Building the 'leadership brand'

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Dave Ulrich, professor of business, University of Michigan.

Dave Ulrich, a Professor of Business at the University of Michigan, is one of the speakers at next week's Leaders in Dubai business forum. He has consulted with over half of the Fortune 200 and was named the most influential HR thinker by HR Magazine in 2006.

You have written about how a company's leadership should reflect its brand. What exactly is a "leadership brand"?

Leadership behaviour inside a company should be consistent with what customers outside the company want the company to be known for.

What are some good examples of strong leadership brands?

At Apple, they want to be known for innovation, and they are committed to leaders at every level focusing on innovation. They're creative, they're risk taking, they're probing new ideas.

Wal-Mart wants to be known for low prices. And their leaders' behaviour is consistent with reducing costs and managing price.

How do you go about building such a brand?

The first step is to build a case that leadership is something important for a company to succeed. There are a lot of ways to do that. You can show that leadership makes a difference to business results.

Leadership helps investors have confidence in the stock price. And it helps employees be more committed.

The second step is to create a leadership statement. The place to start that is with the customer. Who are the customers that are key to our success, and what do we want them to know us for?

For example at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, they want to be known for prudence in investing, sophistication and endurance.

They then want to build leadership behaviours consistent with those three things. Are our leaders prudent, are they sophisticated and are they enduring?

Step three is to assess it - do we have it? Step four is to invest in it through training, development and job experience. The final step is to measure it: track it and follow it so that you are successful.

What are some of the most common obstacles when trying to build such a brand?

At the first step, unless the senior leadership team is committed to building a leadership brand, and you have built a case that it is important, they won't stay the course.

We found in our research that senior leaders probably need to spend about 30 percent of their time on building leadership and people practices.

Building the brand that you think is important on the inside, rather than what the customers want, is also a common mistake.

Another one is not making an integrated set of investments; companies doing one training programme and thinking they have been successful. It requires a more holistic and system-wide approach.

How can a company measure the results?

One way is to look at the stakeholders in a company, who are affected by leaders. If we are a publicly traded firm, do we have higher price/earnings ratios or market value than our competitors? Have we retained a committed work force?

Do the employees perceive that our leaders are competent and capable and demonstrate the leadership brand? Are we hiring from within rather than from outside, to build a future leadership brand? Those questions would be significant.

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