In Chapter 4, you identified your vision, purpose, goals, values, and passions in order to begin articulating the unique contribution you want to make to the world through your personal brand. But as with any brand, your personal brand ultimately exists in other people’s hearts and minds. So in addition to knowing key aspects of yourself, you must also attune yourself to external perceptions of you.
If you’re an executive, you probably have limited information about what others really think of you. The higher you move in the company, the more you hear what people think you want to hear. And the less you hear what you need to know. Sometimes even one clear insight from an outside observer—“You need to delegate more,” “You intimidate people”—can forever change the course of your career. Savvy executives don’t wait for that insight; they proactively seek out the honest feedback they need to be ever more effective as they progress through their careers.
CEO reputations have a significant impact on a company’s success and viability. CEO reputation, when harnessed on behalf of corporate goals, is an asset.
—Leslie Gaines-Ross, author of CEO Capital
One of William’s clients, the president of a software company, was truly confident about what those around him thought of him. That was, of course, until he asked them. When he received personal brand feedback from his employees, colleagues, and customers, he developed a whole new picture of his external reputation. Externally, his self-confidence was being perceived as arrogance; his speed and dynamism were making him seem dismissive; and his pensive nature was being interpreted as disinterest. William really earned his consulting fee when he had to share these delicate insights with his client; but to his client’s credit, not only did he graciously receive this feedback, he proactively developed a plan to refine his reputation to align it more with his own brand understanding.
As you may have concluded while reading Chapter 4, a successful personal brand is authentic: It reflects your unique personal attributes or qualities. That’s why you need to know yourself before you can build a successful brand. If you’re creative, dynamic, outgoing, and whimsical, you’ll find it difficult to succeed by communicating personal-brand attributes of predictable, steady, and focused. When it comes to understanding your brand attributes, you need input from those who know you.
What are brand attributes, exactly? They are the adjectives people use to describe you. We all walk around citing people’s brand attributes without even realizing it. “Have you met Sally? She’s the most dedicated assistant we have in this company.” Or, “I’d like to introduce you to Henry, he is so buttoned up that he can tell you where every dollar of the budget is being spent.”
Your goal is to understand the attributes that people associate with you. That way, you can maximize the most attractive and compelling ones—those that will help you stand out from everyone around you.
Each of us possesses a unique combination of rational and emotional brand attributes. Typically, rational brand attributes relate to your competencies. They are the “table stakes” that get you into the game. For example, if you are a competent accounting manager, your rational brand attributes would include your ability to understand financial statements. Organizations have rational brand attributes, too. For an automobile manufacturer, for example, reliability is a rational brand attribute. Consumers won’t even consider buying a car that is unreliable. But reliability alone won’t make a person choose one car over another. It’s the emotional brand attributes that tip the scales. Emotional attributes (such as “luxurious” or “sexy” or “safe”) are the ones that forge strong connections between people and their preferred brands.
Many years ago, when William was working at IBM, the company participated in a study that sought to determine the ideal brand attributes that would tip the scales in favor of one middleware vendor over another. They were surprised at the results. Traditionally conservative IT Business to Business decision makers consistently identified what turned out to be emotional brand attributes as determining factors. Sure, the products need to be reliable and secure. Those rational brand attributes ensure that a vendor is considered in the first place. But among those vendors who met the rational criteria, the emotional connections proved pivotal.
These findings probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, we are human. And even the most rational person (whether he admits it or not) is influenced by emotion. In his book LoveMarks (Powerhouse Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2005), Saatchi and Saatchi CEO, Kevin Roberts argues even more strongly for the connection between emotion and the success of certain brands. He illustrates how some brands just command greater loyalty, thanks to their powerful emotional attributes. He calls these brands LoveMarks and maintains that they inspire loyalty beyond reason.
Love: v. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
All this talk about emotions and successful brands is music to the ears of anyone who wants to get ahead by leveraging his or her personal brand—whether that means advancing in his or her current organization or moving to another employer or business opportunity. If emotional brand attributes are so critical to loyalty, then who better to win loyalty from the people around you than you—a human being? You certainly have an edge over products and companies.
