So, what makes knowing and promoting your Personal Brand so essential?  Well, if you don’t know what your Personal Brand is and you don’t work on building and promoting it, then you leave yourself wide open for other people to make their own assumptions about what you are like.  Why would you want to hand over something so important to someone else?

A common definition of Personal Branding is the “practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.”   It’s the promotion and communication of what you do well verbally, non-verbally, in the written word and online.  Understanding and promoting your Personal Brand can help you clinch that promotion, raise your profile and increase your credibility inside and outside of the workplace.

So how do you define your Personal Brand?  Firstly, you need to know the components of your Personal Brand.  Very simply they are:

• Your assets – your qualifications, education etc
• Your image – this is not about beauty but more about how you dress, present yourself and how you use your non-verbal communication
• Your behaviours – these are what I call your ‘baseline’ behaviours. Are you the type of Leader that people feel they can easily approach?  My favourite question to ask of yourself in this space is:  ‘do you light up the room when you walk in or when you walk out?’
• Your strengths – what are you really good at? What are your areas of expertise?
• Your skills – what are your core skills?

The above components may seem obvious however, how often do we take the time out to spell these out?  ‘Not often enough’ is generally the response I get when running workshops on Personal Branding.

I like to add a stretch to some of these components – as in, define the components of your Personal Brand as in what they are like now but also define which components you want to further develop in order to enhance your Personal Brand on your Leadership journey going forward.

Once you know what your Personal Brand is, then you can look at developing and promoting it.  Here’s a few suggestions to doing just that:

• Network – make sure you can easily relay your Elevator Pitch
• Write articles / blogs
• Record vlogs
• Share your ideas with influencers
• Create and maintain your LinkedIn Profile. Ensure you have a good photo that is not one of you taken at a wedding, christening etc.  It should be a head and shoulders shot
• Be authentic – this is especially important when leading people
• Put yourself forward for Presentations / Projects etc
• Ask effective questions at meetings
• Ask someone who is a good role model to be your mentor
• Become a Mentor as you certainly have some powerful learning to impart
• Write up a Status Report of: what good work you’ve completed, what good work you are working on and what good work is coming up for you.  Then email this to who you report into and anyone else you feel will benefit from this information
• Support and promote your Team members and their successes

Knowing and promoting your Personal Brand is essential to being a great Leader so take a few minutes over the coming week to define your Personal Brand.  Once this is done, then start getting the word out there by promoting your Personal Brand.  You’ll be amazed at what opportunities will present themselves to you and how people will now perceive you.

The best of luck.

Until next time.