W. Clair Communications

Brand Strategy · Storytelling · AI Advisory

  • Redesigning Seats on the Bus

    Redesigning Seats on the Bus

    Published in 2001, Jim Collins’ book Good to Great debunked key assumptions about how businesses become great and produce sustained excellent results. Collins and his research team found that factors like large acquisitions, revolutionary technology, and high executive compensation were accelerators, but not the root causes of greatness. Photo by Skip Hidlay

    Making the Leap from Good to Great

    There’s one book I’ve read and reread several times in three decades of leadership. Though it was published 25 years ago, it’s the first one I recommend when people ask me for business books they should read.

    For me, Good to Great has been a how-to guide on leading team transformations.

    Author Jim Collins and his research team spent five years comparing 1,435 companies to identify 11 worth studying to learn why — and how — some companies make the leap from good to great while others don’t.

    Collins introduced leadership transformation concepts in Good to Great that became timeless in the lexicon of business because he wove them into stories:

    The right people on the bus. The flywheel phenomenon. The hedgehog concept. The BHAG — the big hairy audacious goal. Level 5 leadership.

    “We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy,” Collins wrote. “We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats — and then they figured out where to drive it.”

    Honoring Jim Collins’ work

    I want to both honor Collins’ work and share how I’ve applied his “first who, then what” framework in my practice to focus on redesigning the seats on the bus and identifying the best existing team members for these new seats.

    When I became The Ohio State University’s first enterprise Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for healthcare, I faced a daunting challenge: integrating three separate teams into one new department — a challenge made more complex because we were working remotely in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

    When taking over as a new leader, I have found an important initial step is to meet individually with each team member — no matter how long it takes or how busy you become.

    In these conversations, I ask each team member to share their personal career story, talk about the type of work that makes their soul sing — what they love to do — and provide their ideas for how to make our team better.

    Reading people rather than resumes

    This is the leadership discipline of human archaeology:

    As business conditions and strategic priorities change, talented team members are often filling roles that were designed for a previous version of the work, jobs that aren’t the best fit for their talent and that no longer advance the organization’s strategy.

    Human archaeology involves listening to learn, excavating team members’ experience, talent, and passion — and then matching their skills to new seats on the bus needed to advance enterprise goals.

    It requires reading people rather than resumes. And the courage to redesign the org chart around what you find.

    In my early days at Ohio State, one of the most revealing conversations I had was with Holly Roby. At the time, Holly was serving in an important role as marketing manager for Heart and Vascular services.

    When we talked, I learned she had previously served as creative director for a marketing agency, had a degree in journalism, and loved the creative process. As we began working together on projects, I also quickly learned that she was one of our best writers and editors.

    Crafting a new organizational design

    When I unveiled the new organizational design for the integrated Marketing, Communications and Digital Strategy Department, Holly held a leadership role in brand storytelling that previously didn’t exist — a new seat on the bus that would be critical to our future success.

    Since Holly had not worked previously in a traditional communications role, I received a healthy dose of skepticism from the team’s writers and editors, many of them seasoned journalists.

    A marketer? What does a marketer know about communications and storytelling?

    Give her a chance, I said, and you’ll see.

    Over the next five years, Holly became the linchpin in building the best multimedia brand storytelling team I’ve ever worked with in my career.

    She served as the editor of Ohio State Health & Discovery, bringing to life the new website we created to achieve the strategic imperative of building Ohio State’s brand as a destination for innovative clinical care and breakthrough scientific discovery.

    When I announced my plans to retire from Ohio State and start my own brand strategy practice, Holly shared how our work together changed her life.

    “I wanted to reach out to personally thank you for the lasting impact you’ve made on my career, my profession and me, personally,” she wrote. “You took a chance on me five years ago — putting me in a new position, giving me a team, and a whole new platform to develop.

    “I am so grateful that you saw something in me and gave me the confidence to rise to the challenge. Thank you for having faith in me and seeing potential in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

  • People Own What They Help Create

    People Own What They Help Create

    Our team from The Ohio State University health system celebrates finishing a seven-day brand marketing shoot with colleagues from The Shipyard agency. We’d spent months collaborating with The Shipyard on new brand creative and filmed more than 90 individual scenes for multiple TV spots to launch the campaign. Photo by Skip Hidlay.

    A Playbook for Building Team Culture

    During a wide-ranging pitch for our business, a marketing agency strategist riffed on the power of genuine collaboration between team members to drive the iterative process of developing new brand campaigns.

    “People own what they help create,” said Mandi Cohen, head of strategy for The Shipyard.

    I nodded and smiled. I immediately wrote her quote on a scrap of paper so I would remember it exactly. She had distilled my experience to six simple words.

    Over three decades in leadership roles, I have learned that creating ownership is an essential ingredient in building high-performing teams.

    How you begin when taking over a new team sends a critical first signal about your views on ownership, what you value and how you will behave.

    Why Do Most Value Statements Fail?

    An important early step in creating ownership as a core pillar in your new team’s culture is the difficult, time-consuming and often-messy work of developing shared values.

    We’ve all heard the phrase “values-driven leadership” so often it’s become a corporate cliché. Many groan and roll their eyes when they hear this phrase.

    That’s because many leaders and organizations give lip service to values. They write them down, publish them on their websites, and then ignore them in how they behave and make decisions.

    Edgar Schein, who shaped the field of organizational culture, distinguished espoused values — what we say we believe — from underlying assumptions — what the culture actually rewards and punishes.

    If you’re not prepared to live by and uphold the values you develop, you will erode trust in your leadership and quickly lose credibility with your new team.

    How Do You Create Shared Values That Stick?

    I’ve helped communications and marketing teams develop shared values at three different health systems — two complex academic medical centers and a faith-based system that’s now part of Ascension.

