Employees Are Already Representing Your Brand. Have You Trained Them To?

Your Employees Are Already Representing Your Brand.

Have You Trained Them To?

 

I have walked into companies with beautiful websites, carefully written mission statements, impressive brand guidelines and clearly defined corporate values.

Then I start talking to the people who work there.

I ask a few simple questions.

What is your company known for?

What makes you different from your competitors?

What do you want a customer to say about your company after working with you?

The answers are often completely different depending on who I ask.

Then I ask the individual:

What do you want to be known for?

That question can be even harder.

Here is the problem: companies spend tremendous amounts of time and money building brands, yet the people responsible for delivering those brands are often left out of the process.

Your employees are already representing your company.

The question is whether you have prepared them to do it well.

Your Corporate Brand Is Walking Around in Human Form

Every employee creates an impression of your organization.

Your executives do it from a stage, in a boardroom and at industry events.

Your salespeople do it in every customer conversation.

Your managers do it through the way they lead.

Your employees do it at community events, conferences, networking functions and even on the sidelines of their children’s soccer games.

They certainly do it on LinkedIn.

People no longer experience a company brand solely through advertising, a website or a corporate social media account. They experience it through people.

That changes the conversation about brand training.

Teaching employees the company mission and handing them a list of values is not enough. If you want people to represent your organization effectively, they need to understand what the brand actually means, why it matters and where they fit into the story.

Start With the Person

This is where personal branding and corporate branding become incredibly powerful together.

One of the biggest misconceptions about personal branding is that it encourages employees to promote themselves instead of the company.

Done correctly, the opposite happens.

When people understand their strengths, expertise, values and professional reputation, they become better communicators and more intentional leaders.

I often ask executives and employees to consider three questions:

Who are you?

What do you want to be known for?

What evidence are you giving people to believe it?

Those questions force people to move beyond titles and job descriptions.

Someone may be a Vice President of Operations. That tells me a position.

Perhaps that person is actually known for developing exceptional teams, fixing complicated operational problems and bringing calm leadership into difficult situations.

That is a brand.

Once people understand their own value, the next step is helping them understand how that value connects to the organization they represent.

That connection is where companies have an enormous opportunity.

LinkedIn Has Changed the Equation

Years ago, an employee’s professional reputation might have existed primarily inside the company and within a relatively small professional network.

That world is gone.

Today, your people have platforms.

An executive may have thousands of LinkedIn connections. Your employees collectively may have a larger audience than your company’s corporate account.

That should not scare companies. It should excite them.

LinkedIn gives organizations an extraordinary opportunity to put human beings behind the corporate brand.

Train your people to use it.

Help them build profiles that communicate more than employment history. Teach them how to share expertise without sounding self-promotional. Encourage executives to have perspectives on their industries. Give employees the confidence to engage with company content and add their own voices to it.

Most importantly, give them something worth talking about.

Your employees should know your company’s stories.

Why was the business founded?

What does the company believe?

How have you helped customers?

What are you building?

What makes your approach different?

What are you proud of?

Where are you going?

People remember stories far longer than they remember corporate talking points.

Stop Trying to Make Everyone Sound the Same

Brand consistency does not mean turning employees into corporate robots.

I do not want 50 executives copying and pasting the same company post onto LinkedIn with the same three approved sentences.

Nobody wants to read that.

The goal is alignment, not sameness.

Give people the foundation of the corporate brand, then teach them how to communicate it through their own experiences, expertise and voices.

One executive may talk about leadership.

Another may be passionate about innovation.

Someone else may have spent 25 years in an industry and can teach people things no marketing department could possibly manufacture.

Use that.

The strongest corporate brands have people throughout the organization who can tell different parts of the same story.

Brand Training Is Leadership Training

There is another reason I believe companies should invest in this work.

Teaching someone to understand and communicate a personal brand develops skills far beyond marketing.

It requires self-awareness.

It improves communication.

It develops executive presence.

It forces people to articulate their value.

It teaches them how to build relationships and influence.

It creates stronger ambassadors inside and outside the organization.

Those are leadership skills.

Imagine developing emerging leaders who can confidently walk into a room, introduce themselves, explain what they do, articulate why their work matters and represent your organization in a way that makes people want to know more.

Now imagine an entire leadership team capable of doing that consistently.

That is not vanity.

That is business development. Recruiting. Retention. Reputation management. Leadership development. Culture building. Brand building.

Try This With Your Leadership Team

At your next leadership meeting, ask everyone in the room to answer these questions without preparing beforehand:

What do we want our company to be known for?

What makes us meaningfully different?

What are the three most important stories we should be telling right now?

What do you personally want to be known for as a leader?

How does your personal brand strengthen our company brand?

If I looked at your LinkedIn profile today, would I see evidence of any of it?

Listen carefully to the answers.

The gaps will tell you a great deal.

Your company already has a brand.

Your people already have personal brands.

Your executives already have digital reputations.

Your employees are already telling stories about where they work.

The opportunity is to stop leaving all of it to chance.

Train your people to understand their value. Teach them the corporate narrative. Develop their communication and leadership presence. Show them how to use LinkedIn and other platforms intentionally. Give them the tools to become credible, authentic ambassadors for themselves and the organization they represent.

When people know who they are, understand what the organization stands for and know how to communicate both, something powerful happens.

You do not simply build stronger personal brands.

You build a stronger company.