brand as business bit:  The folks at UpMo, an employee-centric career management company, asked me to contribute to their blog, the upMover.   I thought it was the perfect opportunity to share about something I’ve been thinking about for awhile now:  the power of storytelling to engage employees.

Companies often use advertising and social media to share rich and compelling stories with their customers and then revert to PowerPoint presentations and strategy documents for internal communications.  But employees need to be inspired as much as – if not more than – customers.

In my post, Once Upon a Company, I convey how business leaders can use stories to convey their company’s vision, reinforce its values, and inspire connections among its people. I’d be grateful if you would take a click over to my piece and let me know what you think.

What happens when a $2.1BB+ organization re-commits its 20,000+ people to its vision and values?!   I got to find out last week when I attended “Extraordinary: The Power of Ten” the All-Staff Assembly put on by Sharp Healthcare. Thanks to a generous invitation from Mark Tomaszewicz, the director of The Sharp Experience, I got to experience first-hand the truly remarkable event.

Some background: Sharp Healthcare introduced The Sharp Experience in 2001 as an organizational vision and commitment to transform the health care experience. It is intended to enhance how Sharp people interact with and serve their patients, their affiliated physicians, and each other – it’s really their culture. The Sharp Experience vision is to make Sharp be “the best place to work, the best place to practice medicine and the best place to receive care.”

It’s been a phenomenal success:

• Sharp is in the 85th percentile of national rankings in patient satisfaction.
• Last year for the third year in a row, readers of The San Diego Union-Tribune recognized Sharp HealthCare as San Diego’s “Best Hospital” in its Best of San Diego Readers’ Poll.
• In November 2007, it received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest presidential honor for quality and organizational performance excellence.
• And even though Sharp is a non-profit, its financial performance is significant — it has grown its market share leadership for 10 years in a row.

Every year since the inception of The Sharp Experience, it holds an All-Staff Assembly as a way to engage the entire Sharp HealthCare team in recommitting to “the purpose and worth of our work and the difference we make in the lives of others.” (They actually do the assembly 3 times over 2 days so that everyone can attend.)

It’s part-inspiration, part-education, and part-celebration. The Assembly makes a powerful statement about how important the organization views employee engagement to The Sharp Experience.

I don’t think words can describe what the event is like, so check out the highlight reel I made:

The Sharp Experience All-Staff Assembly Highlight Reel by DLYohn from Denise Lee Yohn on Vimeo.

I was blown away by the event. That Sharp would invest the time, money, and energy to put on this kind of event is, well, extraordinary. Throughout my career, I’ve been involved with a lot of corporate efforts with similar objectives, both as a producer and as an attendee, but nothing comes close to what I experienced.

There are three particular things about the event which stood out:

1. Multiple entry points to understanding The Sharp Experience – The event included a full-range of experiences which allowed the attendee to engage with The Sharp Experience content in different ways. From the moving videos of Sharp patient stories, to the awards ceremony acknowledging people’s distinctive performance, to an inspiring spoken-word performance by Sekou Andrews, to the crazy dancing in the aisles, to the provocative speech about unlocking human potential by Sir Ken Robinson, to… Regardless of where you were coming from, what kind of input you prefer, and whether you wanted to learn, be inspired, have fun, or be challenged, the event connected with you.

I once heard MIT Professor Marvin Minsky talk about the importance of experiencing something in multiple ways in order to really understand it.  This event demonstrated this principle. It offered up different ways to understand The Sharp Experience and in doing so, ensured that all Sharp employees were re-engaged in its vision.

2. Fun! – The event was a lot of fun. And I don’t mean that kind of manufactured fun that corporate events often feature – you know, the kind that seems a little awkward but you feel like you have to play along in order to show your corporate spirit.

The Sharp Assembly was truly fun. It started when you walked up to the event – employees formed a tunnel of cheering and clapping for each and every attendee to walk through.  And the fun lasted through to hilarious videos of executives doing Harry Potter spoofs and Beyonce moves. The event lasted 4 hours but the time flew because it was fun.

Healthcare is something to be taken seriously but I applaud Sharp for making it fun.

3. One brand – Oftentimes when I’m speaking to people about employee brand engagement, the question of employee experience vs. customer experience arises. Companies increasingly use terms like “employment branding” and “internal branding” to describe efforts to create a unique employee experience which they can promote in the recruitment process. People ask me if “the consumer brand” and “the employment brand” should be related — and how.

The Sharp Experience – and the way it is served up at the All-Staff Assembly — answers the question more clearly and convincingly than I ever have: It’s all one thing. There isn’t one way of talking to patients and another for engaging employees. There aren’t two separate set of values which define what it’s like to work at Sharp vs. to be treated at Sharp. The Sharp Experience weaves together seamlessly the employee experience and the patient experience into a single symbiotic experience.  The result is a brand and an organization with clarity, focus, and integrity.

The organization’s vision speaks powerfully to all audiences: “Sharp will redefine the health care experience through a culture of caring, quality, service, innovation, and excellence. Sharp will be recognized by employees, physicians, patients, volunteers, and the community as: the best place to work, the best place to practice medicine, and the best place to receive care…Sharp will become the best health system in the universe.”

