“Leadership brand occurs when leaders at every level connect employee actions to desired customer experience.”

Norm Smallwood is a recognized authority in developing businesses and their leaders to deliver results and increase value. His current work relates to increasing business value by building organization, leadership, and people capabilities that measurably impact market value.

In 2000, Norm cofounded The RBL Group with Dave Ulrich.

Much of his current work relates to connecting firm brand identity with leadership brand capability. Leadership brand capability occurs when investors, customers, and employees have confidence that leaders are able to deliver present and future results in a manner consistent with the desired customer experience or firm identity.

In 2010, the Harvard Business Review recognized Norm in an ad for the magazine as doing “innovative and ground-breaking work on effective leadership.”

He has co-authored seven books: Real-Time Strategy, Results-Based Leadership, How Leaders Build Value, Change Champions Field Guide, Leadership Brand, Leadership Code, and What is Leadership? (eBook). He has published hundreds of articles in leading journals and newspapers including Washington Post, Forbes, and Financial Times, and has contributed chapters and forewords to multiple books. Norm has been a frequent blogger on HBR Online where his blog on personal Leader Brand was highlighted as one of ten most read of 2010.

Norm was a faculty member in executive education at the University of Michigan in the Ross School of Management for three years.

For several years, Leadership Excellence magazine has ranked Norm as one of the top 100 Global Voices in Leadership and the RBL Group as one of the top leadership development firms in the world.

Background
Prior to co-founding the RBL Group, Norm was a founding partner and managing director of Novations Group, Inc. where he led business strategy, organization design, and human resource management projects for a wide variety of clients spanning multiple industries. Before this, he was an organization development professional at Procter and Gamble in a start-up business in Georgia and in Calgary, Alberta, with Esso Resources Canada.

He is an Honorary Colonel for the West Valley City Police Department.

On the family side, Norm and his wife Tricia are the designated leaders of two Great Danes (Fritz and Freddy) along with a couple of cats (Max and Achilles), a school of koi (fish), and assorted children and grandchildren.