Our Trademark
When you work with Leading Teams, we’ll talk a lot about trademarks: both personal and team.
What do we mean by a trademark?
A trademark is how you define what it means to be a part of your team. It sets out the agreed standards that the team will operate under; it creates a code of conduct for the culture you want to see. It’s what you hang your hat on as a team and it defines the legacy you want to leave. We also refer to a trademark as an agreed behavioural framework and it’s a key element of our model.
We conducted a survey that found that as many as one in five top-level managers didn’t even know their company’s mission statement and values, and only 20% of Australian employees believed that their workplace’s values were inspiring and motivating.
While it’s important to have a set of agreed behaviours, or values, they’re only worth anything if everyone knows what they are and agrees to live by them. Our experience has taught us that a trademark is an essential part of any high performing team.
Our own trademark is:
Go The Extra Yard
This is underpinned by five agreed behaviours:
- Show initiative
- Live our model
- Take responsibility
- Find ways to collaborate
- Show genuine care for each other
What does this look like in practice?
We use our trademark to hold ourselves to account. Our behaviours are our expectations – we have defined how you should behave if you are part of our team. We use these behaviours in our recruitment practice because we only hire people who will fit well with our culture. We use them in every facet of our business from induction to retention and exit – read Justin Peckett’s article about our Cylinder Model to understand how this works.
As we encourage every team to do, we expect that every member of Leading Teams models these behaviours – we should all set the example for our colleagues, regardless of their role in the business or level of seniority.
We also reward and challenge these behaviours when we see them – we refer to this as a genuine conversation.
Each year we vote for the person we believe has best lived our behaviours and we award them the Sally McLean Award. Named for Ray McLean’s late wife Sally, the award symbolises our commitment to our trademark by invoking the name of someone the team loved and respected as a great leader and a great team-mate.
- Sally McLean Award 2016 – Daniel Healy
- Sally McLean Award 2017 – Tim Ferguson
- Sally McLean Award 2018 – Justin Peckett
- Sally McLean Award 2019 – Guy Redhouse
- Sally McLean Award 2020 – Justin Peckett
- Sally McLean Award 2021 – Shelly McElroy
- Sally McLean Award 2022 – Steve Lacy
- Sally McLean Award 2023 – Martine Harkin