Hero, Jester, or Outlaw? Use Your Brand to Improve Your Meetings
Brand = Culture = Meetings
Your Brand is your most powerful tool to improve your culture.
Too often, the brand is treated as a public-facing concept, distinct from company culture. However, a brand goes a lot deeper than logos, taglines, and color palettes. A brand represents the promise that is made to every person who interacts with an organization, including (especially!) employees. The brand is codified in the brand style guide, sure. But the brand is made real through each interaction. And when the brand thrives internally, it’s experienced authentically externally.
The Most Powerful Culture-making and Brand-affirming Experience is the Meeting.
Use your brand to steer the choices and experiences of your team by integrating the brand promise in the company culture. Effective leaders reinforce the brand concept through their interactions with employees and partners, just like they reinforce the brand at every customer touchpoint.
Consider this: Organizations spend roughly 15% of their time on meetings, and surveys show that 71% of those meetings are considered unproductive. This may be why it’s estimated that $37 billion is lost to unproductive meetings each year.
Are your meetings meeting their potential to bring your brand to life? Are you using the brand to its fullest potential to fix your meetings?
Note: I’m referencing brand archetypes to summarize brand positions in this post. I love the overview of brand archetypes offered by Flux Branding here.
Company meetings offer a unique opportunity to express and reinforce the brand promise. Meetings are a platform where employees can align themselves with the company’s mission, values, and overall brand experience. This doesn’t happen through slogans or posters - it is experienced through behaviors.
Is your company aligned to a Ruler brand that is all about making order out of chaos? Or is it a Creator brand that celebrates innovation, artists, and dreamers? If your meetings index on rigid processes or strict hierarchies, that will undermine your Explorer brand. If your meetings are repetitive, monotonous, or static, how will that harm your Jester brand?
Consider how these brand attributes may reveal themselves in meetings and how you run them.
Are you ready to redesign your approach to meetings so your brand is brought to life for the team? I’ve put together some ideas to introduce these culture-building and brand-affirmed interactions:
Ruler - believes in the best o the best. Wants to make order out of chaos. Meetings should be polished, organized, and focused on leadership.
Caregiver - leads a life of service. Meetings should be equitable and focus on personal connections.
Creator - a dreamer, builder, innovator, artist. Meetings should be expressive and dynamic, and encourage people to use their imaginations.
Innocent - rooted in safety, security, optimism, goodness, and youth. Meetings should be honest, transparent, and focused on positives.
Sage - believes in knowledge, insight, thoughts, and the mind. Meetings should emphasize knowledge sharing, open mindedness, and intellectual curiosity in pursuit of expert status.
Explorer - yearns for travel, risk, discovery, and freedom. Meetings should be spirited and candid. Attendees should have the freedom to express themselves.
Hero - triumph over adversity. Meetings should include celebrating mastery and professional growth. Because heroes sacrifice for the greater good, work in meetings should link back to the company mission.
Magician - believes in the power to create almost anything. Meetings should celebrate magical moments and leave attendees feeling happy and transformed. Meetings should fully immerse attendees in a topic and celebrate the complete manifestation of a vision.
Rebel - craves freedom and liberation. Meetings should be tailored to the needs of attendees, giving flexibility in the ways to participate. Leaders should be willing to change anything that is not working and be ready to disrupt, destroy, or surprise.
Citizen - down to earth, appreciates the simple things. Meetings should be non-hierarchical, welcoming, and friendly. Reward empathy and create a sense of belonging.
Jester - wants fun, pleasure, and lives forthe day. Meetings should be playful, fun, and light. Use humor. Play games.
Lover - craves intimacy and romance. Meetings should focus on self-improvement and crating strong connections with others. The goal is to create strong and committed relationships between teams and team members.
In summary, meetings are the place where brand and culture are intrinsically connected and cannot be separated. Your colleagues joined the organization because they want to be part of something greater than themselves, which is represented by the brand promise.
Use each meeting as an opportunity to design your culture and strengthen the connection to the brand through real experiences.
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