7
Building a Personal Brand

In a nutshell: Building a personal brand reinforces your aspirations. It’s critical that you look and act the part you want to play. This isn’t about simply faking it until you make it. This is about purposefully building your visibility and cultivating your presence. It’s about getting external validation to promote yourself at work, and beginning to live the life to which you aspire.

Defining Your Brand

Christine Lagarde enters the press conference room at the IMF exactly at 10 a.m. It is two days before the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank. Hundreds of government officials, bankers, and ministers of finance have gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the state of the global economy. She moves purposefully toward the stage with a smile of recognition to familiar faces and takes her seat.

She is tall and slim, in her 50s, with closely cropped gray hair and a year-round tan. She is wearing tailored black pants, a fitted jacket, and a colored scarf at her throat. Her earrings are discreet and look expensive. The speakers on either side of her are men in suits and ties. They look faded and tired and dressed so uniformly as to be interchangeable.

After an introduction, she begins her speech. She tells the audience that she wants them to remember three points from her remarks. She tells them what the three points are. She discusses the three points in detail, adding statistics and examples to make her case.

Her tone is friendly but firm. She alternates smiling with a serious gaze. She concludes by reminding the audience of the three points and then takes questions. She is humorous and slightly irreverent while taking questions, self-deprecating and warm in her manner. Hostile questioners are treated with the utmost politeness and an offer to discuss further outside the press conference. Whether that discussion actually happens is another matter but the audience is charmed and on her side now, even if the questioner is not.

Christine Lagarde has a very strong personal brand. She deals with the most serious financial issues in the world at any point in time: the Eurozone crisis, the Greek default, U.S. Fed policy, the China slow-down, and others. Yet, she is always a calm and measured presence. People expect her to be pragmatic and constructive, to be crystal clear in her pronouncements. And she is. That is her brand.

Her brand is also elegance. She dresses well, conservatively but very elegant. She is a minimalist, carrying at most a well-made handbag. No piles of papers or large tote. She is often the only woman in a sea of suited men. The annual photograph of her with the board members of IMF is comical for its gender imbalance. Yet she looks comfortable as if with a group of classmates at a college reunion. This is all part of her brand.

What’s your brand? How would people describe you? We are talking about the attributes people ascribe to you, not just your appearance. How do people experience you?

---

Exercise: Jot down the five key characteristics that you think people associate with you, positive or negative. For example, they might say you are warm, reserved, quiet, boisterous, skeptical, informed, curious, kind, solitary, forthright, calm, enthusiastic, ambitious, passionate, and more.

Now do a reality check. Having asked for their help, hand three good friends or colleagues a blank index card and ask them to write down the first five adjectives that come to mind when they think of you, positive and negative. No discussing. Be sure to say you want honest answers and no filtering. Compare the lists.

---

Are you happy with what you’ve got? You might be pleasantly surprised at how people perceive you. I remember being taken aback at how many people find me warm and enthusiastic. I think I can be quite critical and judgmental. That was not their perception.

Now let’s look at this from a professional point of view. Are any of these attributes less helpful in the workplace? Are you reserved to the point of invisible? Is your flexibility perceived as not being convinced of your own opinions? How do you want to be perceived in the workplace? Do you want to be known as boisterous and fun in the office?

---

Exercise: Jot down the attributes you would like people to associate with you, but which they don’t currently. For example, approachable, successful, elegant, calm, generous, smart, and so on.

Put these aspirational traits on an index card. Now add the most common traits your friends and colleagues used to describe you. Put green circles around the positive traits and red circles around the negative ones. Post the card on your bulletin board.

---

You can strengthen or change your own personal brand by being aware of how people experience you and deciding to develop the traits to which you aspire. You can do this with behaviors, your presence, and even your appearance. The key is a conscious decision to amplify or restrain some of those characteristics. Start practicing being the brand you want to be.

Appearance is not the sum of your brand, just as a logo is the not the sum of a company’s brand. But it is an important part. What can you do to amplify the positive in your appearance?

Good grooming lies at the heart of a good appearance. That means nails manicured, shoes polished, shirt ironed, and hair regularly trimmed. Once you’ve got the basics down, apply the exercise of aspiration.

How would you like to appear? Do you need to lose a couple of pounds or get a new winter coat?

