How personal brands and company brands can learn to commingle
August 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
For smaller agencies, it’s often a challenge to strike a balance between creating a strong foundation for your brand while encouraging your employees to create brands of their own. In the end, are you setting up your employees to leave you? Maybe. But business isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days where people have the desire to work for one company their entire career. If you can come to terms with the fact that it is very likely that your employees will one day leave your company, helping them to be the best they can while you have them, only benefits you.
Agency size and employee prominence are inversely proportional. The reason is that small agencies have to hire top-notch talent in order to succeed because dead weight will result in lost profits due to incompetence. For larger companies, dead weight more easily slips through the cracks because the company is often inundated with managerial layers and procedures making them harder to spot. Therefore, agencies rely too heavily on each individual employee to allow anyone not pulling their weight to continue very long with the company. You can choose to be terrified at the prospect, or you can embrace it, and I’d strongly encourage the latter.
Why does your agency benefit from employee prominence?
By thinking of employees as investments, instead of future competitors, you’re helping to sky rocket your agency’s ability to gain new or deeper levels of information that relate to your core expertise. And all of this can happen without having to gain company-wide acceptance followed by two-week training programs for each department since the information is housed within your employees, who individually represent a large percentage of your organization.
But be careful.
Remember earlier when we mentioned that employees come and go? If you forgot, I’m either worried or you’re skimming.
No, I’m not going to say you should fear them turning into your competition, rather, ensure that the individual knowledge contained in any one employee is always being shared through across your company. This way, if your employee leaves, which they inevitably will, you’re not stuck with a process or deliverable that no one else in your company can complete. Many companies find creative ways to cross-train for this exact reason.
Encouraging the development of personal brands within your employees is no easy task, unless they already have a strong brand going for them. Generally, employees are motivated to develop their personal brands when they find themselves inside a culture that’s always encouraging the gaining and sharing of new information. This gives them confidence in themselves and their work. Here are some simple ways to help them develop this mindset:
- Start a conference/workshop/meetup program where employees are encouraged to attend as many as financially possible
- Don’t restrict the use of social media, particularly while at work, even for their own personal accounts
- Start a book club, visit the library as a company, or start a book trading program to encourage constant learning
- Train everyone in RSS feeds and allow them time during the day to simply keep up with industry news
- Encourage everyone to contribute to company communication channels such as blogs, newsletters, presentations, etc.
- Link to or promote individual employees’ personal content within your company’s
