What Is a Personal Brand?
Have you ever wondered if the people you work with like you? What drives that and what can you do to be more confident in the impression you’re making on people? In this post I want to address those two questions head-on. Recognizing your personal brand at work is crucial to following your own career compass, however, many of us aren’t quite sure what our brand is and how it affects us professionally.
In a recent post, I discussed solving one problem for your boss that will open many doors for you in your career, and this post is the progression of that idea. Being in control of a career sounds like a lot of work when you break down the complexities and challenges you face at work. Shoot, that sounds almost impossible when you think about the challenges you face by lunchtime on a Monday!
Let’s take a step back and define your personal brand. Quite simply, your brand is the perception that your leaders, co-workers, stakeholders, clients and peers have of you. This for them is not as complex as your email inbox; this is their undeniable split second judgment of you based on their memories and experiences with you, and/or what they know or heard about you. Sound like junior year of high school yet?
My focus in this post is to help you understand and build your brand and leverage the power of your stakeholders’ perception of you. Their undeniable split-second perception of you is their initial impression of you. For many of us, this impression becomes our brand. What maintains a brand is how we make people feel after their initial impression, or split-second decision they already made of you. If you’ve made a poor impression, you can rebrand yourself to the person or people who view your brand poorly. But it takes some consistency and awareness to pull it off.
Why Is a Personal Brand So Important?
I want you to think about the car you drive, the personal care products you use and the shoes you grab when you’re in a hurry. Why did you choose these specific products? More specifically, why is it important to you that these products will represent you in public? Because you trust them. As much as we don’t want to admit that we are materialistic and that extrinsic values aren’t that important to us, the truth is that we can all be pretty vain. But it’s okay – our personal brand means a lot to us and it should. Our peers’ undeniable split second judgement of us is and should be important.
Imagine that when you purchased your car the salesperson told you that you wouldn’t find out the brand name of the car until you drove it off the lot. For most of us, we’re not driving the car for the color or leather seats; we buy the car because we trust the brand. And I am not suggesting that you need to drive an Elon Musk-mobile in order to build a brand.
Likewise, if the brand of makeup that you put on your face was a mystery, your confidence probably would be affected that day. This is the power of a brand; it’s your perception of something relative to how it serves you. It’s the trust you have in something to represent and align with your peers’ undeniable split second judgement of you. That’s the impact of a brand and the importance of both the undeniable split-second judgement someone makes of you and the affirmation you provide by being consistent with your behavior.
Your consistent behavior and mindset is on full display whether you know it or not. To you, it’s unconscious reactions and demeanor, but to your stakeholders, it is the message you’re sending them about your brand and they will react accordingly. Your body language in a meeting, were you sending signals of disinterest? The way you write your emails, are they quick and absent of a greeting and a signature? Your zoom camera, is it on or off during a meeting with new stakeholders? These behaviors have a massive impact on your brand. You don’t get to choose when people will make undeniable split-second judgements of you, but you do control whether a split-second judgement aligns with the vision of your own personal brand.
Let’s go over and example of a split-second judgement and maintaining (or changing) a personal brand. I like to use the example of the all too familiar zoom call. There is a lot happening in a virtual representation of you that people are making judgements about. In many cases, the judgement isn’t of malicious intent. It’s unconscious bias – it’s a reaction to how you make others feel by the signals you are sending.
Suppose you’ve joined a zoom call with familiar faces or even a team you know very well. Your brand is likely pretty solid to them. You’ve made them feel a certain way consistently and whether you realize it or not, they have a perception of you that only takes them a split-second to apply. Maybe you generally keep your camera on and have a fun background while in meetings. You may have some other consistent habits in meetings that affirm your brand – You greet people on the call; display body language that tells people you’re engaged; contribute to valuable questions and thoughts. These are all behaviors of brand affirmation. If you do certain things consistently enough, you become aware of how people feel about you and your brand.
Now, let’s look at the flip side of that example. You’ve joined a zoom call with new stakeholders. This is a new interaction and because you’re not physically present body language is very limited. Facial expressions and posture become the main focus and people unconsciously notice this. Maybe your camera is off, so there is no opportunity to understand your body language. You’ve buried your personality by not showing off your fun background and you’re unsure of the audience so you don’t greet people that you don’t know.
Think about the brand you’ve built with your own team versus the brand you’re building with new stakeholders. One population of people knows you as a down to earth, engaged, value-adding asset to meetings. Someone who people likely will come to with questions or project ideas. Another population is unsure of you – they have no body language to call back to, your contributions and warmth in a meeting were limited and you didn’t care enough to turn your camera on.
You now have an inconsistent brand based on how you’ve made people feel and their undeniable split-second judgement of you is now something you need work to reverse. Now, it’s probably not your intent to foster a weak brand by turning your camera off when working with new stakeholders. Of course, not. Maybe you were feeding your kids or have a less-than-considerate family member video-bombing your calls so you’re trying to avoid an unnecessary distraction.
There are many ways to build a strong brand even when the vehicles you would normally use are not available to you. If your video needs to be off when it is usually on, type in the chat and introduce yourself. Explain that your camera will be off but you’re looking forward to working with everyone. You can apply this concept to almost any scenario where people are going to have the opportunity to make a split-second judgement of you.
One of my brand-altering habits is that I tend to stand up when I am engaging an audience or speaking. It helps me think on my feet – literally. That’s obviously something people will notice and undoubtedly make a split-second judgement about. My focus is to be aware of how this makes them feel, so my strategy is to let people know from the very beginning that I am going to stand up while engaging with them because it helps me think. That removes the ambiguity from the behavior, thus helping to shape their judgement and ultimate feeling of my approach.
How Can You Be Aware of Your Own Brand?
