Eleven ways to build your personal brand from Harvard Business Review.
Few of the key things they're talking about here is that your personal brand needs to be compelling
to your audience, authentic.
Consistent, well, no.
Now, let's get into the specifics, so one of the recommendations here is to rethink the way you view
your career.
So typically people think of their career in terms of being an employee.
Now, obviously, if you're an influencer, a consultant, some sort of independent freelancer, you're
not going to view yourself as an employee.
But for a lot of you, this may be the case and it may be the case for you in the past.
So instead of thinking in terms of I'm an employee, which you need to think about is your lifetime
career and your brand is the asset that you own throughout all the different jobs that you have, all
the different job titles that you're going to have.
So reframe the question in terms of what is the brand and the experience that I'm developing rather
than specific positions or titles that I've held.
You also need to reassess your loyalties now.
The research from Jeffrey Pfeffer shows an interesting asymmetry between employees and employers in
that employees, at least in the Western world, are not very loyal, but employees are actually very
loyal.
And where you see this asymmetry, most obvious is when people are fired, they're not given two weeks
notice.
But and when people quit, there's still some social pressure to provide two weeks notice.
That asymmetry is very bizarre and the asymmetry in loyalty is also very bizarre.
So you have to think about loyalty to yourself rather than being stuck in a rut and thinking that you
are need to commit to an employer when really you don't have to.
The other recommendation is to be authentic, be honest about who you are, your attributes and your
qualities.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with this point from an empirical standpoint, because if we look at
some of the research on leaders, one of the attributes that makes the most successful is that they're
able to control their outward expressions of emotions.
So, for example, if you disagree with your direct reports, you don't necessarily want to show that
if things are going poorly, you don't want the people under you to feel like the world is falling apart.
So being authentic, I guess it depends how you define that word.
I also gave the example of someone who's highly influential in the online course space and how one of
the reasons that I'm not particularly drawn to her is because I feel like she's disingenuous.
She doesn't seem authentic to me, but her overdramatic way of speaking seems to have made her distinctive
and gotten a lot of attention.
So authenticity take that with a grain of salt.
But long term, you definitely want to be true to yourself and what your competencies are so that you're
going to put in the time to master whatever that skill is that you're going to develop your personal
brand around.
Learn from the big brands, identify what makes you distinctive from the competition.
So in the case of personal brand, who is actually super competitive landscape, right, eight billion
people, you need to think about what your points of difference are, what your strengths are, how
how can you actually compete in an ultra competitive market?
What is it that fundamentally makes you better?
Make yourself visible?
So I've highlighted this point time and time again, which is that if you don't stand out, you'll never
get chosen.
You're not even in the portfolio from which people can choose.
So visibility is highly important.
That means when people ask you for speaking engagements, go when people ask you to attend podcast,
go actively solicit people to get those visible positions.
Being on a board of directors for charities, for example, is another way.
Being a emcee at an event, it helps you build your visibility and your comfort with being visible as
well.
Putting the camera in front of you when you're doing videos instead of just screen chairs, it's another
example.
Be consistent.
So I highlight at this point earlier about how consistency is one of the strongest ways of being more
memorable.
The other thing with consistency is that people like it.
They like people that are more consistent, they seem predictable, trustable, etc..
That should be an attribute of your personal brand.
Now, balance substance with style.
Don't forget that the way you do things is often as important as what you do.
You speak succinctly, do you command attention?
Do you look the part?
So this is something that I struggle with when I was younger, where I always felt that the substance
of what I was writing mattered more than how I presented it.
And the truth was what really fundamentally mattered was I actually discovering the answer.
But in reality, in the real world, people care a lot about how things are presented.
Is it visually stunning?
Does it look professional?
Is it organized in a good way?
So coming to the truth is important, but also just the style with which it's presented.
Also talked about how personal branding has a lot to do with style in literally the fashion sense in
terms of how you dress, how you style your hair, those sorts of things.
And it's not just about looking good, it's about looking distinctive.
So, for example, when we're showing the influence or the life coach, she has short hair that's been
dyed blonde.
That's something that's a little bit iconic.
We showed the example of long dyes, her hair, bright colors like red build and manage, your marketing
network, your friends call it clients, customers and important marketing vehicle for your brand so
you can leverage networks.
You already have volunteer organizations from your alumni, etc. Make sure they know what your brand
stands for.
Your personal brand learn to influence.
So we talked about the principles of persuasion from Dr. Veni.
Things like are you likeable?
Are you an authority figure?
And here they're saying, use your personal power, your role and your network to leverage that influence,
seek feedback.
This can be hard, but when there are opportunities to get feedback, ask for it.
Try to get it from people that you believe are going to be straightforward with you, particularly people
that are above you may be a bit more honest than people that report to you because they could lose their
job or you could abuse your power against them in some way.
At least that's what the perception might be.
So getting feedback from people that are also trusted friends, to give you honest opinions, very important
ways to pivot.
So, for example, with me, my way of talking and presenting sometimes is very much too serious because
I'm very task oriented person.
I focus on the facts.
I focus on the statistics.
So a lot of what I had to learn based on feedback that I greatly appreciate from people both my peers
and my superiors, is being more people oriented, being a bit more soft, a bit more personable, instead
of just talking about the facts as they are.
The other thing is to reassess.
So keep checking what motivates you.
You need to think about repositioning in some cases.
So if you develop a reputation around a particular thing that you now find that boring or perhaps the
market just doesn't value that anymore.
Perhaps you're a little bit older in your career and what you're known for is maybe a programming language
that's not very popular now or a style of marketing that just doesn't is irrelevant today.
You need to think about repositioning.
So something in my case is I'm I'm most known probably for product marketing management, which is a
very strategic side of marketing.
But sometimes what people forget is what how I started in marketing was more of a growth hacking, highly
tactical, experimental approach to marketing.
And I found it really interesting because.
Getting feedback from people to the point above, people were perceiving me as a very much a Fortune
500 high level corporate type of marketer and didn't really see me as the kind of startup, experimental,
entrepreneurial type of marketer.
But that's actually how I perceived myself was more on the hustle move quickly type of marketing.
And you can see there that there was a mismatch between my personal brand and what I was actually very
good at because I focused too much on the on the strategy and long term performance.
People weren't positioning my brand in the way that I positioned myself, which is more in the startup
approach to marketing.
So that's one of the overarching things you need to keep in mind is that there may be a disconnect between
how your brand is perceived and what you actually think you are.
And one of the best ways to get that is to seek feedback.