The Employer Brand: Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work

5

The Role of Leadership

In the first few years of my consulting in the early 1990s – perhaps when we were assessing the effectiveness of internal communications, doing qualitative employee research or advising on post merger integration – dialogue like this sometimes emerged:

‘You’ll never get anywhere with this job you know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because until the people at the top here are committed to change this project is a waste of time.’

Have you ever felt like that? I can tell you far too many people do and it takes me into this chapter on the importance of senior management’s leadership of the development and support for the employer brand. If you are working in a politically sensitive area where roles, responsibility and power are key factors, then you have to get buy-in from the top. And not just buy-in. Any new capital investment like plant and machinery has to get buy-in from the top. Strengthening the employer brand needs more than that, it needs leadership involvement, commitment and courage to overcome the forces of conservatism which can result in an employer brand project being still-born or restricted to tinkering with a different style of recruitment advertising.

We recently did an analysis of the last five years of People in Business’s work. You would think that HR were the major buyers but, for many of the reasons we covered in Chapter 4, they are not. Of our revenue over the past five years, 57% has come from working with CEOs and Managing Directors, 28% from HR ...