But don’t get us wrong. Being loved is not about pleasing everyone. As an executive, you inevitably must make decisions that are unpopular with some people. Strong brands take a stand; they don’t try to be all things to all people. But developing emotional connections with your constituencies will ensure that people respect you even if they don’t agree with everything you do. You build these connections by consistently demonstrating your emotional brand attributes. Also, you need to augment your emotional brand attributes with a sturdy foundation of rational brand attributes. As we’ve seen, those attributes illustrate your competence and make you credible. Even the most lovable among us won’t get too far without being able to demonstrate that we’re capable and generate business results. The most winning brands succeed by exuding a solid combination of genuine rational and emotional brand attributes—as the story that follows reveals.
In addition to having rational and emotional brand attributes, we all have positive and negative brand attributes. For example, perhaps you are energetic, enthusiastic, and collaborative (your positive attributes), but also impatient and hasty (negative attributes). The goal in personal branding is to showcase your positive brand attributes while diminishing your negative ones. Remember, the exciting thing about branding is that it gives you permission to maximize your strengths and other attractive qualities.
Anyone can revolt. It is more difficult silently to obey our own inner promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperament and our gifts.
—Georges Rouault, French artist
Entire companies strengthen their brand by applying these practices. Consider IBM, once known for being old fashioned and bureaucratic. The company implemented organizational changes so as to focus more on the future and create a less bureaucratic culture. At the same time, it launched a major e-business marketing campaign to communicate these positive changes to the world. The campaign paid big dividends: Now, most people see “Big Blue” as leading the Internet revolution rather than remaining mired in the slow-moving, giant mainframe computer environment.
But asking for feedback is not a one-time event. Perhaps your 360°Reach assessment will be the first time you have formally polled those around you; you must continue to ask for feedback. In fact, you must become a feedback fanatic. You must seek it out regularly.
Whether William is in New York or Kuala Lumpur, at the end of every workshop he delivers, he asks the participants to go to the flip charts at the front of the room and write down his top brand attribute. He keeps his back to the flipcharts so his participants can be completely candid. He has spent a full day, sometimes two or three days, with the participants—so he wants to understand their impressions of his brand. He saves all the flip chart pages so he can see if he is consistently demonstrating his most compelling brand attributes. For this book, he consolidated the input from all the flip charts. Here are his top five personal brand attributes:
It’s unfortunate that so many executive development programs concentrate on helping learners address their weaknesses instead of maximizing what they already have going for them—their most natural gifts and talents. In personal branding, it is essential to understand and use your strengths—your skills and capabilities. Of course, weaknesses deserve some acknowledgment and attention, but you should devote most of your energy to identifying and leveraging the skills that you enjoy and do well. We call these motivated skills. Why focus on using your motivated skills? Doing so enables you to derive the most satisfaction from your career while differentiating you from your peers. As you go about your days, you can identify these skills by paying attention to how you feel as your day progresses. What are you doing at your workplace when you feel the happiest? What skills would you relish employing even if you weren’t paid to use them?
Many of us are good at a lot of things, but we don’t enjoy using all our skills. For example, perhaps you excel at analyzing market research reports, but you absolutely loathe that kind of work. If you had to do this work all day every day, you’d soon be looking for a new job. For you, analyzing market research reports is a burnout skill. Be sure to identify your burnout skills and omit them from your brand communications. After all, if you list a burnout skill in your resume, you may unwittingly end up doing it again in your next job.
Although introspection can help you identify your motivated skills, you should further validate them by examining your 360°Reach results. For example, you may have important strengths that others don’t perceive, or you may not be aware of strengths that others clearly see in you. Let’s look at an example of someone who truly understands his strengths.
“The Strengths Movement” explained in the box that follows provides additional insights into the importance of leveraging your motivated skills. In addition, try the strengths exercise in the workbook (www.careerdistinction.com/workbook).
We are all born with wonderful gifts. We use these gifts to express ourselves, to amuse, to strengthen, and to communicate. We begin as children to explore and develop our talents, often unaware that we are unique, that not everyone can do what we’re doing!
—Lynn Johnston, Canadian cartoonist
You’ve gained insights about your vision, purpose, goals, values, and passions through introspection. And you’ve identified your brand attributes and strengths by finding out how others perceive you. Now you need to identify your brand community—the network of people who most need to know about your brand in order for you to achieve your career goals.