CHAPTER 3

Deliver Your Brand Daily

 

What’s Your Story?

Your authentic story is told in many forms, from your elevator pitch to your bio. Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, explains the connection between your story and authenticity brilliantly, “We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.”

But before we get to your story, let’s talk about the foundational skill that’s needed to tell your story: communication.

We talked about how relationships are the currency of business. Well, communication is the foundation of fruitful relationships.

Fun Fact

Let’s spend a little time on this extra-important skill.

PONDER THIS

Listening	1  2  3  4  5
Writing (long form)	1  2  3  4  5
Email	1  2  3  4  5
Public speaking	1  2  3  4  5
Telephone	1  2  3  4  5
In-person discussion	1  2  3  4  5
Texting/IMing	1  2  3  4  5
Video	1  2  3  4  5
Social media	1  2  3  4  5

How were your scores? If you scored a three or lower in any area, it’s time for a workout to strengthen that zone. All of the communication forms on this list are crucial in today’s world of work.

To get stronger in any of these areas, your resources include hiring a coach, asking HR to offer a professional development session, enrolling in a short-term professional development course (they’re even available online), and seeking a role model. Whose social media posts do you look forward to reading? Who writes the best pitch letters in your department? Who’s the best listener you know?

MINDSET RESET

If you’ve identified a communication skill that you need to work on, you’re already starting to work toward making an improvement. That’s because if you identify a need for improvement, you will become more aware of the maestros around you, and you can start taking note of what makes their delivery so appealing. If you do enroll in a short course, you can add that to your resume. And if you hire a coach, that person will become part of your network. You have nothing to lose and much to gain by strengthening this fundamental skill.

Fun Fact

Tell Your Story

All strong brands are clear about their story, and all strong brand managers can tell that story to a variety of people using various communications vehicles. The first step is defining your story. That means taking what you learned about your brand when you took time for introspection in chapter 1, combined with the feedback from others, and deciding which elements to include as part of your narrative. The technique I use with all my clients involves gathering the raw data and using it to fill six “content buckets.”

The Six Content Buckets

These six categories of content will help you identify the elements of your story: accomplishments, values and passions, superpowers, differentiation, quantifiable facts, and validation.

Accomplishments

Craft a sentence for each of your most important accomplishments in terms of the value you create or created. Remember “nexting,” the trend discussed in the introduction—include those accomplishments that are most relevant to what you want to do next.

Values and Passions

Your answers to the Ponder This questions in chapter 1 will help you here. Just remember to edit. It’s not about adding all your values and passions; select only the ones that are important to expressing your brand.

Superpowers

These are your signature strengths. What do you do better than anyone else? What skills do you possess that are rare?

Differentiation

This is the moment when your quirks get to shine. What appealing aspects of your background, your work process, your life story, and your personality (the sky’s the limit!) help you stand out from others?

Quantifiable Facts

Make your accomplishments count, literally. Sales figures, budget savings, number of presentations, frequent flier miles accrued in a year: It all adds up.

Validation

Quotes, awards, testimonials, and accolades bestowed upon you from someone else or by an organization—like being quoted in a publication—along with your degrees will serve to confirm what you’re saying about yourself.

Once you have filled your content buckets, ask yourself these two questions:

• Is there anything missing? If so, just add it in. Maybe there was a detail that didn’t seem to fit in any bucket. Find a place for it regardless.

• Is there anything extraneous? When you look at all your facts and figures together, are there some things that are just not as important as the rest? If so, remove them. You need to deliver a cohesive message, not a cornucopia of unrelated tidbits.

Now you have everything you need to be able to tell your story.

Brandi Brainstorms

If your buckets aren’t as full as Brandi’s, don’t despair. Her list didn’t always look like this, but she did a great job of nurturing the seeds she started with.

Now let’s start writing. When it comes to branding, your story comes in three sizes: Small. Medium. Large.

The Small: Tagline

You can use your tagline to describe your brand promise or convey your brand personality. Taglines are powerful because they can encapsulate an entire image into a few words. But they need to be memorable.

