Manage-Wise

Power of personality

Once you have started to establish a basis of credibility within your company, the next step is usually tackling the roadblocks. Before you do, it is important to understand why personality seems like such a risky idea for some organizations. We have several reasons for this:

• It requires you to embrace your accidental spokespeople.
• It involves sharing control with your customers.
• It takes more work than using brainless policies and standard “corporate language.”
• It forces you to be more open, honest, and transparent about what you do.

I am presenting you with the argument for why your organization needs a personality and how to understand what it is and how to start to recognize and foster it. It is now time to talk about those things that may hinder you. Whether you are an employee trying to start an uphill surge toward reinventing the way your company communicates or you have your own small business and want to promote it more aggressively, this will help you get past the things that may stand in your way.

Fear and beyond

When you look at the list of reasons why personality makes brands nervous, you will notice that underlying all of those reasons is a single emotion—fear. Fear as a factor is holding companies back from thinking differently and/or from innovating. Fear, however, is too broad a subject to treat as one universal emotion or as the universal cause of all obstacles of embracing personality. And for me to tell you simply to find a way to help your organization conquer its fear is too simplistic a solution—because fear in our culture is “macro.” It is all around us, like water; we live in a culture in which so much of the media we see, hear, and read is infused with fear-driven messages that it has become expected.

Fear is the basis for almost all of the stories we read in our newspapers and magazines, the dramas and sitcoms we watch on TV or at the movies, and in many places on the Internet too. Terror alerts around the world flash in alarming colors like orange and red at moments when we are powerless to do anything about them. Advertisements everywhere continually proclaim the dangers of being too fat, too skinny, too old, etc. Don’t make a mistake or get swindled; instead, log on www.wetellyouthetruth.com and avoid the scammers. Don’t get sued, buy legal coverage. Oh, and don’t forget to tune into your local news to learn what you don’t know about your shoelaces that could kill you.

The list of fear-inspired messages is nearly endless. As author Bernard Goldberg noted in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, “Scaring the hell out of people makes for good TV, even when it makes for shallow journalism.” It is the dark side of media and a common trick in a world where news has become entertainment and substance is overtaken by shock or awe.

The reason I bring up this culture of fear is that the net effect of this media is that we as individuals tend to build a cautious view of the world, a cautious view also makes businesses reluctant to try a new model of communications or to share too much information authentically about itself or its employees.

A culture built on fear leads to individuals and companies that are afraid of change. This is a fear I have seen firsthand in colleagues and clients unwilling to take a risk, stuck on following conventions, blindly taking orders, and never doing anything remarkable. I am betting you have seen it too.

In“duh”viduals fear change

None of us want to be in an organization like that, yet many businesses unwittingly encourage their workplaces to become exactly like this. These choices lead to an organization filled with automatons who follow rules and wait for the bell to ring to be done for the day. They are the in“duh”viduals that Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, frequently pokes fun at. They are the monkeys that CareerBuilder.com featured in its series of highly popular television ads that bring to life the feeling we have all had at one point in our working lives of being stuck working with less evolved colleagues.

We already know you are no in- “duh”vidual, though, because you have your knuckles firmly off the ground. So, you should be the one who has come this far toward realizing the promise of how personality can help your organization and now need a method to help you get past the naysayers and conquer the fear of change within your team or among your customers.

Whether you are in the middle of a huge and seemingly unmovable enterprise, or the head of the business, you are still likely to find barriers.

Fear is the underlying emotion, but to do something about it, you need to understand where the fear is coming from. In most organizations, the fear originates in one of four key places: success, uncertainty, tradition, or precedent.

Great barriers to personality

• Success—What we are doing is already working.
• Uncertainty—We don’t know what will happen.
• Tradition—We have always done it this way.
• Precedent—No one else is doing it that way.

These are the four great barriers to a company’s developing its own personality, and one should explore the ways that you can spot which one of these barriers exists within your organization, and then try to find a way to overcome it.

Excerpt from ‘Personality not included’ by Rohit Bhargava. Reproduced with permission © 2008, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 525. Vishwanath_Ghanekar@ mcgraw-hill.com