    Each time, our team grew closer from the experience. Not because we discovered a magical combination of words to capture our values on paper. But because we took the time to follow an inclusive, collaborative process.

    Together.

    People own what they help create.

    When values are handed down from above — laminated, distributed, announced — they quickly fade into the background. When values are built by the people who are asked to live by them, something different happens.

    When I became the first enterprise-wide Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for The Ohio State University health system in November 2020, my charge — and challenge — was to integrate three separate and distinct teams with different cultures and practices into one unified department.

    As a first step in bringing the teams together, I knew instinctively that developing shared values would be critical — and that the process of doing it openly with broad-based input from team members would be as important as the final words.

    I enlisted the help of three staff members widely regarded as among the best writers and editors — one from each of the three teams. I gave them full rein to develop an initial draft, lead department-wide collaboration sessions, and create the final values we would commit to.

    They went off and worked for weeks. They argued over wording. They rejected the easy abstractions. They insisted on the specifics that mattered to them. They led meetings with other team members to get their input and feedback.

    They refined. They rewrote. They polished.

    When we unveiled the final wording, I committed publicly to live by our new shared values. I encouraged the department to hold me accountable.

    The values gradually became ingrained into our team’s culture and grew stronger with each year. They truly became our North Star.

    They stuck, I believe, because we took the time to debate, to disagree, and to listen to each other.

    This deliberative process created shared ownership of our new values.

    Values Are Behaviors, Not Abstractions

    Distilled to their essence, the shared values we developed at Ohio State were similar at each of the teams I have led in healthcare and the news media:

    • Maintaining a positive attitude.
    • Building ownership through teamwork and collaboration.
    • Committing to excellence through continuous improvement.
    • Assuming positive intent and extending grace when mistakes happen.

    Notice what these values are not. They are not abstract nouns dressed up to look strategic. They are behaviors.

    Assuming positive intent is something we can do or fail to do, in real time, on a Tuesday afternoon when a colleague’s email lands the wrong way. Extending grace is the choice we make when a teammate has gotten something wrong.

    A fair question: if our teams all built strong cultures, was it really the values exercise that did the work — or were we, as leaders, modeling the behavior all along, and our teams converged on values that matched our leadership styles?

    The honest answer is most likely both.

    A leader’s behavior fertilizes the soil. The team’s shared values grow — and a new culture begins to take shape — from the collaborative process.

    People own what they help create.

  • How are strong brands built?

    How are strong brands built?

    William “Skip” Hidlay, in his early years as a reporter, interviewing workers at the scene of a labor dispute.

    Lessons from a storytelling career

    The managing editor worked in an office with a glass wall facing the newsroom, presumably so he could keep an eye on the reporters. He seemed to have built-in radar for me – or at least for whenever I’d file a story.

    He’d see me drop off the paper slip with my story file name at the city desk. As I walked back to my desk, he’d come out of his office, snatch my story slip and retreat to his computer to review my work.

    I was in the third year of what would become a 30-year journalism career, taking me from reporter to news editor to executive editor for some of the biggest media brands – Knight-Ridder, The Associated Press, and Gannett.

    But at this moment, I worried only about managing editor Tom English Jr. – and the grueling interrogation he’d put me through whenever I turned in a story.

    Guardian of the Brand

    Tom grilled me about each word, each sentence, each paragraph. He wanted answers to questions I’d forgotten to ask. He asked about angles I’d not thought of. Most of all, he questioned me relentlessly to make sure I had my facts straight and that my story was accurate and fair.

    I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first lesson in building and protecting a brand. In this case, the brand was The Fayetteville Times, a small, scrappy morning daily newspaper in a medium-sized city in North Carolina.

    As managing editor, Tom served as the guardian of the brand, ensuring that every story we published was accurate, fair, balanced and thoroughly reported.  

    In doing so, he was helping us build and protect our own personal brands as journalists.

    News Media, Healthcare Share Key Brand Ingredient

    After three decades in the news media, as the traditional business model began to crumble, I shifted my career into healthcare marketing, communications and digital strategy.

    Over the next 15 years, I plunged into the world of brand strategy, omnichannel marketing campaigns and owned media storytelling.

    While news companies and academic medical centers couldn’t be more different, their brands share one essential ingredient: Trust.

    Both are businesses built on trust, their brands shaped by what happens at the moment of contact between a person and the organization.

    These two very different businesses also illustrate one of the most important – and misunderstood – elements of brand strategy:

    Brand is not a logo, an identity system, or an architecture of sub-brands. Brand embodies and grows from every experience a person has with your organization, your team members, your leaders, your website, your social media channels.

    Every moment of contact is a brand experience:

    • It’s the valet parking cars as patients arrive.
    • It’s the way a nurse extends grace to a grieving family.
    • It’s the way the call center handles a complaint at 4:55 pm on a Friday.

    The strongest brands grow one customer interaction at a time.

    Unfortunately, many companies, healthcare systems and large enterprise organizations neglect the hard work of aligning team culture, behavior, and experience with their brand promise.

    That gap between a brand’s promise and its customers’ lived experience is where trust dies.

    Once lost, trust is the most difficult thing in business to rebuild.

    StoryPower Connects Teams and Brands

    I founded W. Clair Communications to help leaders build brands on a bedrock of trust — brands forged from the alchemy of culture, experience and authentic storytelling.

    This is what I call StoryPower: Connecting Passion to Purpose.

    It’s a way of thinking about how to connect what your team members care about with what your organization exists to do — and then embedding that connection in culture, storytelling, and customer experience.

    Brands that endure aren’t the loudest. Their people understand what they are part of and why it matters. That’s how brand trust is built.