Avoiding The Pitfalls of Executive Imitation
How to develop your unique brand as a path to the c-suite
A colleague texted me a screenshot of the offending LinkedIn profile.
“Hey, JD — I thought YOU were the Chicagoan leading at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity.”
He had my full attention. I‘d developed the tagline years ago to convey the connection between my PhD in organizational communication with my decades of PE-backed sales experience. I tout it as the unique differentiator I bring to organizations as their CRO or Board Advisor.
I opened the link. A front-line seller who abruptly resigned a few months previously had taken a role as “VP of Sales” at what seemed to be a 17 person software company, and had copied this tagline wholesale for his own LinkedIn profile.
He also include a familiar claim of specializing in “sales transformations.” In Chicago.
I shot him a quick note, and he replied within the hour. “Let me cut to the chase — you should hire me to run sales in North America. We’re both local Chi-town, let’s meet up in person.” No mention of my request for him to choose something more original, and no acknowledgement of the source of his new brand’s inspiration.
I had a lot of thoughts about this. The most important one, though, is that he’s not really helping himself advance to the c-suite.
As professionals move past front-line and middle-level management, they’re assumed to be a functional expert in their particular domain. Interviews with Board and Executive team members use prior track record as evidence of tactical mastery, and so they focus much more on fuzzier concepts of “fit.” They’re looking for the truly unique experiences, values, or points of view that will complement the rest of the leadership team in driving their unique business forward.
A personal brand, then, should serve as a pithy-and-punchy explanation of your unique complexity, and serve as a framework to support any conversation about your resume or leadership style.
Copy and pasting someone else’s brand promise simply won’t work.
Here’s a better approach to crafting your own personal brand statement:
- Review at your life history, and identify what is truly unique about you. Of course you’ve risen through the ranks of sales, development, or finance and hit all the relevant metrics. What sets you apart from others who have done the same?
- Grab some post-its or make a list of the pivotal experiences from your life that you would want to tell in an interview or panel discussion.
When I was in college in the 90s, a White House internship caused me to shift from law school to a communication degree focused on the emerging internet. I added “tell me about your values” to every interview I’ve conducted since leaving a job with colleagues who had very different values than my own.
Your experiences will be different. Perhaps you play a sport or an instrument that gives you a unique sense of discipline. Maybe being an adoptive parent has taught you how to develop deep trusting relationships with strangers. Reduce each experience to a two sentence commercial for a longer story you might want to tell in more detail. - Synthesize these commercial teasers into themes. Can you create a list of a half-dozen words that connect them all together? How might those words combine into you own unique brand tagline?
- Consider generative AI to assist in this process. I pasted the former employee’s resume into Bard, and asked it to summarize the key experiences that set them apart from other sellers. Then I asked Bard to generate a set of taglines that convey those messages. Here’s what I got:
“SaaS expert with a passion for helping professional services organizations achieve greatness.”
“Sales leader with a knack for building lasting relationships”
“Big 4 alliance expert driving innovation through mutually-beneficial partnerships”
Like a lot of AI content, these suggestions have room for more personalization, but I can see how each one might start a conversation about accomplishments from the resume.
5. Use your new brand language consistently across all channels. Make sure your website, LinkedIn profile, and social media presence, all use consistent language to convey your personal value proposition.
At conferences, I give the MC the “intersection of business, technology, and humanity” language for my introduction, I use the three big themes as organizing pricniples of most of the content I create, and it’s found in the author bio of every blog post I write. Each time incrementally build s the association between me and these unique differentiators, and helps me refine my own thinking about the benefits I bring to my work.
6. Re-assess anually, or after major career accomplishments. Over time, new skills and topics will becme trendy, or you’ll achieve things you’ve never done before. These are great opportunities to revisit your brand promise, and tweak to represent your new reality.
As new technologies offer automation and routinization of lots of jobs, the professionals who become c-level leaders are there because of their humanity — the life experiences, values and viewpoints that make them unique individuals who lead an innovate in ways specific to them.
Take some time to think about what you bring to the workplace that is specific to you, and follow these steps to start articulating your unique brand promise as a leader.
You’ll soon find that that you’re unique executive who can’t be imitated or replaced by others.