My rule of thumb is always to dress up rather than down, especially for work, but even at social events. This advice is hard earned, as I found myself too often at meetings in a T-shirt without a jacket and at church services clad in denim, feeling uncomfortable because everyone else was dressed much more formally.

For women, make sure you have a small number of high-quality basic items in your wardrobe: stylish jackets, tailored black pants, a nice winter coat, and formal shoes. Add dark-blue designer jeans, some white tailored shirts and black T-shirts, and you’re done. You don’t have to have suits if they are not worn where you work, but if you do, invest in a few good ones and take care of them. A good bag and shoes will carry you a long way.

For men, get the basics. That means three suits, 10 shirts, two blazers, three pair of shoes, two belts, three trousers, 10 pair of socks, and five ties. Think Tom Ford or Daniel Craig. There are plenty of role models out there. Look at the men in your office, leaders you admire, and men in public life. Who looks good? Who do you want to emulate? What mistakes do you want to avoid?

Depending on your finances or where you are in your career, consider finding a personal stylist at a major department store. They will pick out clothes for you and help you develop your style. You won’t save money but you will save time and you’ll end up with great clothes that flatter you and build your confidence. You won’t be wearing the same thing as everyone else. You’ll also be left with fewer mistakes that linger unworn in your wardrobe.

Your appearance can strengthen your personal brand. Make sure the two are congruent and reinforcing each other.

Maximize Visibility

Emma worked at a global consumer products company. Recognized as a high performer, she had been rapidly promoted, but now, for some reason, was struggling. Her role involved working across teams and coordinating corporate efforts, but often without authority over the people she worked with. She found it hard to negotiate successfully, especially with more senior colleagues. Her boss, the global head of a corporate function, was tired of having to intervene and negotiate on her behalf. He told her she needed to improve her visibility and get more recognition for the initiatives she was leading. This, he argued, would give her more standing and make it easier for her to negotiate with others.

“Be more visible? What does that even mean? It’s not like I’m wearing Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. I am right here, doing my job,” said Emma when we started working together.

Visibility can be particularly important in large companies, where you’re working across matrices and your colleagues are spread across the country or the globe. Committees of senior colleagues who have never met you and have no stake in your success decide promotions and rewards. How do you make yourself more visible to them?

We could digress and have a conversation about how your work should speak for itself and your boss should be the one to lobby for you in those committees, but let’s assume you already know that’s not always the case.

WHY: Five reasons why you need to improve your visibility

1. You need to be more visible in order to be recognized and rewarded for the work you do.
2. If more senior colleagues are aware of the results you’re getting, you are more likely to secure resources when you ask for them.
3. The people on your team ought to get credit for what they do, and you are the best person to get that for them.
4. Increasing your perceived value and marketability gives you better options to move, inside or outside the company.
5. Less talented people can do this well and if they get rewarded, you will resent it.

But how do you improve your visibility where you work? Pick an area of activity where there is corporate interest. This could be a corporate project, an employee affinity group, or an annual corporate event. Hint: Senior people will be involved. If they are not, stay away unless it’s something you enjoy for its own sake.

HOW: Ways to rapidly increase your visibility

1. Volunteer, ask, or lobby to get involved. Offer to do a tedious job on a committee. Write about it for a staff newsletter. Make sure to attend any events or receptions related to this initiative. Show up early, network purposefully, and be aware that you are doing this deliberately to improve your visibility.
2. Offer to help out at senior-level retreats, even in an ancillary role. I know of one senior strategy officer, who was not part of the management team, but offered to take minutes at their offsite. The following year he was asked to facilitate their discussion. Not only was he sitting in on discussions of the senior team, to which even his own boss was not privy, but he was also able to build relationships and become well known to the people running the organization. He had unparalleled access, all because he offered to do something as menial as typing.
3. Show up at corporate receptions and events. Arrive early when the hosts have to be present but most other staff haven’t yet arrived. Senior people often don’t know many people in the room and employees are reluctant to approach them.
4. The seat next to the CEO at the corporate picnic is often vacant. Take that spot. Be personable. Don’t talk about work. Treat them like a colleague you don’t know that well, ask questions, and share a little of your own life.
5. Hold an event to honor someone junior and invite their boss, or their boss’s boss. The lower you go in the food chain of your organization, the easier this is to do and the more likely the senior person will turn out.
6. Write for corporate newsletters or your company’s intranet site. The internal communications people are often desperate for content and out of ideas.
7. Invite a speaker to address employees at your company and invite someone senior to introduce them. Then write about it for the internal news outlet. You will find that you can get surprisingly high-level speakers for free if they are on a book tour and in the area.

