Last week, I gave two keynotes around the topic of Influence Without Authority and how to stand out in your organization.
During the keynote, I ran a couple poll questions to get a better understanding of the goals of my audience attendees and the idea of building your personal brand stuck out.
One of the questions I asked was, why do you want to improve your influence without authority?
I tallied up the responses to the poll question (N=122) but almost 40% of the audience selected to build my personal brand.The net of it is that many of those in the audience came because they want to improve their own personal brand and gain more visibility within their organization.
This is not necessarily shocking or surprising, as from my own experience this is a question that I get a lot, whether it’s working with young professionals looking to cement themselves in the organization, mid-career professionals who are looking to get to the next level, executives who want to get their voice heard externally, or entrepreneurs who are trying to find their niche and speak to their desired audience.
Personal branding is not a new topic. Ever since Tom Peters coined it in his seminal Fast Company article in 1997, books, movements and podcasts have been built around it. Furthermore, with the proliferation of social media, it’s evolved and taken on a life of its own. But the world of work has changed since the topic first came out, and but since it’s so hot, I’m going to do my best to share with you my own framework and tips for how you can build your personal brand, whether you’re trying to gain more visibility for your work, cement yourself as an expert, or get others to pay attention to you so you can get things done.
What is a Personal Brand?
The starting point for any conversation around personal brand is with the simple question of “what is a personal brand?”
Going back to Tom Peter’s original definition, here is what we got:
A personal brand is your promise to the marketplace and the world. Since everyone makes a promise to the world, one does not have a choice of having or not having a personal brand. Everyone has one. The real question is whether someone’s personal brand is powerful enough to be meaningful to the person and the marketplace.
And from another famed expert, Gartner’s Mark McDonald, a personal brand is “the context people use when making judgments about your messages, actions and requests. It’s how they hear you and how you encourage them to take action.”
Why Does Your Personal Brand Matter?
Generally speaking, most people I work with and speak to generally get the textbook definition The what) but struggle with the why and the how, so let’s go a little further into these.
One of the realities of today’s workplace is that while working hard and doing your job well are necessary they are often insufficient. They are table stakes for good work, which while important, is not always enough to get noticed, stand out, or gain access to the visibility, opportunities and resources you desire.
While this has always been true, there are a number of other factors about today’s workplace that make having a personal brand and articulating it well very important for any professional:
- Collaborative Work – We work in a world that requires cross-functional collaboration with peers/colleagues. If they don’t know who you are, its going to be hard to get anything done
- Continuous Work – We work in an “always on” workplace where there are always lots of things going on. Its easy to miss what’s going on, and even if you do good work, it’s never guaranteed others see it
- Distractions – The average person gets 56 distractions a day and 304 emails a week. If you want to be seen or heard, others need to know you exist
- Cooperation – Most knowledge workers need the help of others to get things done. If people don’t like you or don’t trust you, and if you don’t know where to find them, it’s going to be hard to be effective
The net of all of this: Having a strong personal brand in today’s workplace means that others:
- Know who you are, what you are an expert in, and how that can help them/the company
- Are aware not just of your name, but your work output, and the credibility behind it
- View you favorably and want to not only work with you and bring you in, but also are willing to support the work you do
How Do You Grow Your Personal Brand at Work?
Just like company brands have to consistently show up and demonstrate how they add value to customers, people have to show up and communicate their own personal brand so they stay top of mind to others. So how do you do this? Here are a few tactical suggestions that you can use each day, to improve and share your personal brand.
1)Create and Track Proof Points
Marketers live and die by the concept of “proof points.” These are specific examples, stats or the “so what” behind any copy or messaging that they write. This is also why when you look at a company’s website, you’ll often find things like customer logos, or ROI statistics – these are things that demonstrate the reasons they can say why their product or brand is great.
For your personal brand, you want to do the same thing, by creating your own “proof points.” These can be anything from a deliverable that you completed that really demonstrates the skills that are part of your personal brand (ex: an amazing analysis you did in excel or powerpoint, a blog post you are proud of, a readout deck from an internal meeting that won praise.) These can also be kudos, or times when you’ve gotten positive feedback. For example, did a customer send you a thank you note for an amazing product training, or did your cross-functional partner send you a nice thank you note for your work on slack? These all are proof points that you can capture that demonstrate your personal brand.
You may already have these at the ready, if so, make sure that others can see these, either by putting them on your internal company profile, or by sharing them in internal communities, Slack Channels and with your manager or supervisor. If you don’t have proof points, start collecting them and sharing them with your manager and others, so that they are aware of the great work you are doing.
2)Practice Internal Marketing
As I said earlier, doing great work is not enough. Making sure to document the great work that you do, summarize it, and share it with others, especially stakeholders and key decision makers, is critical to getting visibility and credibility for your personal brand. One way to do this is through getting into the consistent practice of internal marketing. Internal marketing is the act of surfacing and making others aware of your work and ideas through documentation so you both can be more collaborative, effective and informed about how you do your jobs.
