I had a light-bulb moment this week. One of those times when you look in the mirror and recognize the connection between your earlier self and the person you are today. We were in Philly at a two-day meeting with 30 CXR Community members focused on Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing. [It was CXR's 136th peer-meeting - I’ve always referred to these as a colloquium...feel free to look that up.]
@John Graham, a leader in employer branding, humanity and culture from Shaker Recruitment Marketing, was sharing some of his expertise and insights. At one point, he pivoted from Employer Branding's (EB) contribution to Recruitment Marketing (RM) to focus, for a moment, on the alignment & truth of EB to employees after they are hired.
The conversation in the room transported me back to my first post grad-school job at Johnson & Johnson as a 20-something. At the time, at the entrance to every J&J facility, was an embedded four-paragraph text that spelled out J&J’s Credo. Each paragraph described the company's responsibilities to customers - the doctors, nurses, mothers and fathers who use our products; to employees who deserve good management, fair wages and benefits, etc.; to the communities where we live and work as stewards of the planet’s resources; and, finally to stockholders where doing right by the three previous statements would result in a fair profit.
Internalizing the employer brand
I drank that Kool-Aid, empowering me to sit at any table I chose to join or was asked to contribute to, and my managers always had my back as I linked my actions and my performance to the values we espoused. What hit me this week was how embedded the credo really was in the company culture. First written in 1943 by one of the last Johnsons to run the company, it was annually evaluated and updated - an effort led by a board of directors that was not just committed to the aspiration but constantly measuring whether it was supported through every layer to those in the trenches.
I looked up the current 2024 version. The text has changed somewhat but it is essentially what I saw as a daily reminder many decades ago. I have many stories supporting the truth of the brand in my 10 years there and was front and center at J&J as an HR Manager during the ‘Tylenol Crisis’ in 1982 when every action taken by the board was tested against the Credo standard (worth Google-ing if you’ve never studied this historic business test).
My take away from J&J is shorter and is simply four sentences I often ask myself and use to judge my performance:
- Am I passionate about what I do and project to others that I care about hiring in a way that we should all be proud of what we do?
- Am I compelled to improve…never satisfied and always curious to learn new ways to solve recruiting challenges?
- Can I challenge myself and others to dig deeper for solutions without judgement?
- Do I encourage others to share unconditionally?
#TAStrategy
#leadership
#Employer-Brand