For years, HR and talent acquisition teams have been told to 'think like marketers.' That's mainly because marketing is known for adapting to changing market conditions and leveraging new technology to create differentiation and competitive advantage. Brand and customer experience (CX) are prime examples where marketing shines.  But do we, or rather should we, flip this thinking back on HR and TA? Maybe we've had it all wrong. Maybe marketing should actually own all aspects of the organization's brand. And at that point, if marketing is taking ownership of the employer brand, then what about the employee experience (EX)? Should

When she’s passed over for a big promotion, one leader must learn how to reposition her out-of-the-box approach for the C-suite.

It's not always obvious to see when you're making an impact, but knowing what you're trying to measure is a good start.

This week's long read comes to us from strategy+business. This is a great primer on what you can do to create culture change in your organization. Sure, as employer brand people, you may grapple with the business of when you need to accept an aspect of the culture and when you should try to change it (especially when you likely have no formal power to do so), but this article may help you see ways to nudge the change into occurring.

I used to have a boss who used the phrase, "one man invading China" as shorthand for the person she tasked with a project that really should have gotten a LOT more resources. Of course, that could describe every employer brand person I've ever met, so I always love to see stories of how one person can make a difference in even large organizations.

I'll admit that I started reading this article on how data can help make remote teams work better to see what kind of data they were looking at, but it's really a different article. The premise is that if you give your staff more of the data/context/info on how leadership makes its decisions, other staff will likely make similar decisions, Further, with that info, they can do better work with less oversight, thus supporting a more remote work space. Why should I care? Because this is a great way to show a candidate what you mean by "we give people lots of opportunity" or "we empower our staff," both of which are functionally meaningless. But talking about how much data and info you share internally to support this claims makes those brand claims infantely more believable, credible and clear.

I can usually count on the HBR to take the safe road in any given situation, so seeing an article that embraces some very contrarian ideas is always worth a note. But this article on the three things most people get wrong about organizational change was pretty great. Things like "Share Your Failures" rather that "Follow Best Practices" make my heart warm on many levels. Also note the example of "Kill Our Company" (also known as Red Team exercises) where people try to figure out how to destroy their own company in order to shore up their own strategic weaknesses.

The concept of “self-directed organizations” isn’t strictly new, but as business leaders are looking at 2020 as an opportunity to build back better, the idea seems to be coming into vogue. Building an employer brand in a top-down org is relatively straight-forward. Building a brand in a more self-directed org is a whole different beast, so take a look at this model for how business can become more self-directed and start identifying places where you can influence the process and embed more brand thinking into it.

“The analysis reveals that there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of employees. All of the correlations between official and actual values were very weak, and four of the nine — collaboration, customer orientation, execution, and diversity — were negatively correlated.” Ouch.