Mind your ‘I’s and ‘We’s – 3 reasons to present your company as a team
There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, but there is a ‘We’ in ‘well done’.
Sorry about the world’s worst cliché, but I was recently talking to a business owner who was frustrated by a member of his team always using ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. He found it most embarrassing when that employee talked to a customer about the results achieved as if it was an individual endeavor, when the rest of the team were in the room.
There are three really good reasons why inclusive language is important to your business:
- Maintaining team morale and good internal working relationships.
- Allowing for succession planning. An individual who is entrenched in one client account can be hard to promote if it means moving them to another client.
- You need to protect your business from churn, so having clients loyal to your team rather than to an individual is essential.
It could be argued that this is a confidence issue. Proven management styles, like coaching or mentoring, could certainly help to resolve this, but there is something else you can do. And it involves the whole team, better still the whole company…
Effective Corporate Guidelines encourage your staff to understand how your brand feels as much as how it looks – and that means more than just spelling out the colour of your logo, or the typeface you use.
In addition, ‘Tone of Voice’ guidelines ensure your company ‘sounds’ like your brand too. And you can discreetly point out the ‘I’ and ‘We’ thing quite easily.
Guidelines on tone of voice are especially useful if you have sales colleagues who are constantly in front of clients, or if you run a call centre for example. And I (sorry, we) would say they are essential if you’re contemplating commissioning online, radio or TV advertising. How you use language (and music and/or a recognised voice-over) is as much about delivering your brand as your website or corporate literature.
5 tips on sounding like your brand:
1. Guidelines: All companies should have a set of designed guidelines that detail exactly how to use your brand. We recently did this for our client Gradwell, who a year later conducted a survey in which 95% of their team agreed that the brand was essential to the success of the business. When pulling together guidelines you should also include a section on ‘tone of voice’ and spelling conventions. If you are briefing marketing copy, or press releases, your suppliers will find it refreshing and useful. After all, you want them to write in your corporate style. This should also form a key element of an employee welcome pack and induction programme – an overview of your brand. The way you talk from the outset could nip the ‘I’, and ‘We’ thing in the bud.
2. Internal comms: Talk to your employees regularly, and all together so as not to single people out. Remind them of ‘the rules of the game’ regarding behaviour when acting/talking on behalf of your company. Make it clear to them that if a client is attached to them as an individual, then they will find it hard to move into more senior positions by virtue of being stuck in the role the client perceives, and that they are the one who’ll be expected to deal with any problems. Appealing to self-interest here can help.
3 Practice: Whether you are a sole trader or work in small company, you will work as a team with each other, your clients and suppliers, and inclusive language is usually preferable. Practice your elevator pitch – use team activities or even practice in front of a mirror. Role play scenarios and prepare flash cards if you think they will help.
4. Scripts: It’s not just TV and radio advertisements, or telesales teams that need scripts, but all of your employees could benefit too. From the receptionist to the sales director, pre-prepared scripts demonstrate the correct use of tone of voice for your staff. And never forget, it’s potentially out of your control how employees talk about your business down the pub or on social media, but if you get their buy-in to your guidelines early on, you are in with a chance of a positive (and subconscious) representation of your brand – even when they are not in the office. These don’t need to be overly prescriptive, key pointers and bullet points can do the trick, and you don’t want people to sound like robots.
5. Feedback: And finally, it is your responsibility as a business owner to get the best out of your staff. If the way one of your team behaves has a knock-on effect throughout your business, consider some one-to-ones to talk about the issue. They may not even be aware they are doing it.
So we urge you to stop and listen to yourself and your employees. Do you ‘sound’ like your brand?
By Cheryl Crichton | Associate Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | @cherylcrichton | www.clear-thought.co.uk
If this blog is of interest to you, you may also like to view:
- Case Study: Gradwell brand refresh
- Blog: How to create professional sales tools from your desk
- Blog: What to say, when
Clear Thought Consulting works with small businesses, equipping them with the marketing strategies, suppliers, skills and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We do this by planning and delivering 12-month marketing transformation programmes – supporting a small business through a step-by-step process to making marketing pay. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend your competition, you have to out-think them.
Published on 12 May 2010
