Personal Branding: it’s not as fancy as You© think
Developing your personal brand is both simpler and more important than you realize.
1. The brand called You.
“Personal Branding”
When you hear a buzzword like this, you probably think of Kim Kardashian or some trendy career coach promising to Land You The Job of Your Dreams.
Don’t. (No offense Kim).
Personal branding is not just for celebrities. It’s not just for people in marketing or click-baiters seeking likes. In fact, it’s critically important for job-seekers in today’s economy — but it’s not even just for them.
Personal branding is for anyone who wants to take control of their career — whether that means carving out a new path or simply getting the most out of the one you’re on.
After you get over the fancy term, the underlying ideas of personal branding are not fancy or particularly trendy. In fact, you’re probably already using personal branding — at least to some extent.
So let’s wrap our heads around it together, and you’ll do it even better.
2. What is a personal brand, and why should you care?
The term “Personal Brand” was introduced by Tom Peters in a 1997 article in Fast Company, where he makes the astute observation that “workers” can take a page from the book of their employers:
“You’re not an “employee” of General Motors, you’re not a “staffer” at General Mills, you’re not a “worker” at General Electric…You don’t “belong to” any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular “function.” You’re not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description.
Starting today you are a brand.”
The core idea behind personal branding is about empowering yourself and taking control of your work. Jobs come and go — as William Aruda writes in his article for Forbes, today the average worker has had 10 jobs — a number predicted to rise to 15 for our youngest generation. But you are the common thread. Who is You©?
Personal branding means thinking about yourself as a business, a free-agent in the marketplace. Just like a business, you offer certain services. You excel in some areas (your skills and experience); you contract-out others (the many things you know nothing about). And like businesses, you adapt and grow over time to offer new services, but there is an underlying theme. (Just as Nike won’t start selling medical equipment, a software engineer probably won’t list “hospice care” on her resume). Your personal brand is the coherent set of services you bring to the workplace: your talents, your strengths, your value proposition.
But you don’t get to simply “invent” your brand out of thin air. (That should come as some relief — part of the work is already done!) We all have a certain set of characteristics and personality traits that propel us in some directions or others. Knowing your personal brand, then, means knowing yourself — and the better you know that, the more efficiently you can run the business called You©.
Developing this brand will help you in myriad ways. Here’s just a few:
· It will improve your resume. Resumes often suffer by appearing as an unstructured list of activities. People don’t find those fun to read — and hiring managers are no exception. Knowing your personal brand, you’ll naturally craft your resume with a theme — one reflecting who you are and where you want to be.
· It will keep you focused on your goals. Every day we face countless career-related decisions and opportunities. How should I define my role in this project? Which of the many items on my to-do list deserves the most attention? Knowing your personal brand helps you answer all of these questions. You adopt roles that need the services you prefer to offer, and you expend the most energy on tasks that call on the skills you love using. (Of course, at the end of the day you have to get your work done — but how you do it is up to you).
· It will enhance your job satisfaction. When you see yourself as a business and take ownership of your work — because you played an active role in shaping it — not only are you more motivated to work, you’ll also enjoy it more. You’re working for yourself, looking for opportunities to grow and expand in the ways that you have decided.
3. How do I define my personal brand?
As Aruda writes in their Forbes piece:
“The most important part of the personal branding process is the hard part — determining who you are, what makes you great, what separates you from your peers, and what’s valuable to those who are making decisions about you…”
I think we should follow these ideas…and in chronological order. When thinking of your personal brand it’s easy to get caught thinking too much about what others want. Surely it’s important to offer services that others will find valuable, but that’s where you should end, not begin.
You should start by asking yourself who you are — what services you want to provide.
That’s hard, so instead let’s do an exercise that’s a little further from home.
Think about your ideal work-self — what you picture your work to be like in 5, 10, 15 years if everything went ideally (for present purposes, we’ll bracket thoughts of retirement — that’s another discussion). Your ideal work-self is the person you want to be, doing the work that gets you excited — even if everyone else thinks it sounds awful. What is your ideal work-self doing on a daily basis? What are the skills and strengths they’re applying most often? Why do others find them valuable? Describe this ideal self; try to summarize them in a brief sentence or two.
Congratulations, you have just defined your personal brand.
Don’t worry if it’s a far cry from the way you see yourself now. You’re a new business, and new businesses rarely start with all the capital, infrastructure, and capabilities that they want. Your job is to set a goal you are serious about, and start working on the plan to get there.
The best way to do that is to decrease the perceived distance between your current position and your end goal. So get out your resume. We’re going to craft a portfolio that showcases the success stories of You©.
For each of your past experiences, ask yourself: how can I discuss my role in a way that highlights my personal brand? If your ideal work-self does more managing than your current self, that needs to be highlighted. Maybe you haven’t ever strictly been a manager…but there were those times you helped train the new employees, and oversaw their progress. Just like any other business, you need to inspire confidence in your clients by highlighting your relevant successes.
For job-seekers, this exercise has obvious value. Although your resume contains your job history, it’s a forward-looking document: it shouldn’t simply describe what your path has been, but rather showcase the path you want to be on.
But even for those just looking to revamp their current role, reframing your resume in this way can provide you with much-needed perspective. You need to recast your story and see how you already are — if even just a little bit — on the trajectory that you want to be on.
4. Personal branding: with great power comes great responsibility.
Businesses need a marketing strategy. So does your personal brand. But creating bumper stickers or sharing on social media will only get you so far. As Aruda continues the quote above,
“All the Twitter followers in the world are not going to help you build your brand if you don’t have a strategy for delivering value to them consistently and authentically.”
That’s right, now that you have defined where you want to be, the best way to make sure others recognize your brand is to start acting on it. Tom Peters’ wisdom is still apt today:
“Search relentlessly for job or project opportunities that fit your mission statement. And review that mission statement every six months to make sure you still believe what you wrote.”
I think you’ll find that your focus makes all the difference. You now have a clear goal. The more that goal lives at the front of your mind, the more readily you will recognize new business opportunities — and the more you can build your brand.
So get out there! You© have work to do.
