Truth 7. Your behaviors are your brand

Brand experts will tell you that you build an enduring relationship with customers by connecting them emotionally with your product. Sure, it’s essential to provide a product that is consistently excellent and priced to appeal to your customer base. But you also have to make them feel good about what you’re selling.

As a manager, you have a brand, too. The way you treat your people categorizes you as a certain type of commodity among your most valued customers—your employees. Just like a box of soap or a cast member at Disneyland, your own features deliver hundreds, if not thousands, of touchpoints to your customers. These are moments of truth when your people experience your management brand promise and decide whether they’re going to remain loyal customers. The way you treat your employees on a daily basis—even in those insignificant moments—makes up your brand promise. And it determines how much brand loyalty your people have to your company and to your department.

The way you treat your employees on a daily basis makes up your brand promise.

Are you proud of your current brand promise? Or is it time for a major brand overhaul? The answers aren’t necessarily easy or obvious. Just like there are many brands of soap and a wide selection of amusement parks to pick from, there is a variety of “right” management behaviors. They just have to be consistently appropriate to the culture you want to establish and the values you want to promote. Assuming you don’t behave like a character out of a Charles Dickens novel (Scrooge, for instance), and assuming you behave like a basically decent human being, your management behavior brand can have a variety of characteristics and still be engaging. It just has to create the emotional experience you want your employees to have and, in turn, to provide to their customers.

Your management behavior brand can have a variety of characteristics and still be engaging.

• Do your personal habits demonstrate quality standards you expect from your team?

If you want a clean and organized department, how tidy is your own work area? If you need employees who speak well and correctly to your customers, does your grammar meet that same standard? What about your vocabulary? Do the words you use set the right tone of formality or informality that would make your customers feel at ease? Do you dress at least as well as you expect your customer-facing employees to dress, even if you sit behind a desk all day?

• Do you treat your employees the same way you expect them to treat their customers?

If you want a high level of customer service coming from your department, you need to show a high level of customer service in the way you treat your employees. Do you return their phone calls and e-mails promptly? Do you honor your appointments with them? Do you keep their secrets? If a fleeting bad mood makes you edgy, do you take it out on your people, even if it’s only just a little bit? Do you lightly shrug off the rare, innocent mistake? Or do you routinely overlook sloppy work? Or do you pounce on a slip-up as if it were a deadly virus about to be unleashed on Los Angeles?

• Do you fit into the overall company culture?

You are your company’s kind of manager if its customers are your kinds of people. Companies whose customers prefer a high-end, formal experience are best served by employees who behave in a high-end, formal way. And those employees are best served by managers with a more formal demeanor themselves. (The opposite is also true, of course. The waitstaff from Le Cirque would be poissons out of water at TGI Fridays.) What that means in specific terms, naturally, depends on the company itself. But if you’re not feeling comfortable in the environment there, either internally or in the way the company faces its customers, it’s possible that your own personality is a poor fit with the company’s brand.

So the final question is this: Are you your company’s kind of people? If not, you have two choices: change your branding behaviors, or change your company.