Reinventing Your Leadership Brand

Episode #352 Reinventing Your Leadership Brand

YOUR LEADERSHIP BRAND IS IMPORTANT

We hear a lot these days about personal branding and there’s an expert for every occasion promising to guide us through the leadership branding maze.

We’re told how important it’s to have a strong leadership brand if we want to progress in our careers. Well, look, that’s probably true… but there’s a dangerous misconception that you can construct an external image of desirable behaviours and values without actually possessing them.

That approach is doomed to failure.

The people in your professional sphere need to know who you are, and they need to know what you stand for. So to that extent, building a strong brand around your positive attributes, and being clear on what distinguishes you from other leaders can be highly valuable.

In this newsletter I define what leadership brand is; I give you a very specific example of how you can change any given element of your leadership brand; and I’ll leave you with two practical tools to help you with any changes that you might choose to make.

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP BRAND?

It’s become pretty popular to talk about personal brand. LinkedIn is full of experts offering to help you build your brand, and this has now bled across into the broader culture: you know it’s a thing when Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the South Park guys, decide to dedicate an episode to it!

Your personal brand is just the perception that others have of you, based on your personality, your behaviours, and your communication style – it’s how you show up in the world.

The key elements that make up your personal brand are:

• Your values;
• Your defining strengths and weaknesses;
• Your communication tone and style;
• Your external image (the way you present yourself, the way you dress, your personal grooming etc);
• The reputation that you’ve built over time, based on your actions; and
• Anything else you are known for.

Just to be clear, what you don’t want to be known for is for the time you got blind drunk at Friday drinks and declared your undying love for one of the junior analysts.

Your leadership brand is just an extension of your personal brand, and it incorporates things like:

• Your values, competence, and credibility;
• How you interact with and influence others;
• The consistency and quality of the results your teams deliver; and
• How people feel when they work under your leadership.

To bring this concept to life, I just want to take a quick look at the similarities between brand and team culture.

Culture as we know, is just the way we do things around here. Every team has a culture, whether it’s formed deliberately or accidentally. A culture that isn’t created consciously will just follow the path of least resistance. It’ll grow like weeds. You’ll just get what you get, unless you choose to do something different – something that explicitly shapes the culture.

Changing a culture takes committed effort from the leader, and this is why team culture is determined to such a great extent by who happens to be in charge at any given point in time.

Your leadership brand works in a similar way to culture – the people who interact with you each day see how you talk and act and behave, and from this, they infer how you think, and what’s important to you.

Like it or not, you already have a leadership brand. Do you know what that brand is? If you could change one thing about your leadership brand, what would it be? If you were able to change it, would it increase the likelihood of you achieving your career ambitions?

Being conscious about building your leadership brand is a no-brainer. The problem though is that some brand experts are going to encourage you to contrive your image to create a more positive perception, regardless of who you are and what you stand for at your core.

Building a shiny facade to cover your true identity is a bad idea, and in a few paragraphs’ time, you’re going to understand why.

START WITH YOUR LEADERSHIP USER MANUAL

There’s nothing wrong with working to improve your leadership brand. In fact, if you want to be successful in corporate life, it’s almost essential that you pay attention to your brand.

But it has to be done in a particular way. Your brand has to be built from the inside out. It can’t just be a facade. You can’t just throw some window dressing over the mess that lies beneath, and expect it to change your underlying success equation.

That’s just putting lipstick on a pig and eventually lipstick wears off. Sooner or later, you’re going to be found out, because you can’t keep up the charade forever.

The closer your brand aligns with who you truly are, the more powerful it’s going to be.

It’ll be more consistent and compelling because you never have to think about how to talk and act. You’re just you – for better or for worse.

Those who come from the fake it until you make it school of thought will give you all sorts of advice about how you need to appear. But then in the very next breath, they’ll tell you how important it is to be authentic… and fallible… and courageous…

That advice is, of course, ridiculous.

I’ve mentioned on several occasions the concept of the leadership user manual. In Ep.257, I home in on the elements of leadership that your people are going to find useful to understand:

• Your personal style;
• Your leadership philosophy;
• How your people can get the best out of you;
• The things you won’t tolerate;
• How to best communicate with you; and – my favourite part,
• “You won’t enjoy working for me if…”

Your leadership user manual is a good place to start your thinking process. Then, of course, you have to realise that your job as a leader is to set the tone, the pace, and the standard for your people.

As they get to know you better, your brand is also going to include :

• How clearly you set objectives;
• How you respond to pressure;
• Your level of professional judgment and credibility;
• How well you engage the team;
• How you manage peer relationships;
• Your level of confidence; and
• How you handle poor performance and unacceptable behaviour.

Understanding these things, and being mindful of what you’re putting out into the world is super important. But this assumes that the brand you’re generally known for is consistent with what you think it is.

DON’T TRY TO BE SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT

The cardinal sin of personal brand is trying to be something you’re not.

I just want to give you a really practical example of how you might go about changing just one of your leadership brand characteristics.

Let’s say you wanted to be a more courageous leader, and this wasn’t something that you were known for.

Where would you start?

What would you have to change?

What habits and disciplines would you need to adopt?

You can’t just change your professional resume or your LinkedIn profile to say, “I’m a courageous leader” because, if you’re not, people are going to work it out pretty quickly.

