Helping the C-suite engage employees around brand values

Sometimes organizations need deeper training and accountability to truly begin living the brand

In this video Core Creative President Ward Alles interviews organizational psychologist Dr. Daniel Schroeder from Organization Development Consultants. You will learn about organizational effectiveness and how brand impacts culture.

Transcript:

Ward:
As an organizational psychologist how are you brought in to help leadership?

Dr. Schroeder:
Typically we’re brought in to assess analyze and describe individual team organizational effectiveness through data.

Ward:
Okay and as a branding firm we get into organizational effectiveness when it comes to the brand. We work a lot with healthcare marketing and healthcare marketing directors, the c-suite. Now if I really wanted to help one of my clients understand the power of employer branding, and I tap into somebody like you… Why would I do that? Where would you come into play?

Dr. Schroeder:
The work that we do, attempts to bring out the best, in individuals, teams, or organizations. Typically we’re working under executive sponsorship, and we target very very specific consultations. Emerging issues that the organization wants to improve upon.

Ward:
And so you’re talking to the c-suite they own the topic of culture, what might you do to help of you know formulate some of those strategies internally?

Dr. Schroeder:
Organizational culture Ward, is what we like to call the other bottom line of organizational effectiveness. It’s all the things that people might describe as as leadership, communication, things that go in that other bottom-line, culture drives the bottom-line. Organizational culture when it’s well tended, when it’s nurtured, when it’s focused upon is a catalyzing force. So from our standpoint culture isn’t something you think about every once in a while or when you get there. Culture needs to be something that you’re thinking about each and every day and particularly the people that need to be thinking about culture are the people who are the architects of the organization the top executives. They have to be mindful of that.

Ward:
Do you use any kind of special tools to help a client of yours get at the idea of culture what kind of company or organization they are?

Dr. Schroeder:
We believe that what gets measured gets done. We have tools, measurement tools that we use. At the organizational level, we often make use of a tool that we call the Organizational Culture Assessment Inventory, the OCAI.

So that’s going to measure the impact of the culture is having on the employees behavior at an individual level…

Ward:
That’s right. The type of organization they are.

Dr. Schroeder:
That’s right, by starting to give tangible words or descriptors to culture, what we’re doing is we’re very powerfully shaping the narrative of the organization. How do we describe how we do things around here, what words do we use, the idea of artifacts, what are the representations of culture? It unleashes a vast array of leadership storytelling possibilities.

Ward:
We really emphasize at Core the whole idea behind “Say it” and “Live it” brand alignment. What you’re saying on the outside from a marketing standpoint, living inside as it organization. And I can see why an expert like you, would be plugged in to help flesh some of that out.

Dr. Schroeder:
The research is very clear at this point, that, leaders are best defined in terms of the quality of their followers. And when it comes to employees resonating and being catalyzed by leaders, values have a lot to do with the culture that is shaped.

Ward:
We talk about helping our clients understand what their employer brand is. I can see how you can help operationalize that employer brand, to get it kind of into the DNA of the organization.

Sr. Schroeder:
The three C’s of customers, competition and change, provide some real challenges for organizations that move in the healthcare milieu. Highly competitive landscape. And if you’re going to differentiate in the marketplace relative to those three C’s you have to do it from the inside out. That’s that whole idea of behaving into brand.

Ward:
Any big success stories that you’d want to talk about, or point to, or maybe just major challenges that you’re often called in to handle?

Dr. Schroeder:
We work with a team of executives within a healthcare organization, that according to a very mini survey that they did prior to the engagement they were known to be a “Viper pit” type of executive team. Well after working with with us in what we call combination coaching individual team development, this “Viper pit” team of leaders became well regarded, approachable, communicative within the team and beyond, such that; performance gains were made at the individual level, the team level and the organizational level. in demonstrable performance categories like financial return, like client or patient engagement, process improvement, employee morale.

Ward:
It’s really fascinating because we can’t be effective with our strategy of turning employees into ambassadors brand ambassadors, if they’re not feeling good about the culture or the leadership and that’s where an expert like you comes in. Dr. Schroeder, thanks for your time this afternoon.

Ward Alles is a Brand Consultant and President of Core Creative. Dr. Daniel A. Schroeder is President and CEO of Organization Development Consultants, Inc. (ODC), a management consulting firm offering performance consulting solutions for individuals, teams, and organizations.