From my experience at the All-Staff Assembly, I’d say they’re well on their way.

What a day!  The World Business Forum featured phenomenal speakers and drew over 4,000 attendees from 60+ countries.  I’m so honored to have been invited to attend as a guest blogger.

I tweeted the best bits from today as they rolled off the speakers’ tongues and will be doing the same tomorrow morning (follow me: deniseleeyohn) but here are six of my main takeaways so far:

1.  Leadership is an art

Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall:  Level 5 leaders share a special brand of humility – they have absolute burning ambition for the cause and company (not themselves) combined with the will to do whatever it takes (as long as it doesn’t breach the core values)

Bill McDermott, Co-CEO of SAP:  Leaders have followers – they set high expectations and are resolute in face of adversity — when others day it can’t be done, they say it can and they make it happen

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, current founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute:  lead change before you have to – complacency is the biggest danger we have – change is happening all around us – be on the offense

Carlos Brito, CEO of InBev:  Dreaming big and dreaming small take same amount of energy, so dream big!

Charlene Li, author of Open Leadership:  You do have to be centralizing and controlling in terms of how open you’re going to be

Li:  Create a culture of sharing

Joseph Grenny, author of Influence:  The Power to Change Anything:    2 problems of leadership:

• 1. what should we do (strategy)
• 2. how do I get everyone to do it (influence)

Grenny:  Greeny’s law of leadership – there’s no strategy so brilliant that people can’t render it worthless

Grenny:  Influencers succeed where the rest of us fail because they over-determine success –  instead of focusing on one thing they need to do to get person to change; they marshall a critical mass of 6 sources of influences

2.  Success is not what we think it is

Les Hinton, Dow Jones & Company:  success requires seeing past your own operations and beyond the competition – leaders shouldn’t be bound by their own assumptions of their products or even peers or competitors

Collins:  Greatness is not a function of circumstance (not entirely) – if’s first and foremost a conscious choice and discipline

Collins:  It’s not about profit for X — being useful in a way that society values

Collins:  Don’t worry about whether going to be successful; ask how you can be useful

3.  Be wary of common pitfalls

Collins:  definition of hubris — outrageous arrogance that inflicts suffering on innocent

Collins:  It’s hubris to come in with less passion on day 1000 than on day 1

Collins:  Never confuse power with leadership – I can get you to do anything if I put a gun to your head but it doesn’t mean I have led

Welch:  Don’t celebrate successes; celebrate who’s doing their job

4.  Having the right team is critical

Collins:  If you allow growth in complexity to exceed your ability to have all key seats filled with the right people to execute brilliantly in that growth, you will fall

McDermott:  You can tell the best CEOs from their executive secretaries – if you can’t manage your own house, how can you expect to run a company

McDermott:  the best leaders hire over their heads every time

Welch:  The main job of a CEO is developing talent – the team that fields the best players wins

Brito:  Great people:

• make great companies
• attract more of the same
• will push you to be better
• like meritocracy (and they see through it if you’re not fair)

Brito:  You have to be the coach – people are not the responsibility of the HR dept

Brito:  We want owners vs. professionals or executives – owners make better decisions

David Gergen, former Presidential advisor:  Human resources are most valuable thing you have in company

5.  Leadership requires honesty and perseverance

Collins:  Just because our intentions are noble and good doesn’t mean our decisions are good and wise

Collins:  the Stockdale principle (named after Admiral Stockdale top ranking officer at Hanoi Hilton):  never confuse the need for unwavering faith that you will prevail in the end on one hand with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts

Collins:  Building greatest never happens in a single moment; it happens only by turning the flywheel in consistent intelligent direction and keeping pushing

Collins:  Don’t focus on career, focus on building pockets of greatness at every step

Welch:  Face reality as it is not as you want it to be

Welch:  Searching for a better way every day is a game-changing way to do business

6.  Why we do is more important than what we do

Collins:  if your enterprise went away, who would care? – what un-fillable hole would it leave? You have to have an answer to that question otherwise someday you WILL go away

McDermott:  you need a compelling vision for your business – why do you exist and why should people care?  SAP’s purpose is to make the world run better

Brtio:  We don’t have vision or mission, just a dream:  Be the best beer company in the world

notes and quotes from other conferences I’ve recently attended:

• best bits from Dine America
• keys to compelling customer experiences

The development and management of a corporate brand is often a stumbling block for companies.  the same business leaders who understand the role of brand when it comes to products, grapple with applying it to the corporation.

Thankfully the brilliant international business school professors Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz have provided some help. Their latest book, Taking Brand Initiative, serves as a culmination of the decade-long research and analysis they’ve conducted on corporate brands.

A particularly useful framework from the book relates to assessing the strength of a corporate brand by determining whether or not there are “Vision-Culture-Image” gaps.  They define Vision as top management’s aspirations for the company; Culture, the organization’s values, behaviors, and attitudes; and Image, the outside world’s overall impression of the company.

By identifying where gaps may lie, companies are in a better position to develop strategies that develop their corporate brands into assets for competitive advantage.  There are some other great tools and frameworks in the book as well as examples from companies like LEGO, Intel, Nissan, and Johnson & Johnson.

I hope those of you who employ a corporate brand approach in your brand portfolios find the book helpful.