Force yourself to talk to senior people in your company. They are often out of touch with the daily goings on and even lonely. They like to have other channels of information, apart from the senior executives that surround them, and they like to be seen as familiar with mid- and lower-ranking employees.

Ask them open-ended questions. Start a conversation as you would with any colleague you don’t know well. Ask them about their involvement in the event you’re both at, about their thinking on a current issue, or about their family life or career history. Offer your own views and experience. Tell them how this event relates to what you do, or suggest ways you’d like to get involved. Do your best, then go home.

To Boldly Go

You can have a lot of success in building your personal brand by being confident and courageous. Most importantly, it doesn’t pay to care too much about what other people think.

In 1994, I was a junior reporter with Reuters news agency in Moscow. I met the agency’s editor in chief there when he visited to open a new office. Editor in chief in a news agency is a big deal, a CEO equivalent. He said to stay in touch and have lunch when I was in London next. So I did. Several months later, I was reassigned to London. I called and set up a lunch appointment. When I told my then boss why I needed to be excused from my desk, his jaw dropped. I was a minion heading off to lunch with the big cheese.

I hadn’t thought anything of it. Someone said look me up and we will have lunch, so I did. I didn’t manage to leverage the occasion because I wasn’t aware of what an opportunity it was and I failed to nurture the relationship. Ironically, if I had been more senior I probably would not have followed up, thinking that he invites everyone to lunch and doesn’t mean it. I would have “overthought” the situation.

As our careers progress, we are often more reluctant to take people up on these kinds of offers. We fail to see opportunities to build our own brand and profile. We become timid and worry what others will think.

Here are seven easy ways to boldly build your brand.

1. Find industry conferences and offer to speak. Start small if you are junior. Look for angles. What are they missing from their typical lineup of panelists? Are they short on young people, women, or minorities? Are they missing new sectors or niche fields? Can you fill any of those gaps?
2. Identify other speaking opportunities. Get an assistant to scour the most important events in your industry and call the organizers to find out the lead-time for booking speakers. Put those dates on your calendar and call them.
3. Write for industry newsletters and blogs. Find out the rules at your company for doing that. If you need to, start small. Trade publications are often desperate for content. Being published regularly will make it more likely that you’re invited to speak at events or asked to write for other outlets.
4. Visit the pressroom at conferences, if there is one, and network. Most people are too afraid to talk to reporters. That’s crazy. If you know your subject matter and don’t criticize others, you can safely become a reliable source for reporters covering your industry. This helps build your profile as well as that of your company.
5. Invite experts to your company and host a brown bag lunch or equivalent. The experts will be flattered. The cost is zero or very little. The result is you being seen as a connector to innovation and leaders in the outside world.
6. Look for awards for which to nominate yourself or your team. These are often low-hanging fruit. People don’t actively look for these, leaving the organizers to revert to people they are already familiar with. They are often grateful for a fresh face. Search in trade publications and associations for relevant awards and mark the submission dates on your calendar.
7. Think outside your industry. If you are in the private sector, build relationships at international organizations like the United Nations or World Bank with a view to getting speaking opportunities at their events. People heading partnership functions like UN’s Global Compact or external affairs are a good place to start. Back at your own company, you will be perceived as a global thought leader.

External validation is a great way to build your profile internally. But the key is to make sure the people who matter are aware of it.

Cultivate your internal communications function, if that exists at your company. Make it easy for them to cover the award you were shortlisted for (you don’t have to win, think “Oscar nominee”). Or provide them with links to the articles you penned. If the articles mention your company, and they should, they can be included in the news round-up that most companies produce to distribute to staff and will be read by senior executives.

Having done all of that and been confident and courageous about building your personal brand, the next step is to boldly go further. Why not go for that senior position or promotion? Or leave the company you’re with to join a new one? The longer you stay in one organization, the harder it becomes to leave. But once you’ve made a change, your ability to change again increases dramatically. The logic of that is that if things don’t work out, it will be easier than you currently think to move on.

If, after reading Chapter 1, you’ve identified the type of life you’d like to create, does your current job support that? Are you happy doing what you’re doing?

For some people, the current job supports other goals they have and even if it’s not very satisfying, the other goals are so important as to outweigh any unhappiness.

