In today’s competitive professional landscape, having a strong leadership brand is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity. Your leadership brand is the unique combination of your values, priorities, approaches, and skills that define how others perceive you in the workplace. While you might not be consciously aware of it, your superiors, peers, and subordinates certainly are.
Understanding and refining your leadership brand can open doors to new opportunities and position you for future challenges. This article will help you decode your leadership brand and provide actionable steps to enhance it, ensuring you stand out in your organization.
What’s a leadership brand?
A personal leadership brand is how others perceive you through your professional and social interactions in an organization. It reflects your values, priorities, approaches, delegation methods, and collaboration and communication skills. It defines who you are as a leader.
Your leadership brand will decide how many crucial projects you get to lead, how easy it is for the system to trust you, the value you create, how many colleagues look forward to working with you, and the ease with which you produce results.
Why your personal leadership brand matters.
You must be aware of the importance of the brand equity of your business or its product or service. That will determine how easy it is to get customers or clients to differentiate you from others, believe in you, and pay a premium. Similarly, your personal leadership brand also has profound significance for your career in the following ways:
- Growth: Your leadership brand will influence the pace of your growth and the opportunities that come your way. If your superiors and leaders perceive you as reliable, trustworthy, and valuable, they will entrust you with more projects and lucrative assignments.
- Collaboration: When teams are constituted, or new hires are onboarded, one of the first questions on everyone’s minds would be about the person leading them. If you’re the leader, would they associate your personal brand with effectiveness and openness? If so, it would be easy to get the right talent to work with you.
- Differentiation: Cubicles and qualifications will resemble each other after a while. With a personal leadership brand, you have the opportunity to differentiate yourself from others. You won’t be just another VP or Team Leader. Your subordinates and superiors will associate you with certain unique qualities.
- Network: Growth, both within an organization and outside of it, is a function of the quality of your professional network. A leadership brand allows you to join or build networks as your values and personality will give you easy access to key stakeholders and decision-makers inside and outside the organization.
- Authenticity: Identifying your leadership brand will reveal the traits that come naturally to you. It will allow you to work on your strengths and remedy your weaknesses. It will also help you align with themes and characteristics that you value. It’s easy to be who you are rather than pretend to be someone you are not.
5 steps to identify and strengthen your personal leadership brand.
Understanding how others perceive you and then building your personal leadership brand will pay dividends for a long time. Here are five ways in which you can do it:
- Identify Your Goals You need to know what you’re working for. Better than being vague and calling it career growth or promotion, be specific about what you want to achieve. Would you like to be more decisive or proactive? Or would you like to work on your social skills? To make yourself accountable, add a timeframe to your goals.
- Define Your Brand Identity The next step is to figure out your desired brand identity. How would you like others to describe you a year or two from now? Focused and disciplined? Ambitious and assertive? Helpful and welcoming? Then, you have to write it down and treat it as your leadership brand statement. As the intended result of your efforts, this vision should help guide your interactions.
- Identify Your Strengths Now, it’s time to figure out your strengths. Look back in your career and identify occasions when others would have complimented you for a job well done. What did they specifically appreciate about you? Is there something your current and past colleagues have consistently found in you? Maybe it’s the fact that you’re relaxed and friendly. Or that you’re focused and can cut through the clutter when giving suggestions. If you’ve difficulty identifying your strengths, you can always reach out to your team members, present and past.
- Understand Your Organization’s Needs Leaders don’t rise in a vacuum. They grow and are appreciated in response to an organization’s needs. To make sure that your leadership brand will be relevant, you need to understand the kind of leaders your organization would want in the medium and long term. Would they want innovative individuals or team players who can stabilize operations? Are they looking for responsible and mature leaders to fill senior positions in the near future? Are there any associate units that would need independent thinkers soon?
- Develop an Action Plan Now that you have your brand statement and know what your organization wants, you should create an action plan with a timeframe attached to it. You should find out what are the immediately actionable items on your vision and start executing them. If you want to be seen as a thought leader, should you start writing for the company newsletter or start a blog? If you want to be identified as friendly, should you be active in your company’s social events?
Conclusion
The right leadership brand will help you accelerate your career and elevate your lifestyle. The good news is that you can craft it starting today with a viable action plan. By following these steps, you can ensure your leadership brand is not just recognized but celebrated within your organization. Start working on your leadership brand now and watch as new opportunities unfold.
For more insights on leadership development, visit Leadership Brand Development.