Your Team's Brand

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I was giving a talk this week to an
audience of CIOs and one of the topics
we discussed was choosing the level of
service you want your team to deliver,
and how to do specific things on purpose
to make sure your team is consistently
delivering that service.

It occurred to me that this is an
important issue for any team to
decide on purpose — not just ones that officially deliver “a service”.

Your team has a Brand today whether you know it or not.

Your current Brand is based on how your team collectively behaves.  Your Brand is defined by the experience people have with you.  More specifically:

Your Brand is defined by the things others experience most consistently.

What does your team do consistently?  Does everyone on your team have the same view of responsiveness, quality, innovation, collaboration?  Do they do they have the same values? Do they do the same things when they interact with others?  What collective impression is your team giving your many stakeholders, influencers and other audiences?

Leaving your Team Brand to chance creates a big hazard for you, and a lost opportunity to step up to play a bigger role in your company.

Doing a team brand-building exercise is great not only for team building, but it helps increase your team’s effectiveness, and builds credibility.

In its basic form building a Team Brand has a few simple steps:

1) Find out what your current team brand is
2) Decide as a team what you want to be known for
3) List the audiences you want to make an impression on
4) Build a plan to do it

What is your definition of Service?

Service is a good place to focus when you are deciding what you want to be known for, because it forces you to define your values, your expectations, and how you plan to show your brand by what you give to the rest of the world.

First, what does service mean in your world? Who are your “clients”? What are your “services”? What are your “service intentions and promises”? And what is your “style” of service? These things will have a huge impact on your Team Brand.  Remember your Brand is defined by how people experience you.

If you are an IT organization, service is a huge part of your brand.  It starts with your help desk, and your website.

If you are a Marketing team, you provide service to many organizations: the sales force, the product teams, the executive suite, the media.  What level of service do you want your team to be known for?  What will it look like in terms of quality, responsiveness, creativity, business acumen?

If you are a Product Development organization, how do you define the service you deliver in terms of general competency, handling change requests, customer understanding, quality, innovation, and communication?


Everyone has to share the same view and committed behaviors.

To have a consistent and positive Team Brand it is important that everyone on your team has the same understanding of what the Brand is, and how to deliver it.  The more you define it on purpose, the more likely it will be that every member of your team can and will deliver on it consistently.

Brand is not just for “Show” – it’s about effectiveness.

And when your team shares the same values and definition of service, and reinforces a set of brand-supporting-behaviors they all do on purpose, your team will be more effective and have higher credibility.  So you’ll deliver stronger results and get more done.  And you will position your team to play a bigger, and more important role in the company.

More articles on Service:

Here are some additional articles on Service you can use to start thinking about what type of service is important to you.  These also happen to be some of the most popular articles on the site.

Service or Torture?
Serving or Selling?
Customer Cost or Care?
Customer Value and the P&L

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or Facebook, or read her books RISE and MOVE.


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