But if that’s not the case for you and you regularly complain to friends about how cheesed off you are, then you need to consider making a change, or you will never live the life you want.

Got Gravitas? (aka Presence)

I have worked with executive coaching clients who have been told they need to acquire more gravitas. But what does that mean, and how do you acquire some?

Gravitas is defined as “dignity, seriousness, or solemnity of manner or bearing.” Leaving aside the merits of that and what may lie in the eye of the beholder, the following exercise includes suggestions for some instant gravitas.

---

Exercise: Make eye contact with your interlocutor, keep your feet flat on the ground, and hold your body nice and steady. Listen carefully to what they’re saying. Repeat back what they said, checking for understanding. Confirm understanding. Pause. Now ask an open question to explore their point of view. It’s basically active listening, while paying attention to your body language. It’s not all you can do to develop gravitas, but it’s a very good place to start. Try it.

---

But gravitas can’t be achieved just by active listening. It’s part of the larger issue of “presence.” Presence is another trait that many of you have been told you need to develop. Or maybe you’ve been told you need to adapt your presence for your audience.

The key to developing a positive presence is having more awareness of your impact. Your impact is how others experience you, regardless of what you intended. It’s how what you said or did landed with them. It varies by person and circumstance.

Have you ever been told you were “shouting” at someone, when you clearly weren’t shouting? That’s impact. The other person experienced your tone and body language as “shouting.” It happens a lot with teenagers but also with colleagues who are of a much quieter disposition than you or who are much subordinate to you.

Intent vs. Impact

There is often a gap between intent and impact. Only the person on the receiving end can know what impact you had on them, and only you can know your intent.

It seems obvious, but think about it for a minute. If that’s the case, you will never know what impact you had unless they tell you or you ask. Likewise, they won’t know what you intended, unless you say.

The lesson here is to check assumptions and signpost for your listener. If you tell people what you intend, you’re making it easier for them to experience you as you intended.

Example #1: “I’m going to go through the timeline for this project, as I see it, and then get your feedback, okay?”

Not: “We need to get proposals in by June, select a provider by July, and have first-round drafts by August....”

Example #2: “I’d like to give you some feedback on your presentation because you’ve said you are working on your public speaking skills. Would you like that?”

Not: “I thought your presentation was decent, but you could have done a better job explaining the data.”

Ceilings and Floors

People have different tolerances for behavior. For some listeners, when you speak quickly with energy and gestures, it conveys enthusiasm and invigorates. For others, the same behavior is overwhelming and domineering. Think of this as ceilings and floors. The limit of my tolerance for your energy is my ceiling, but that may be someone else’s floor, because they love high energy. Figuring out the ceilings and floors of your audience is critical.

As you think more about your presence and impact, take a look around and look for examples of people whose impact is probably not what they intended. You’ll see it in the spoken and written word, as well as in body language.

Focus on the Physical

Physical body language is often the one thing we forget as the speaker, but its impact on a listener can be profound. This is especially the case when our body language is at odds with our spoken or written word.

A colleague once accused me of rolling my eyes every time she spoke up in a meeting. It’s true I thought her ideas were lousy, but I had no idea I was “leaking” my opinion so obviously and so unkindly.

An example of body language trumping the spoken and written word was apparent in March 2015 when the CEOs of Lufthansa and German Wings came together in public after a German Wings pilot had deliberately crashed a plane in the Alps, killing all 150 people on board. Lufthansa owned the low-cost carrier German Wings and repeatedly stated that they were a united executive team and had full confidence in each other. However, it was apparent from their body language at a press conference that the two men were at odds and barely knew one another.

Think about cultivating a presence that reinforces your personal brand. If you want to be considered an effective, trustworthy, senior player in the organization, start acting that way. Think about your impact on others and tailoring your style for your audience. Check out how others experience you. Is it in line with your intent? Is it in line with your personal brand? Is in line with your values?

Act the Part

A former colleague of mine, Jo, based in Hong Kong with a large financial institution, got a call one day from an executive he knew in mainland China. They had previously met at an industry conference. The executive was calling because he was applying for a job at Jo’s company and wanted some insight about the role and the organization. Jo assumed he was interested in a recently advertised investment role in the region. The executive was actually applying to be CEO of the corporation. He got the job.

