Organizations are often looking for what they call “employee branding”. I have never really understood what this means, because “employee branding” suggests to me that we are branding our employees – and this does not make sense to me. But what does resonate with me is branding your compelling purpose, especially if that branding happens organically.
If at the core of what you do is a purpose that compels you to keep going even, when things are really tough, you will eventually be able to brand that purpose with little or no effort. It is like the flywheel. You just keep pushing it. You do it because you have to, because you are called to. This is a compelling purpose.
When organizations have a compelling purpose that they live by and that is reflected in all of their actions and decision-making, they are able to much more easily brand themselves. In fact sometimes the branding happens organically without really trying. People line up to work there. Retention is never discussed because it just isn’t an issue.
We can all have this within our organizations if we just identify our organizational purpose and stick to it. As Ian Percy says, “pick that one thing” and do it a million different ways.
