How Guiding Principles Shape Your Brand & Culture

In a previous insight, we talked about brand personality and how it is an important cornerstone of your brand strategy. In today’s insight, we’ll discuss guiding principles and how they closely tie to your brand’s personality.

What are Guiding Principles? 

Guiding principles are another humanistic part of your brand and its identity. They are the fundamental truths that shape your culture and your team’s behaviors. Although processes and strategies may change, principles should endure and remain the same, reflecting how you think, act, and communicate.

In many ways, guiding principles are the guideposts you put in place to live out the brand. From an employer branding standpoint, these often help you select the best candidates that align with your values, and at times, they allow you to determine those that do not.

Values vs. Guiding Principles? 

When developing a brand, many organizations instinctively reach for a set of values–things like integrity, respect, and honesty–to anchor who they are and how they want employees to act. While there is a positive intent behind creating the values, we often find that values alone can be abstract, subjective, and open to interpretation based on a person’s individual experiences and linguistic backgrounds.

Values can also be pretty status quo. Instead of providing clarity on differentiating factors of your brand and how you provide a unique experience to your employees and customers, they can address the baseline behaviours of what one would expect in a professional environment.

In a professional setting, where you’re dealing with adults, do you really need to tell people to act with integrity and be respectful and honest? Okay, maybe sometimes, for those who may not be a fit for your organization, but typically these are givens or more table stakes.

Guiding principles, on the other hand, can be more of a strategic tool to define your brand experience–internally and externally. Different than values, they explicitly define the behaviours to achieve this experience and serve as a purposeful guide for decision-making.

Example:

Value: Integrity

Guiding Principle: “We always communicate transparently, even when it’s difficult.”  

In this example, the principle leaves little room for interpretation. There is a concrete definition, and the principle can be effectively used in practical conversations.

Scenario 1: You’re conducting your standard one-on-ones with a team member. You’re aware that they frequently hold back information that would be invaluable in making the business better. Simply saying they’re not acting with integrity would not be a recommended or favorable approach. However, reflecting back to the standard principle of “we always communicate transparently, even when it’s difficult,” it is about the behavior and the desired action, not a question of one’s character. The principle can present an opportunity for a more honest, two-way conversation, which can lead to more productive outcomes.

Scenario 2: A project is not going as planned. Your team has done the best they can to get the project to a good place, but they’re not going to make the deadlines as originally planned. This is not news your client will want to hear, but will most likely value knowing as soon as possible so they can manage accordingly. Instead of questioning whether to communicate, the principle has been ingrained in your culture to do so even when it may not be easy. And in this case, though the news is not favorable, the client experience will be better for it. 

Advantages of Principles vs. Values

Here are some additional reasons to consider principles over values:

• Principles remove ambiguity. They give a clear direction on how to act, react, and even approach situations.
• Clearly defined principles can empower your team to make decisions confidently and independently, creating a more agile and nimble organization. 
• They offer actional alignment. They can guide how to foster a positive culture in the good times and the difficult ones. 
• Principles provide accountability and measurement for the intangibles. In addition to performance based on skills and expertise, principles help measure how someone contributes to the greater ethos of the organization.
• They can be a strategic tool and differentiator to attract and retain talent, and to provide a customer experience superior to your competition.

Quick Take

When defining or redefining your brand, reflect on your brand personality. What behaviors and actions will help you consistently reflect these traits and deliver a differentiated brand experience to customers and employees alike? 

Once your principles are defined, make them an integral part of your company’s operations. Work with human resources to make sure they’re a part of your recruiting and retention efforts. Integrate the principles into the way you do business and make them a part of your regular conversations. Create digital and physical touchpoints to let your principles be known. 

Ultimately, guiding principles are more than just words on a page—they are the living essence of your brand. They shape not only how you interact internally but also how you are perceived externally, creating an experience uniquely yours. By embedding these clearly defined, actionable principles into every aspect of your organization, you build a brand culture that not only attracts and retains the right talent but consistently enhances the experience for your customers.

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Need help crafting your principles and brand strategy? Get in touch!

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