How Guiding Principles Shape Your Brand & Culture

In a previous insight, we talked about brand personality and how it’s an important cornerstone of your brand strategy. In today’s insight, we’ll discuss guiding principles and how closely they 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 bring your brand to life. From an employer branding standpoint, they often help you identify the candidates who align with your values, and those who do not.

Values vs. Guiding Principles — Not One And The Same 

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

Values can also be pretty status quo. Instead of differentiating your brand and how you provide a unique experience to your employees and customers, they often simply name the baseline behaviors of what one would already expect from a professional environment.

In a professional setting, 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 and differentiate your brand experience—both internally and externally. Different from values, they explicitly define the actions and behaviors to achieve this experience and serve as a purposeful guide for making decisions.

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. Instead, reflecting the standard principle of “we always communicate transparently, even when it’s difficult,” makes it 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 flex these traits and deliver a differentiated brand experience to both customers and employees?

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 that’s uniquely yours. By embedding these clearly defined, actionable principles into every dimension of your organization, you build a brand culture that not only attracts and retains the right talent but consistently enhances your customers’ experience.

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

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