Personal Brand for Corporate Leaders: 3 Tips
You work inside of a company. So, why do you need a personal brand?
Here’s why:
Because leaders with a personal brand will have greater confidence in they way they show up each day. They will inspire trust among teams and customers and will be able to lead with authenticity.
When it’s done thoughtfully and consistently, personal brand work within a company can be incredibly impactful - for the leader, their colleagues, and their companies as well.
And so, I wanted to share these tips with you. See the full transcript further below.
Three ways corporate leaders can deploy their personal brands:
Hi, I'm Cat Coffrin with CaptivatingCo and I want to talk to you for just a few minutes today about how you can use a personal brand for corporate leaders.
So you work inside of a large company, why do you need a personal brand?
I get this question all the time but i'm actually seeing two major trends that seem to be converging to drive the need for this work among people that are leading inside of large companies:
The first is that in the absence of having a clear sense of what your personal brand is as a leader, what's going to happen is you will default to using the brand of your company as your own. The problem with that is that you are not your company and your company is not you, so why would you use the same brand?
The second is that increasingly, some of the very largest firms around the world are actually investing more into building the personal brands of their leaders. And, this makes a lot of sense because having a strong personal brand is associated with things like greater self-awareness and also self-awareness in the way that we walk and talk and behave, but also an increase in confidence among those leaders to be who they are and the best version of that, and perhaps most importantly it's directly associated with an increase in authentic leadership.
So i have a lot to say about how you can actually build your personal brand and that is for another day. But for now I want to talk about once you've put in the work to craft your brand, what do you do with it?
So here are three key ways that you as a leader inside of a company can put your brand to work for you:
The first thing is that you can use your brand to help other people understand you.
I have talked to a lot of leaders who maybe are taking on a new executive leadership role being named partner inside of a law firm or maybe coming in from a different company.
When you have a sense of what your personal brand is as a leader, you can use it to make it easier and faster for people to feel a strong sense of connection to you, and that's going to help build some trust real connection between you and the people on your team and also contribute to building a high performing team environment.
Because, you're actually exhibiting for others what it looks like to not just be who you are or even know who you are, but actually use that information to say things like, "I have a strong bias towards action that's something I know about myself. I realize sometimes that can be challenging for people who don't share that with me, so it's okay to recognize that, name it, and even call me out if it feels like you're struggling with that."
And if you think about the way that it feels when a leader shares that information with you, it makes it much easier to figure out what's a safe way of engaging with this person and to understand where they're coming from so that you're interpreting their actions and their behaviors in the right way.
The second thing is that you can use your brand to move towards what excites you.
One of the things that I know, and that you know probably, is that C-Suite and executive leaders in companies really struggle especially today, in this moment in time, to make sure that their very very best people are in the very best place. We want to make sure that the person is in the best place where they will deliver for the company, but also it's kind of a two-way street and we need to know from the person where are they going to thrive and be happy - or maybe not - so that we try to avoid the issue of burnout.
Nothing is more powerful than having a leader at any point in their career who's able to come to you and say, "I have done a lot of self-reflection I know that I'm strongest here and I know that I'm going to be most fulfilled over here," that makes it that much easier to make sure that you can move in that direction.
Even if maybe it's not a reality today, but the more that you broadcast to others what you ultimately want to do which requires doing the work to figure that out first the easier it becomes for them to advocate for you and move you into that direction.
And then lastly, leaders who build their personal brand will actually start to have more confidence.
The word that I hear a lot more lately is courage, to increase your voice and be a really great spokesperson for your company as well as for yourself externally.
And we know that personal connection with company brands comes through humans and human voices and individuals, so one of the best things for a company to do is make sure that their strongest most impressive leaders feel enabled to go out and be a representative of the company in the community but you have to do it in a way that actually feels authentic to you.
You can't just be a mouthpiece for a company, conveying information that sounds like an automaton wrote it. You need to be able to do this like a real human being.
These are just three things to get you started in case you were wondering. Let me know how it goes for you and thanks for listening!