Start with your identity

By Andrea Hill

When I was a child, I lived for dinnertime. Not only was my mom an amazing cook, but dinner was when my dad and mom might discuss anything—from what was going on in his courtroom to what was going on in her classroom. Politics, religion, philosophy, world events—it was all on the table at dinnertime. Even better, my siblings and I were encouraged to participate and trusted to understand the conversation. Our house was an exciting place to be.

I also enjoyed eating at my friends’ houses and seeing how each family was so different. The Warner family particularly captured my attention. Theirs was not an intellectually robust dinner conversation like ours, but something else was always on the menu. Their parents used that time to discuss family values. There were nine children in the Warner family, and they were a small tribe. They didn’t look alike, but they acted alike and they stuck together like glue. Apart from dinner, when we all came together, my siblings and I had little to do with one another. There’s no way others viewed us as a small tribe that represented our family as a cohesive unit.

Throughout my career, I have noticed that businesses have characteristics similar to families. Some business leaders are filled with ideas and vision, constantly stimulating their employees with talk of the future and engaging them in brainstorming and barnstorming and other types of storming. These are stimulating places to be. But from the outside looking in, it can be hard to understand what all the excitement is about.

Other businesses take time to talk about who they are, what they stand for, and how they want to be viewed in the world. They have that conversation with their employees over and over again, reinforcing those themes in conversation, in memos, and in meetings. They check every element of their communications to make sure the words, tone, and messages are all consistent with their vision of who they are, what they stand for, and how they want to be viewed in the world. This consistent internal identity is the very soul of a business brand. It leads to a workforce of two or 200 or 2,000 who represent the company as a tribe.

Creating a Business Identity

As I became an adult, I was able to look back on my parents and see precisely how they had influenced me as role models—who they were, what they stood for, and how they wanted to be viewed in the world. But when I was a child, my parents didn’t put that into words for me like the Warners did for their children, and I was too young to see it and articulate it for myself. I had to become mature enough to see the message, abstract it, and then apply it to my own life. And I noticed that my siblings and I all did this at different speeds and arrived at different conclusions at very different ages.

In business, you just don’t have time to wait for your employees to see your company’s intended identity, articulate it for themselves, and apply it, likely with widely varying results. The process must be accelerated with purposeful, constant, consistent communication. The only way to be a tribe is to create one, and that requires a lot more than just walking through the same doors every day and working alongside one another.

You can’t engage in this purposeful process if you haven’t defined your company identity first. One of the most compelling ways to define your business culture is to develop a set of principles by which you want your company to operate. Here are the principles we work and live by at my company:

• Accountability—to ourselves, each other, our customers, and our vendors.
• Honesty and integrity in everything we do.
• To work individually and with/for one another to maintain work/life balance.
• To have fun and find joy in one another and in our work.
• To treat everyone with dignity and respect.
• To seek first to understand, then to be understood.
• To remain in constant pursuit of personal, intellectual, and creative growth.
• To understand what is most important and prioritize accordingly.
• To embrace and be open about our mistakes so everyone can learn from them.

This is a terrific list for us, but it’s probably not the right list for you. Take time to articulate the principles you want to live by. Once you define them, make them part of your everyday work together. By doing this, you will create an intentional business culture.  

Once you have invested in creating a business culture, you have a shot at creating a memorable brand. A brand is simply the shorthand for an identity, so the clearer your identity is to you and everyone in your organization, the better you will be able to share it with the world. But first, you must invest in building a powerful identity.

As a parent, I intentionally incorporated a strong element of who we are and what we stand for into our robust dinner conversations. I did not want to sacrifice the excitement of big ideas, bold visions, and intellectual stimulation, nor did I want to leave my children to figure out for themselves what I stood for when they were old enough to do so.