Chief Learning Officer- September 2008

IN CONCLUSION Develop a Winning Leadership Brand Stay true to your enterprise • BY ED COHEN AND ARUNAV SINHA Ed Cohen is senior vice president and chief learning ofﬁcer at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. Arunav Sinha is lead for Satyam Learning World Strategic Communications at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. They can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. n the “surplus society” that existed just a few years ago, corporations depended on celebrity leaders who acted as brand ambassadors. These corporations leveraged the dynamic persona of one or a few individuals who provided the “face” of the company. Their presence, strengths, whims, fancies and peculiarities shaped and symbolized these organizations. Today, our complicated, globalized knowledge economy is not able to sustain celebrity-leader models. Organizations must make the shift to having the strength of their leadership as their strategic differentiator. Learning leaders can contribute directly to this by helping their organizations create a leadership learning strategy that positions the leadership brand for absolute success. There are several examples of leadership brands that exist: Audi, Cisco and Google are known for building outstanding technology leaders. American Express, McKinsey and Satyam are known for building globally savvy business leaders. Apple, 3M and Lego are known for developing leaders who are high on innovation. Regardless of their leadership brand strategy, each of these QUOTABLE organizations relies on learning “The ‘surplus society’ has a to execute that strategy. surplus of similar companies, Once you have consensus employing similar people, that the organization wants to with similar educational backhave a leadership brand, deciding grounds, coming up with on the right brand is the critical similar ideas, producing similar ﬁrst step. Learning leaders should things, with similar prices and bring together leaders from similar quality.” across the organization to answer – Kjell Nordström and the question, “What do we want Jonas Ridderstråle, to be known for?” Start by seeing Authors of Funky Business what, if anything, the leadership already is known for — it is easier to enhance a brand than to build from scratch. Unless your organization is reinventing itself, building on something that exists rather than establishing a fresh leadership brand always is preferred. Armed with this powerful knowledge, the right learning strategy should: I • Achieve a common leadership mindset that strives to balance the needs of all stakeholders including associates, investors, customers and society. • Create a predisposition to leadership that is businessneutral by developing leadership skills and behaviors that are transportable and transferable. • Establish a learning framework mapped to the desired leadership theme(s). • Have a thought model through which the organization can ﬁnd its unique slant, thus encouraging leaders to have diverse opinions and viewpoints. At Satyam, we have spent the past two years implementing our leadership brand strategy. Through many lessons learned, we have discovered a winning approach to implement a leadership brand learning strategy: • Utilize “leaders as teachers” and “customers as teachers.” • Build solid competencies across three key dimensions: business, technical and people. • Focus on ideation, creativity and innovative thinking skills. • Cultivate solid executive presence, excellent speaking skills and media savvy among all leaders. Create an organization of brand ambassadors. • Apply the 30-70 rule. Thought leadership comes 30 percent from organizational content and 70 percent from individual professional expertise. • Extensively collaborate with your organization’s marketing, human resources and knowledge management functions. • More than starting at the top, start with the top. There are obvious beneﬁts to having hundreds if not thousands of brand ambassadors rather than one or two. A speciﬁc leadership brand results in increased attraction and retention of strong leaders and sustainability amid change. However, building a leadership brand is easier said than done. If there is too much of a gap between perception of leadership and the reality, the brand will cave in. Learning signiﬁcantly enhances the potential for success of the leadership brand when they consciously and continuously collaborate with enablers including top leadership, human resources, knowledge management and marketing to measure and reduce dissonance, thus ensuring a match between leadership brand and reality of leadership. CLO • Strategically align the leadership brand plan with desired, not current, organizational positioning. • Assess the gap between current and desired perception of leaders. 66 Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • September 2008 • www.clomedia.com http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer- September 2008

Chief Learning Officer Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Lifestyle Learning: Improve the Bottom Line With Behavioral Education Tracom’s Social Style Model CLO Profile IOL: Determining the Impact of Learning Communicating With the Boss About Impact Mission Accomplished? Measuring Success of Corporate Universities Borrowing Measurement Practices From Investors Value Creation With Human Capital Investment Business Impact Analysis at Chrysler Learning or Performance Enhancement: Which Is It? Best Practices in Global Project Management Training Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

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