blog

Your personal brand conveys what makes you compelling, memorable and interesting. It’s about how other people – including your employer or potential employer, clients and network – will recognise you and your uniqueness: it will convey to them what makes you tick and what you have to offer. It’s your passport to taking the next well-judged career step because it helps attract that step towards you.

And your personal brand becomes increasingly important the more senior the roles you take on.

Your personal brand is also your compass – a tool to carry with you for the length of your career. Reviewed as you move forward, it will guide you in your decision-making whenever you reach a career turning point: it will remind you of who you are and what you want and need if you’re to be fulfilled and successful.

Products or services which have a clearly defined brand consistently evoke a particular set of characteristics in the mind of the consumer. Innocent Drinks: natural, wholesome products and good, clean fun. Mc Donald’s: fast service, consistent food taste and quality, consistent pricing. Mercedes Benz: engineering, quality, performance, consumer service.

To express your personal brand you need to be able to articulate who you are under a variety of headings, including:

Your passions

Your passions are the source of the personal energy that invigorates you and inspires others when they’re around you, and they’re key in nurturing an engaged workforce. Recalling when you’ve been in flow – what you were doing, who with and in what circumstances – will help pinpoint where your passions lie.

Your sources of fulfilment

Your sources of fulfilment both create a sense of meaning and are born from a sense of meaning. What makes you feel fully alive and gives you a buzz? You may be surprised to discover that the most worthwhile thing you’ve done this week is relatively simple: a CEO’s act of kindness towards a stranger, an accountant opening up new perspectives on a problem to a trainee, a doctor sharpening a patient’s pencil because there’s no-one else available to do it.

Your values

Your values underpin everything you do and every service you deliver: they’re about what’s worth doing and investing time and effort in, what matters and what doesn’t, what makes you indignant or engaged. They convey themselves in your behaviours, how you relate to people, your approach to decision-making, and what you give discretionary effort to. And they’re the foundation of the image you project to the world.

Your experience and achievements

The accomplishments and experience you’ve already accumulated – and the learning you’ve gained from them – add to your credibility and to your bank of wisdom and knowledge, to be transferred and applied to new working environments and your approach to fresh challenges. Packaging them skilfully can make you an attractive prospect.

Your strengths and skills

Your generalised and specialised expertise, your skills and capabilities – and the added value they offer – and the strengths you’ve capitalised on (and indeed knowing how to capitalise on your strengths) are critical to conveying your distinctiveness. This is especially the case where your skills extend beyond the technical to the ‘softer’ skills of knowing how to manage yourself and your emotions, how to manage your relationships and influences, and how to get the most out of others.

Your reputation

Ignore your personal PR at your peril: to capitalise on your personal brand, you need to be aware of what others think of you and say about you, as this helps define your market value, for good or for ill. Knowing what people value about you, where they think you stand out, and contexts in which they see you deliver your best work will not only inform you about your reputation, but will also inform those who have an influence on your career progression.

Your personal vision and your goals

Where are you going, and what compelling results are you going to create? What imprint do you intend to make on your team, your organisation and the wider sector? Whether you want, for example, to create a happier workplace, build an enterprise that offers a unique new product that changes people’s lives, or transform the face of healthcare, what specific goals will deliver your personal vision?

Your thought leadership

Where have you led the field, or transformed that field, with new or distinctive thinking and approaches? In what context have you delivered a new order of results? Where have you courageously gone where no-one has gone before? If you’ve found authentic answers to questions under the sections above, your thought leadership will be congruent with those answers. Its expression can make your brand crystal clear and the potential you offer irresistible.

Photo by Nina Matthews Photography via Compfight

Your personal brand: a marketable identity

Your personal brand conveys what makes you compelling, memorable and interesting, and becomes increasingly important the more senior the roles you take on. Expressing your personal brand relates to your passions and the sources of your personal fulfilment, your values and your achievement, your strengths and your reputation, your personal vision and your thought leadership.

Leadership coaching

Leaders who embrace the process of learning and raising their levels of self-awareness, self-understanding, understanding of others and understanding of the systems and contexts they operate within stand to gain the most from leadership coaching. On their coaching journeys they learn to listen to themselves and see themselves as others see them. They become more authentic, they see more clearly what kind of leaders they want to be, and they discover how to make that happen. They learn how to respond rather than react, in a fuller awareness of the choices they make.

You're unbelievable!

'You're uneblievable' - the latest article in my regular reflection column - has been published in 'Coaching at Work'. I'm inspired by Dr Kate Granger, a 32-year-old doctor who’s a terminally ill cancer patient and who's launched #hellomynameis. Change that lasts is internally motivated rather than externally motivated.

Managing yourself to lead others

The leader who builds on, and develops, their self-awareness in such a way that they can step back emotionally from situations to put their own thinking on hold, and empathise with the players in those situations, will find that they are more connected with their people, and that higher levels of trust, performance, engagement and discretionary effort – rather than obedience or compliance (and the corresponding ‘jobsworth’ mentality) – are the order of the day.

Diversity: making more of difference

In order to work effectively with difference, the first two steps for the leader are, first, to understand and be aware of their own thinking, emotional processes and place in their systems, and, second, to adopt a stance of acceptance, humility and celebration of diversity. If the prevailing culture in their team, division or organisation doesn’t acknowledge or value diversity, then the leader needs to change their relationship to that culture (and the relationships within it) rather than try to change it from the outside.

The real message

My latest article in my reflection column has been published in 'Coaching at Work'. It explores the opportunities and traps inherent in the first coaching session with a new client.

Leadership development

Leadership development means embracing the challenges and being courageous enough to be open to learning, whether that learning is unpalatable or affirming. It means being curious, vulnerable and invested in understanding the systemic factors that shape beliefs, behaviours and relationships. It means learning that can’t simply be learnt from a textbook. It means the leader raising their self-awareness to gain insight into their drivers, strengths, and purpose – and into what inhibits them from achieving the outcomes they really want.

The global village

In contexts ranging from multinational corporations to social networking, leaders and their teams interact, communicate and influence others in multiple different cultural settings simultaneously. Culture encompasses literally anything which characterises a particular group, and the leader’s task is to release his or her workforce’s capability in this complex and dynamic environment.

We're all part of the systems

Although we’re all independent human beings, we’re also interdependent, functioning within several systems simultaneously that provide the framework for our relationships to people and organisations, decisions and achievements, beliefs and attitudes. Awareness of those systems and their impact can release blockages in teams, strategy and the implementation of change.

Gold from Dust

Lindsay's article 'Gold from Dust' appears in Coaching at Work magazine May 2014. The client often gives pointers to their most significant issues in their first coaching session - and the coach may notice them but not attribute due importance to them. The first session is rich and complex. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of gems. To see a copy of the article click here if you're a subscriber to Coaching at Work or e-mail lw@lindsaywittenberg.co.uk to request a copy

blog

Recent Posts