Brand awareness is a big deal. Major companies spend millions of dollars every year protecting or building their brand. Billboards, social media, ads on TV or radio, and the strategic placement of their logo on the products they sell. These are all examples of branding and how they are trying to shape your perception of the company. You can leverage the same concept at work and in your community. In fact, I would argue the brand you own in your community should play a role in the brand you build at work.
Many of us are involved in some type of extracurricular activity or organization outside of work. Are you a youth soccer coach? On the Leadership Board of a Non-Profit? Volunteer regularly at a hospital or some other philanthropic activities? Good! Your audience at work should know your goodness outside of work. It affirms who they think you are and whether they can trust you or relate to you. Trusting one another at work is a big part of our brands. After all, our collaborations at work are reflections of our brand and could affect how others view us simply by our professional associations.
Being aware of your own personal brand requires some deliberate and consistent effort, but it is one of the most underrated things we can do to boost our chances of getting to where we want to go. A common strategy to networking at work is asking to grab a cup of coffee to have a conversation. Sounds like a low-risk idea to gain a potential high-value reward. But you should know that if you’re asking to have a cup of coffee with someone who has any motivation to do some recon, they are likely asking around about you. “Who is this person?” is likely the question they are asking, but the real subtext of the question to your peers, bosses and stakeholders is what is your undeniable judgement of this person? Their answer will form the first iteration of your coffee mate’s undeniable split-second judgement of you.
Well, who are you? What do you stand for and what are you involved in at work? Are you patient with stakeholders and new hires during a training process? Are you thorough and accurate with your work? Are you empathetic and relatable to your followers? What do you do consistently and effectively that influences the way people feel? All of these questions and thousands more are usually answered by your actions and reactions at work. It can feel overwhelming, but you are in control of all of it. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes after a meeting or a call; what did your brand say about you in that experience? Maybe a better question is what did you say and how did you say it? Sometimes you say nothing but have reactions and expressions that say all people need to know about you.
It is important to ask yourself often about the impression you make on others. What did you say and how did you say it is a good start. Your consistency in this space matters because consistency likely means your audience will have a clear idea of who you are thus strengthening (or weakening) your brand with every showing of your brand. The undeniable split-second judgement of you to dozens of people will be consistent. This is the essence of a strong brand. Coca-cola has millions of fans who feel the same way about them. Nike, Apple, Amazon all have rock solid brand strength. Why is that? Is it because they don’t make mistakes or have never put out sub-par products? Nope, it’s because they have made an effort to market themselves as trustworthy partners. They have told you a few thousand times that you can trust them in a commercial or in an ad, but more importantly, they’ve told you by putting their product in your peers’ hands. You trust your peers because you have an undeniable judgement of them already, therefore, your undeniable split-second judgement of the products they use must be in line with their personal brand, right?
You can apply the exact same strategy. How can you tell people you can be trusted? Well, you can tell them by offering help, advice and conversation. What are your extracurricular activities and interests? I can’t tell you how many people I have connected with because we share a love for dogs. Some folks have youth sports-aged kids and I was a youth baseball coach. The instant connection of activities and interests tells them that they can trust me. And affirming that is made possible by having these conversations consistently with other people. By doing this, you are building a rock solid brand, like Coca Cola and Apple.
Let’s talk about the weakening of your brand for a moment. A good leader will let you in on the strength of your brand based on feedback they receive. This is the ideal scenario because your boss is inviting you to work on your brand. They are giving you the space to figure it out and ultimately give you the permission you never needed to grow as a professional. Some of us operate on persimmon to do certain things; don’t let your career be one of those things. You don’t need permission to grow. Remember that and never look back.
Maybe you haven’t had an official conversation with your boss yet, but it might be blatantly obvious when your brand needs work. One of the key hints of a weak brand is that you are often circumvented and people try to avoid you when working on big projects. Some folks might CC your boss and do other subtle things that show that they don’t quite trust you yet. In less obvious scenarios, you simply don’t have relationships with people that you should know much better. For example, most of your team might work well with a specific stakeholder, but you just never clicked with them. Your brand (and theirs) are taking a hit by knowingly avoiding each other. You’re telling each other that you don’t trust them or care to know them. Think about the benefit of picking up the phone or sending an email to acknowledge that.
A simple blurb like this might help, “Hey, you seem to work with my team a lot, I want to introduce myself and offer my help and advice whenever you may need it. Happy to chat more to get to know you if you’re free for a cup of coffee soon”.
In two sentences, you have just changed that person’s undeniable judgement of you. Before this email or phone call, your brand sent messages of an off-putting or potentially apathetic stakeholder who should be avoided or shadowed by their boss on an email. Now your brand sends messages of warmth and trust. The ball is now in their court to reciprocate with a brand-build response.
This is the power of perception. Please don’t confuse perception and deception. Don’t make an effort to deliberately throw people off your scent if you’re not truly committed to having a strong brand. You’ll end up doing double or triple work when that catches up to you.
I’ll leave you with a cautionary tale. When I was much younger in my career I didn’t have much of a brand yet. Much like my credit, I had very few indications that I could be trusted because I was so green. Not enough card swipes on meaningful transactions, if you will. My boss at the time, a true leader and now a mentor of mine, pulled me aside and point-blank told me, “perception is everything”. He skipped the brand conversation all together. I wasn’t investing enough in my brand and when you’re not making investments you’re losing value. Every interaction and meeting is an opportunity to invest. The take away from my conversation with my mentor was simply this: You can invest by being aware of how you make people feel consistently. Your goal is to build brand value with every interaction and your investment currency is positive undeniable split-second judgements of you. You have unlimited resources and only you control how much you invest. Having a strong brand can help you learn new skills, land new jobs and be happier at work. Dig into the vault and start investing in your brand, you have a chance to be filthy rich!
