Personal Brandbuilding and Values Driven Performance

A strong brand is to identify – we can depict the image or values that the organization wants to project without making any reference to (or having experience of) its products.  Most people will agree Virgin seeks to project youth, irreverence, good service and value for money; with Coke it’s about family, harmony and love; and for Body Shop it’s about fairness, kindness and the environment.  It is the values behind the brand that allows us to recognise what it wants to say to us.

If the value of a brand is great then so is its fragility.  Gerald Ratner notoriously ruined decades of hard work and success by undermining the brand of the eponymous jewellers in just one short speech.  It was no longer possible to project an image of affordable and accessible luxury after his dialogue about poor quality products and gullible customers.  Imagine what might happen if an organization like The Body Shop were found to be quietly cutting down the rain forest in order to create space for it’s new animal testing laboratory!  Existing and prospective customers would inevitably change their perception of the company even though the products had not altered one iota – simply because there was a perceived gap between values and actual behaviour.

The brand at a personal level - Three decades of research – backed up by our day-to-day work with elite performers in sport and in business – shows that at an individual level our personal brand is also strongly linked to individual performance.  If you want to be a world-class performer you need to have a world-class brand.

In order to achieve this you first need to understand your values because these are responsible for you doing what you do and how you do it in the first place.  Values are deep underlying beliefs and assumptions that guide our behaviour and shape our decisions and are the foundations upon which great performance is built. 

Values define you as a person and when expressed through your behaviours can make a world of difference.  In order to have a world-class personal brand you need to live and breathe your values every day.

During our work in delivering high performance programs we often ask a simple question to each individual – “what are your core values?”  Almost without exception, everyone with whom we have worked can tell us.  They may express them in different ways – moral principles, beliefs, things held in high regard – whatever they call them, they can quickly tell us what they are.Things like honesty, compassion, humour, integrity, passion, energy, family and health are often high on the list.

“When we act in accordance with values, the quality of our motivation improves and we deliver consistent, intense and sustainable performances”

We then ask a second question – “and how did you demonstrate them yesterday?”  Often this takes longer and sometimes the answer never comes – it’s not that the person no longer believes in their values; it’s just that their behavior is out of alignment.  For example, the executive who says that family is important, though if he owned a dog, it would bark at him when he got home as he’s so seldom there; or the manager who says that integrity is important but speaks negatively about colleagues in their absence; or the team leader who values health though has a poor diet, works crazy hours and encourages his team to do the same.

When we act in accordance with our values, the quality of our motivation improves and we deliver consistent, intense and sustainable performances.  Values define you as a person and when expressed through your behavior can make a world of difference, often referred to as being “authentic”.  And great individual performance clearly benefits to business too.

The dangers of doing otherwise are equally clear.  Individuals who fail to act in accordance with their values will inevitably deliver performances that never quite fulfil their potential.  The power they have remains trapped by the daily act of believing one thing and doing another and their quality of motivation is at best likely to be inconsistent.

“Of course, there are things that have to be done quickly and cannot wait – but that doesn’t mean that values should be abandoned completely”

So why do so many individuals have a personal ‘brand’ that is shaky?  The most common reasons we hear relate to the pressure to deliver results.  In their desire to deliver, individuals often abandon their values for the sake of short-term expediency – because it’s quicker and easier just to get it done.  While in the short term this might be true, the day-to-day pressures of today’s business environment means that that short term never goes away. There are always new deadlines to meet and goals to achieve, all of which need to be done quickly, apparently leaving little time to consider if our methods match up to our values.  It may seem therefore that values are niceties that can be indulged in when the pressure’s off – and that in the meantime they’ll have to go on hold.

The irony here is that in an attempt to deliver short-term results, those who abandon values compromise their ability to deliver good quality results now and in the future.  Of course, there are things that have to be done quickly and cannot wait – but that doesn’t mean that values should be abandoned completely.  Embracing your values and acting in accordance with them whenever you can means that your personal brand will remain strong and you’ll be able to deliver consistently great performances – values and performance are strongly linked, whether in the short or long term.

Here are our top tips for living a world-class personal brand:

• Think values driven performance – VDP. Put your values at the foundation of everything you do.  This will then guide what you do, the choices you make and the quality of your performance – stay authentic.

• State your values – think about the principles or qualities that are important to you and write them down.  Reflect upon them, are they the things you really believe or are they qualities you’d like people to think you have?

• Reduce your list down to the three most important values you hold.  There may be many more than this on your list so be practical.  Given the pressures, it might not be realistic to make sure you are living 15 values on a regular basis!  This process will also help ensure that the most important ones are given all your energy.

• Align your behavior with your values – elite performers in any arena have a set of values that are closely linked to their behaviour.  A key player in the corporate arena who is organised, plans ahead for meetings, has balance in their life, and feels a sense of control over their performance, is behaving in line with their value of excellence.

• Finally, keep a values log. This is a diary, though with some important differences.  With your three most important values in mind, keep a log of how, each day, you behaved in accordance with them.  If you did, then give yourself a pat on the back.  If not, then ask yourself what you could do differently next time.

These simple steps are astonishingly effective – it needs some discipline in the early days so stick with it.  Though it may seem like an additional burden on your already overstretched schedule, ten minutes a day is well worth the effort to keep your values alive and will end up buying you more time.  Living your values ensures that your brand is real and authentic.  In doing so it enhances your performance, fulfils your potential and helps you deliver superb results.

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Keith Hatter is founder of the athlete at work™ program and CEO of K2 Performance Systems , leaders in the development of high performance programs drawn from best practices of elite performers in the world of sport. For the last 20 years K2 has worked with the elite in sport and business, coaching their clients in the art and science of high performance.

Optimé International partners with K2 Performance Systems to market and offer the athlete at work™ and elite team™ learning programs.

A number of the concepts mentioned in this article will be explored in an upcoming the athlete at work™ Cilnic on October 2-3, 2007