Credit business guru Tom Peters for pioneering the idea that branding isn’t just a concept reserved for companies selling consumer packaged goods, but also a powerful strategy that we can apply to ourselves and our careers. First outlined in the Fast Company article written by Peters in 1997, The Brand Called You launched a movement and today you’d be hard-pressed to find any leader who hasn’t considered branding for themselves in some fashion.
The problem is when the story about your brand overshadows the much more important story about your performance. Consider three ways to avoid this:
Prioritize your internal brand over your external one. John is an EVP leading a major technology implementation that is missing key deadlines. Meanwhile, he’s been featured in several major industry publications and is a frequent speaker on the conference circuit. It’s raising more than a few eyebrows from his peers, who are beyond frustrated with how delays are impacting sales and service. More than one has commented, “People see John spending a bunch of time out of the office flying to conferences and winning awards. What he needs to be doing is digging in and fixing this problem. He isn’t delivering on what is table stakes for his job.” When it’s perceived that your external brand is overshadowing your internal one, you’re seen as someone that’s more interested in your own career and getting ahead than as someone who cares about the company and team.
Consider how your social media activity is being perceived by the team. Consider Bira, a divisional President who was incredibly active on social media, with daily LinkedIn posts featuring herself at exclusive events or interviewing movers and shakers across industries. From Bira’s perspective, her social media posts were an engaging way to drive visibility and highlight the company’s thought leadership. Her team felt otherwise and saw the videos as driven by her own ego. Fair or not, the posts caused underlying resentment from those who wondered how she had time for online activity but couldn’t reply to a quick email. Bira caught wind of her team’s feedback, realized her social media posts were becoming a major distraction, and made adjustments accordingly.
If you’re a senior leader who is active online, it is never a bad idea to get feedback from a few trusted colleagues about how your voice is really coming across. As one team member put it, “It’s amazing to me how often my manager posts inspiring messages about leadership or teamwork on LinkedIn. In the meantime, he cancels every single one-on-one I schedule with him.” No matter how authentic, engaging, or interesting you think are when it comes to your online brand, validate that with others you trust.
Shift perception of your team’s brand through a “be good” strategy. A technology team at a major energy company felt underappreciated and embarked on an internal campaign to shift perception about its value. “People don’t understand how critical we are to delivering our products and services to the customer,” reported the team leader, who invested thousands of dollars in hiring an external consulting firm to create an 80-page deck outlining the team’s accomplishments, complete with benchmark data that highlighted the team’s performance vis-à-vis competitors. While the leader’s efforts were admirable, rather than shift perception, the activities were viewed as little more as a PR campaign that didn’t move the needle. As one company leader put it, “Nobody cares about a list of accomplishments. Deliver value against metrics that we do care about. You telling me that you are 90% better than our competitors does nothing if you aren’t delivering for me.”
It may be an obvious step, but don’t overlook the importance of getting stakeholder feedback and a clear appreciation for their perceptions of your performance before you embark in any type of brand-building activity. In this team’s case, they scrapped their marketing efforts altogether. “Building our brand started by us asking other teams to assess our performance. From there, we could identify a few simple actions that would help us do good work for our stakeholders. I call it the “be good” strategy. It seems to be working.” For senior leaders, it turns out that the ‘be good’ strategy is often the best brand strategy, after all.
