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3 Ways a Strong Identity Benefits Leaders

Recently I wrote that your organizational identity is not your brand. It’s also not the responsibility of your marketing department.

Identity is a leadership issue that should reach into the highest ranks of the company or institution. The marketing team’s work revolves around identity,  but in the end identity is the leader’s responsibility, because if it’s made clear what the organization stands for, then everything about leading the organization becomes easier.

Identity Is the CEO’s Tool
A CEO can run around in the organization and say, “Why did you do it that way?” or “What’s this about?” or “I don’t like that.” And CEOs can exhaust themselves doing this—especially if they are running global organizations. But when there’s clarity around identity, the organization manages itself more knowledgeably and effectively.

Strong organizational identity:

1. Clarifies communication: It enables CEOs to clearly convey their vision for the organization to critical audiences, such as employees, customers, partners and shareholders or funders.
2. Sets direction: With clear identity, employees know how to act, customers know what to expect, and shareholders and funders understand the value the organization creates.
3. Makes decisions easier: Employees need less supervision and can be more productive because they intuitively know what’s right … and what’s not.

An example I always think of is Walt Disney. You can go to Disney World and talk to one of the janitors sweeping up the grounds and say “Disney is thinking about a movie that has some hard language and violence and nudity.” And they’ll say to you, “That’s not us.” Everyone there knows what Disney stands for and how to represent it. No one has to micromanage the entire team company. That frees up the CEO to think on a higher level.

When Can Identity Help Management?
Often when we work on identity strategy we’re going into organizations where there is some kind of malaise or confusion. Maybe the company is in trouble: People don’t understand it or are confused about it. Maybe there are disruptive forces in the market that make what they used to do no longer viable, relevant or compelling. Or maybe they’ve acquired a lot of companies, and people with different mindsets have joined at different times with different perceptions and capabilities, and pretty soon no one knows what the company is all about.

The lack of a clear organizational identity can interfere with everything. One person may have a grand idea and start going off in that direction and others say, “No, we don’t do that.” Which direction are they going in? Nobody knows. And everybody’s at cross purposes and unhappy.

But with thoughtful and strategic work on clarifying who you are, what you do and why you matter, it’s a different story. When we leave our clients with a strong, clear identity we leave them energized and motivated by who they are and what they do. Everybody knows what makes them special.

That’s the power of identity.

Your Identity Is Not Your Brand

As identity strategists, we work all the time with corporate and nonprofit leaders who come to us seeking the benefits of identity work: improved loyalty and preference, increased sales, an energized workforce and so on. But one of the biggest misperceptions is around the idea of identity itself. Most people confuse it with branding, when in fact your identity is different from your brand in key ways.

A brand is a promise. When someone sees the brand they should know what they’re going to get. Branding is doing everything humanly possible to ensure that the brand promise is fulfilled. That’s what branding is about. But branding is often aimed at specific target audiences: people who want whiter whites or brighter brights. Brands are what I call outer driven. They’re driven by trying to please people out there.

Identity to us is a bigger idea. It’s about the essence of who you are. You might have several brands that make various promises and are aimed at different people. But your identity should be inner driven.

Identity and Authenticity
The power in identity comes from being who you want to be, not who others want you to be.

Your identity shouldn’t be constructed the way some politicians run campaigns—running around the country doing various focus groups to find out what people care about and then giving speeches tailored to very precise groups. That’s all outer driven.

The most powerful identities come from thinking about who you are, what you care about, what matters most to you, what you want to accomplish and why people should care that you exist.

The Six Elements of Identity
As you undertake identity work it’s important to understand what identity is not. It’s not your vision. Your vision is how you see the future. It’s not your mission. Your mission is what role you want to play in that future. It’s not your goals. Your goals are what you want to accomplish. It’s not your logo (your logo identifies you, but it’s not your identity). It’s not a short-term initiative—that’s a tactic. And it’s not a marketing responsibility, it’s a CEO’s responsibility to deliver on your unique sense of self.

So those are the things we think identity is not. But what is identity?

1. It is the essence of your organization
2. It is your organization’s sense of self
3. It is what the organization stands for, is committed to
4. It is what the organization cares about, its driving force
5. It is what you want to be, not what others want you to be
6. It is why your organization matters

You can go on the web and easily find a number of how-tos that promise you can create an identity in five easy steps (give or take). But the reality is that determining your identity is a matter of deep exploration. It requires you to see yourself from new angles, think about possibilities, understand where your industry will be in the future. It’s hard work, but it’s the key to motivating your employees and changing the way your customers, shareholders and competitors think about you.