Smart. Fun. Funny. Fearless.

That was the tagline of Spy magazine, a satirical monthly published in the eighties and nineties. It was the brainchild of Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter. Although the magazine might be extinct, you may have heard of it through references during the 2016 presidential campaign. That’s because Spy magazine had once called Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian,” which became part of the sophomoric hand-size comparisons between Donald Trump and Marco Rubio during one of the debates. That irreverence was part of the magazine’s DNA, brilliantly summed up in its four-word, 27-character tagline. And the message in the tagline proved to have enduring truth.

Your tagline can be a statement, a promise, or a series of attributes.

Brandi Brainstorms

Here are two compelling real-world taglines:

• I spend my days making sure our talent has the skills, support, and sparkle they need to be the best in the industry.

• I’m a data explorer. I can grow your business by driving deeper understanding through data analytics.

Your tagline can also be something that was bestowed on you by someone else. I use “the personal branding guru,” which was how Entrepreneur magazine referred to me … because as I tell everyone, I’m a one-trick pony. Personal branding is my thing!

The Medium: Elevator Pitch

Every time you meet someone in person or are in a meeting where not everyone knows everyone else, you’ll share your elevator pitch. All effective elevator pitches share these qualities. They’re:

• Brief. Think of the elevator in an office-park building, not an elevator in the Empire State Building.

• Relevant. Your elevator pitch changes slightly to adapt to the person or people you’re meeting.

• Intriguing. Not the kind of dramatic intrigue you’d get in a John Grisham novel, but the kind that makes people want to know more about you.

The problem with most elevator pitches is that they are boring and set the speaker up to be a commodity. That’s because most people don’t introduce themselves by what sets them apart. Instead, they focus on their job function, title, and company—what makes them blend in. That’s not branding—that’s conforming.

The Large: Branded Bio

Today, your most important career document is your bio—or what I like to call your branded bio. The resume used to be the tool that would get you noticed. No more. It’s still an important career asset, but it’s been relegated to being a document merely used for proof.

Your most valuable branding document is the 3D brand bio. It’s you in 3D. It should be refined for your LinkedIn summary, your corporate website, your intro when you give speeches, and everywhere else that people are going to receive their first impression of you.

Use first-person point of view (I/me) for your 3D brand bio. You can create versions in the third person (he/him, she/her, or they/them) where it’s more appropriate. The first person is powerful because it is more transparent and personal—and when someone reads your bio, it’s like having a conversation with you.

To draft your 3D brand bio, weave elements from the six content categories into a compelling narrative that touts what makes you great. Combining elements from the different categories throughout your summary makes it more interesting.

Then, close with a call to action.

You’ll use your bio throughout the rest of this book as your source document for crafting your story for the digital world.

MINDSET RESET

Make Your Mark in Meetings

Depending on your role, you can spend between 30 to 50 percent of your work time in meetings. So it’s easy to see that one of the best personal branding opportunities occurs in the meeting room (or in the case of remote workers, in the Zoom room).

The most common mistake professionals make when it comes to meetings is ignoring the prep. When you don’t prepare for a meeting “because you just have to show up to this one,” notice the red flag waving wildly in your face. Either don’t waste your precious time going (that is, delegate attendance to someone else) or prepare to show up with a real presence. My CareerBlast.TV co-founder and NYC-based executive coach, Ora, provides this advice for the perfect prep:

• Review background materials or do a bit of research on the topic.

• Formulate an initial point of view (your branded perspective) on the topic.

• Analyze the audience who will be present. What are their perspectives? What are the hot buttons when it comes to this topic? Who’s the key decision maker?

• Ask: How do I want the audience to feel about me after the meeting?

While there’s been much talk about where the most powerful seat is around the table and how to look assertive on video conference, Ora declares that every and any seat can be the power seat if you focus on two things: your nonverbal and your verbal communication.

