Brand Leadership | Teik Oh

Do you live up to your “Brand”?

Apr 24 2015

What is your “Brand”? Do you live up to it?

Branding is not about your logo, or corporate colours, it is about the way your team behaves in front of customers and other stakeholders. Your brand emanates from your Vision. Your Vision should provide a clear and distinctive picture about what you aspire to be, and it should have inherent in it the types of values you uphold – this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is who we are.

Instilling your brand culture into your people is as much about leadership as it is about marketing. If your people believe in the vision, and behave in a way as if they are already there, then they will display to the inside and outside world what kind of business you are. If you talk about the “quality” of your business but your people can’t deal with customers in a quality way, you are being hypocritical about your brand. If you talk about “customer service” but your people don’t return phone calls, who will believe what you say?

I was facilitating a planning session for a Not-For-Profit recently when it struck me how similar “branding” is with For-Profit companies. Are you doing what you do best? Do you do it as if you were living your Vision?

As usual, the best comes after the viewing – come to the website https://teikoh.com and tell me what your brand is. Tell me how you live it (or not!).

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The New Way of Working

Apr 17 2015

Once upon a time (I’m a Baby-Boomer) when my boss said jump I asked “how high”. This just isn’t true anymore. With Gen X and Gen Y you need to really engage your workforce – and if you do, you will reap the effective and optimal performance that comes from an engaged and motivated workforce.

So what is “engagement”? It’s not just about liking where you work, it’s about being invested in the time you spend there, believing so much in the value of what you do that you provide discretionary effort – in other words, you jump before you are asked because you see that it is needed. Engagement is about making people believe that the business’ success helps them, helps others, and is worthwhile, and that its success is their success.

This week’s video lays out this “new” way of working.

So how do you engage people? Read More

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Building Better Leaders at Work

Apr 06 2015

A 2014 Gallup survey found that more than 70% of Australians were disengaged at work. At the same time we know that Australian businesses invest billions in annual leadership training and leadership development initiatives. So why are trained leaders failing to engage their people?

While I only have information from this survey of Australian businesses, I have worked in other countries around the world and I can assure you that while the quanta may be different, the truth is that the vast majority of people at work feel disengaged. If this is a worldwide trend, then businesses are investing significant resources into something that is not providing them with anything like the desired outcome.

First of all, let’s look at what benefits employee engagement can bring to your company. These benefits are true whether or not you have several tens of people working for you or several hundreds, or even if you only have 2 or 3 employees. True engagement isn’t just “happy” or “satisfied”. True employee engagement means that the employee has an emotional commitment to the employer and its goals that will result in more discretionary effort. It is the difference between someone doing their job as expected or even well, and someone providing discretionary effort to do their jobs as if it enriched their own lives. In terms of service and sales, customers know the difference between someone loving what they do and someone who is competent at it, and it brings extra customer satisfaction.

Engaged employees are more productive, going the extra mile because they see the success of the company as having meaning to them. Their motivation leads to higher productivity. Studies show that offices with engaged employees were up to 46% more productive. Engaged employees lower the risk of employee turnover because they are more invested in the long term success of the company, thus avoiding loss of experience and decreasing costs of retraining and recruitment.

And if you think that’s only biting around the edges, Standard Chartered Bank found that branches with increased levels of employee engagement had a 16% higher profit margin growth than branches with decreased levels of engagement.. It actually affects your bottom line.

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How to create targeted Performance Measures in your business

Mar 06 2015

Have you ever felt that you need to check performance in your business against some yardstick?

It might be that you want to set some Key Performance Indicators for your staff, or you want to see how one branch is performing against another, or perhaps you just want to see how your business as a whole is performing against the bigger picture?

In trying to create Performance Measures for these reasons have you created a set of measures that you haven’t been too happy about? Perhaps you haven’t been sure that in achieving those Performance Measures you actually achieve an outcome!

Performance Measures are essential in your business. They are objective and quantitative, they should reflect your Vision and Mission so that they measure progress against “getting there”, and they create targets for people to work towards. However appropriate Performance Measures are crucial – don’t expect a Vision target of an empowered workforce if your Performance Measures are about ticking off procedures checklists!

This video explains how to create targeted Performance Measures that cascade from your Vision so that everything is measured against the desired outcomes, not just against outputs.

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7 Steps to develop a high-performing Team in your Business

Feb 27 2015

Teamwork is essential in any business, no matter how big or small.

Even if your team were only two people, teamwork is important in co-ordinating your roles, ensuring you support each other in multi-disciplinary skills, and operating at an optimal level.

Teamwork is not just about being friendly with your co-workers, it is a very disciplined approach to working effectively together. Businesses need to develop real teamwork in a disciplined and structured way.

From my experience businesses, and especially small businesses, can best work on their staff to create a high-performance team by following the 7 steps of the “PERFORM” model. It is a simple set of steps where you work in a disciplined way on each of the characteristics of a high-performing team, layering one characteristic on another and building up optimum performance.

Watch this video and you will learn about the 7 Steps to Develop Teamwork in your Business and how to implement these 7 steps, no matter what size business you have.

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Category - Brand Leadership

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Do you live up to your “Brand”?

The New Way of Working

Building Better Leaders at Work

How to create targeted Performance Measures in your business

7 Steps to develop a high-performing Team in your Business