Jo wasn’t off base in assuming the executive meant the lesser role. The executive had never worked outside China and was not a global partner in his firm. He was a regional leader within China for a large investment firm.

The recruiters never really figured that out. They assumed he was a global partner and responsible for the entire country. The executive never lied. He thought he could do the job and acted accordingly. It was only when the press release announcing his appointment was rejected by his former employer, that it became apparent he had been a regional VP, not a corporate partner. By then it was too late; there had been endless rounds of interviews and confirmation by the board of directors. The press release was amended to be pleasantly vague and the new CEO began his tenure.

Sometimes you have to act the part before you have it. You can call it “fake it until you make it,” but there’s more to it than that.

Acting the part means being the person you want to be. It means behaving as though you are already in the more senior role. It means looking for opportunities to be with the people you want as your peers.

There are plenty of ways to do this. Some of them are outlined earlier in the chapter, in opportunities to be visible and raise your profile.

There is also what you need to stop doing. If you aspire to be taken more seriously, you need to stop identifying so closely with people who complain and indulge in conspiracy theories around the water cooler. You generally won’t find senior colleagues there, at least not successful ones. So quit that scene and find another.

Growing Up in the Organization

One of the challenges of being in an organization for any length of time is that people are used to seeing you in a certain light. This can be particularly problematic for women who are often less adept or less willing to self-promote and network. The phenomenon of “growing up in an organization” is that both you and your colleagues still see you in your initial junior role. You’re still there in your head and they forget you’ve been promoted since you arrived.

You’re the one who needs to change. Your colleagues won’t and they might not like it when you do. This is a little like family dynamics, when you try to act around your family as the person you are with your friends, and your family members emotionally bludgeon you back into your traditional role as the baby, the under-achiever, or whatever stereotype they find more comfortable.

That’s why you have to act the part, in life as well as at the office. You have to behave the way you want to be, the way you want to live and work. You can’t wait for others to grant you that role or give you a title. You simply have to assume it and keep going until they get used to the new you.

Sometimes it’s easier to start with small things—speaking up more often in meetings or not offering to do something menial. The physical aspect is important, and dressing for success can help mask your anxiety and give you greater confidence. If you know you look good, you generally also feel good. That makes it easier to try new behaviors.

No Prophet Is Accepted in His Hometown

One easy way to act the part is not to be known. It’s much easier to start behaving differently when people don’t know how you were before. Think of people who move out of a company or town and talk about the freedom they had to reinvent themselves and lose some of the traits and history that held them back.

The bible verse phrase, “No prophet is accepted in his own country,” in the Gospel of Luke 4:24, comes to mind. It is often easier to influence or impress strangers than those who have known you for years. Starting over with a clean slate can be a huge advantage.

That’s why some of the anxiety people have about switching companies or career tracks is often misguided. You get a bump for being new and unknown. Hemingway talked about the attraction of the “new and strange” in A Moveable Feast.¹ The principle applies in the workplace as well as in Paris.

If starting over with a clean slate is not an option, you can still begin acting the part and slowly wean yourself, and those around you, off the old you. Then both you and they will start to see you the way you want to be.

At home it can help to signal the changes you’re making and ask the people who love you for their support. If you want more time for pleasure and want your partner or spouse to join you, it helps to explain to them why it’s important to you and how you think it will also benefit them. That generally goes down better than proposing a date night out of the blue and being irritated at all the reasons they give for why Thursday won’t work.

Engagement Creates Momentum

I often work with coaching clients who are looking for new roles. In some cases, they are looking within their current companies. In others, they have left and are seeking new opportunities. The singular hallmark of those who do well is what I call “engagement.”

Engagement describes those who actively reach out to others, set up meetings and informational coffees, and go to events and conferences. When they do this, they meet other people, have further conversations, and get new ideas and connections to pursue. They place more calls, read up, and do more research. Then the dots start to connect, the path forward becomes a little clearer, and some paths are ruled out.

Sometimes it’s hard. Calls or emails aren’t returned. People don’t respond with enthusiasm. But my most successful clients keep at it. The more engaged they are, the more momentum they create, and that momentum results in decisions and great offers for new roles.

The same applies to building a strong personal brand and creating the career and life you want. Acting the part is really about living the part. It’s about purposefully doing the things you want, and behaving as you want to be. By persisting, you will create momentum that becomes self-reinforcing and, ultimately, self-sustaining.