When it comes to having presence nonverbally, start by sitting assertively, whether you’re in the flesh or on video. Lose the distracting e-device, lean in physically, and make eye contact (or look directly into the camera lens). If you’re small physically, take up more space by raising your seat, resting your hands on the table, and yes … gently airing out your armpits (try it and you’ll get it).

Do This, Not That

Do participate in meetings beyond just delivering your update. Be present and engaged for the entire meeting.

Don’t sit back and relax in meetings, or worse, get on your device when others are sharing their updates.

Your verbal communication at the meeting is what will help you make your mark. If you’re relatively junior or know zilch about the topic, remind yourself that people deep in the weeds of a problem or solution often miss the big picture. Here’s your opportunity!

BRAND HACK

To make matters even simpler, Ora suggests you can ask the very same question in every meeting. She calls it the branded question. This question reflects your deeply developed point of view or value.

If you’re like most professionals, you’re often asked to give an update of your work at meetings, and this is another perfect opportunity for you to make your mark. Instead of talking just about what you’ve done and the challenges you face, talk about the results of your actions. In other words, talk about what you’ve achieved to date. If you haven’t progressed much on the given goal, Ora advises you talk about why the launch was successful, why the initial baby steps situate you for big success, or what great results you expect. And if you are indeed facing big challenges, problems, barriers, and obstacles, that’s OK and perfectly common. But if you want to show up with senior presence at meetings, make sure you don’t just whine about your problems. Focus on offering up some alternative solutions for discussion.

Finally, yet another way Ora suggests to power up your meeting presence is to offer your opinions and perspectives. Why keep them in your head and then kick yourself when someone else offers them up? Coach Ora recommends you get courageous and break into the conversation with a simple question: May I add my perspective here? If you balance curiosity (listening and asking questions) with advocacy (offering your opinion) you’ll never get in trouble. On the contrary, you’ll show up as adding significant value at every meeting while bolstering your brand. And that influences perception. Along with performance, it’s perception that will get you promoted!

Remote Control

Integrating your brand into meetings, as these examples show, is easy—and what’s more, essential. I once worked with an accounting executive at a tech firm. Her brand was all about creativity, but she was one of few at her workplace who knew that. Why? Because she told herself that there’s no room for creativity when you work in accounting. She got her fill of creativity outside the office by drawing, painting, doing interior design, and creating her own recipes, but that meant she had established a firm separation between work and life. It was less than ideally fulfilling. So I challenged her. I told her that if she’s so creative, she could surely find a creative way to integrate her brand into what she does. She accepted the challenge and decided to focus on leading meetings because they take up the most time in her weekly calendar.

Here’s how it played out.

She dissected a meeting into its individual components:

• invitation

• agenda

• kickoff

• introductions

• discussion

• recap/closing

• follow-up.

Then for each element, she integrated her creativity. For example, her meeting invitations were sent on fun stationery she drew by hand and then converted to a Word template. (Digital stationery is great for branding, by the way.) The agenda was always delivered in a format that was fun—like a word search or a crossword puzzle or a mnemonic so attendees could remember the topics. She did this for all aspects of all meetings, and a couple of interesting things happened. She found that she actually enjoys leading meetings. And … she found that people liked her meetings so much, people who had no reason to attend were clamoring to get in.

Now it’s your turn. Meetings are often the most powerful business activity for brand building—but not always. Identify the business action that sits at the center of these three elements:

• High frequency: You do it a lot.

• Visibility: It gives you the opportunity to be seen by others.

• Enjoyment: You get satisfaction from doing it.

It could be leading meetings, but it might also be giving client pitch presentations, participating in team updates, or creating project status reports.

Now, break that activity into its components. Stir your special sauce into each one of them and watch your level of involvement soar.

PONDER THIS

Summing Up

Chapter 3 was all about the power of storytelling. We discussed the different forms your story takes and the different venues where you can tell that story and attract the attention of decision makers. Now, in part 2, it’s time to translate that real-world narrative into your digital brand. In chapter 4, you’ll take the first step by understanding why digital branding is essential (thanks to the digital-first phenomenon) and by establishing your baseline through time-tested tools.