This ensures that others are aware not just of the work you are doing for your own benefit, but educating and making others aware so they might be able to benefit and collaborate with you or your work as well. Here are a few examples of how you can do this:
- Example 1: After you finish a project, put together a 5 slide summary of the key wins, key deliverables, and lessons learned. When you’re done, share it with your skip level manager, and any other key stakeholders that were involved
- Example 2: Bring together a group of people who have the same job title as you, and do a knowledge sharing session around a specific topic or idea
- Example 3: After you finish a project that is something that others typically work on, catalog all of the deliverables into templates, and make them available internally within your knowledge sharing platform (ex: Slack, Microsoft teams) so others can use these in the future
- Example 4: Curate 5 resources (internal documents, slides, external articles) on a topic that aligns with your personal brand, and share them with 5 people who you know also would benefit from hearing about these topics.
All of these are opportunities for you to demonstrate to others how you have credibility, expertise and value to provide, which helps you build your personal brand with others.
3)Intentionally Build Relationships
A practical way to get known by others and improve your brand is by taking the time to intentionally build relationships with key people in your company. The trick is to focus on quality, not quantity, and to view relationship building as a key responsibility of your job. For example, if you have to work on a project where you need someone else to help you, do you think its easier to work with them if you’ve already gotten to know them, their role, and their motivations, or if you’re just meeting them for the first time? I’m assuming you’ll probably say the former. Here are a few ways you can intentionally build relationships
- 15 Minute Hellos – If you’re in a meeting with a lot of people and there is someone on there you haven’t met yet, follow up with them to grab 15 minutes on their calendar to introduce yourself and learn more about them. This is also a great opportunity to practice your elevator pitch!
- 5 Minute Favors – These are for people who you already know that you’re trying to build a relationship with. But find something that is easy for you to do for someone else that might mean a lot for them. Doing so will not only help them out, but also most likely also make them think more favorably of you
- Find Your “3rd Place” – Popularized by Ray Oldenberg, Third places are “watering holes” where we form social bonds that help us personally and professionally. Having third places help us feel connected, but are also places that can help us generate new ideas, get feedback on what we are working on, and gain connections that can further whatever we are working on at the moment. These could be internal employee resource groups, online groups & communities within your company, or just informal groups of people that share your common interests. For example, I used to host an informal meeting with 5-10 other people in my company who all shared the same role, and each month, we’d spend time catching up, sharing what we were working on, and finding ways to advance and help each other out.
4)Create a “Career 10-Q”
In our always-on world with lots of distractions, it can help to block out focus time to reflect on your career accomplishments. One way to do this is to write a “Career 10-Q” or a quarterly review of your career growth and development for that quarter. Ask yourself questions like, “How have I driven impact for my organization? What am I going to get closer to achieving my career goals?”
You can also create a document with your career development plan with your core responsibilities and stretch projects, and schedule a monthly or quarterly career discussion with your manager. Since it’s on the calendar, it’s more likely to get done. These inputs, also can help you reflect and refine your personal brand.
5)Develop a “Shareable POV”
Even if you have great expertise, if others aren’t aware of why you are unique and knowledgeable, it can be hard to build a brand. One way around this is by developing a shareable POV. A shareable POV is a set of ideas, expertise and knowledge about a particular topic that you have synthesized into a piece of content. This could be a written document, a presentation, a deck, a video recording etc.
The format doesn’t matter, but rather, taking the time to develop and synthesize your ideas and expertise and then making it shareable are what are most important.
For example, if I were in my previous job as a product marketer, and I was trying to build my brand and credibility in the product marketing space as an expert in product launches, here is what I might come up with as a “Shareable POV”:
- 5 Cheat Codes For an Amazing Product Launch
- What I got Wrong About Product Launches (And How You Can Get it Right)
- My Playbook and templates for a successful product launch
- 3 Best practices for working with cross-functional stakeholders on product launches
- 5 Learnings from 20+ successful feature releases
All of these could easily be put into a written document, powerpoint presentation, or internal video/training, that could be shared easily and also demonstrate my expertise and brand.
Note: While I think that creating content and sharing it on social media (ex: LinkedIn) or getting visibility by doing public speaking (ex: speaking at a conference) is a great way to build your personal brand, I want to focus this article on getting the fundamentals around your brand and ideas right before going into social media and other platforms.
Conclusion: Your Personal Brand Matters
Everyone has a personal brand, and in today’s fast-moving and changing world of work, your personal brand is your opportunity to show up as the person you want to be, and make others aware of who you are so you can increase your surface area for professional and personal success.
Whether you’re trying to get more amplification for your work, looking to gain more credibility to work more effectively or trying to accelerate your career, intentionally defining and cultivating your brand is a worthwhile endeavor, and these steps and practices can help you get started.
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