Likewise, you can’t just pull out pithy quotes to imply that you’re a courageous leader when you are not. You know the quotes – “Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s being afraid and taking action anyway!” which, by the way, is a pretty cool quote.

If you want to be more courageous, you should probably start by working out what it would look like to have real leadership courage.

What do courageous leaders do? Well, let’s make a quick list:

• They aren’t afraid to speak out when they believe something’s important, especially when it doesn’t align with the popular view;
• They choose to do the right thing when it needs to be done, even if it doesn’t align with their personal interests, or it puts them at risk;
• They have hard conversations because they value the duty of care to their people more than they value personal discomfort;
• They uphold a high standard because they believe it’s fundamental to a healthy culture and high performance;
• They put organization first, then team, then themselves; and
• They don’t walk away from their values when it gets hard… or when it gets expensive.

At any point in your life, the level of courage you have depends on the circumstances you’ve endured and the choices you’ve made.

This is why the path to being more courageous requires that you choose to endure different circumstances and make different choices.

HOW WOULD YOU CHANGE (IF YOU CHOSE TO)?

Once you have a pretty solid idea of what being more courageous might look like, it’s time to put a plan in place – nothing elaborate, just a commitment to act differently.

My big tip? Don’t be overly ambitious!

You’re not going to feel more courageous all of a sudden… but don’t worry, you just need to take baby steps.

I would start by putting three things in your calendar every day and to make the commitment that you can’t stop work for that day until you’ve done at least one of those three. For example, your three things might be:

1. I will speak up in a meeting where I have an alternative view from the majority;
2. I will have a 1:1 feedback conversation to help one of my people improve;
3. I will make a decision that I have subconsciously been putting off ,because I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong.

This is going to take a little conscious thought and planning. You have to look for opportunities to make it happen, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

The 1:1 conversation could be a 30-second sidebar in a corridor to make an observation about something one of your people has done; it could be a highly positive and affirming interaction; or it might be a critique of something they need to improve.

The point is, don’t make too big a deal out of it. The object of the exercise is just to get used to acting. Just get into the habit of doing it before you think too deeply about it.

If you follow your plan, and choose one of those three actions every day, you’ll feel completely different about your level of courage in no time at all.

Obviously, this is just one example of how you might approach it, so I think it’s useful to deconstruct the critical parts of this process:

1. The first thing is you have to know what good looks like (in our example, what is it that courageous leaders do?);
2. Next, you have to identify the specific actions that you’re going to take that will enable you to move from where you are to a more desirable place;
3. Then you have to make a written plan that you can look at every single day;
4. After that, you have to commit to taking deliberate action; and, most importantly…
5. Congratulate yourself for doing the hard thing, when you could easily have avoided it.

 … and in 90 days you will have changed your leadership brand from the inside out!.

TWO VITAL TOOLS

Now that we’ve covered a practical example of how to change something that’s going to improve your leadership brand, I want to give you two tools that are going to make the process more predictable. This will increase your likelihood of success exponentially!

1. My rollout methodology.

If you’re trying to make a change, no matter what it is, you’ll find that you are much more likely to be successful if you declare your intentions publicly. This one move, in and of itself, is going to set you up for a potential brand boost.

If you just decide to make a change and quietly try it out to see what happens, without telling anyone what you’re doing, there are two risks that are going to potentially derail you.

The first risk is that you are leaving the back door open. If no one knows what you’re trying to do, it’s really easy to slip back into your old habits – you’ll try it out, and if it doesn’t feel good, or if you don’t see it working straight away, you’ll just quietly go back to your old ways and no one will be any the wiser.

Clearly, that’s the safest way to make change, because it involves the least personal risk. But it’s certainly not the way to set yourself up for a lasting positive change to your leadership brand.

The second risk, which flows on from this, is that you can’t expect people to work out what you’re doing differently unless you tell them what you’re trying to do.

As an example, I’ve seen leaders decide to raise the standard of performance in their teams, without giving their team any rationale for what they’re trying to do… it just looks like they’ve become more demanding, and less tolerant of their people’s missteps

The team generally won’t see this as a positive. Most people are going to think to themselves, “Geez, Marty’s in a bad mood today. I wonder what’s got him all bent out of shape.”

This is why you have to be open with your team about any changes you decide to make. People need to know what you’re trying to do, especially if you’re changing something about your own leadership behaviour and approach that places different expectations on them.

You’ll need to communicate your intentions – first to the team, then to each person individually – so that they understand their specific context.

Let’s stick with our courage example for now. The first thing I would do is to call my direct reports together and tell them what I’m trying to achieve (and why). I’d probably go with something like this:

“I realise that I’ve been holding the team back. I’ve been too cautious in my approach, and I haven’t been representing you as well as I should have. I need to be a little bolder in how I approach every situation, especially the broader company issues. I want to be more decisive, and I also want to do you the courtesy of setting out my expectations more clearly. I’d really like you to help me by letting me know if I’m slipping back into my old habits.“

This lays the foundation for every future conversation: you’ve announced your intention, and you’ll be able to point back to that line in the same conversation whenever you feel the need.

After the team conversation, you then hold individual meetings with each of those direct reports.

These meetings have a dual purpose:

The first is to remind people of the messages, and to let them know what you expect from them, in light of your own change in approach.

The second is that it gives you an immediate opportunity to tick off your courage goals in the first week. If you committed to doing one 1:1 meeting a day, then over the course of a full week, that should cover your direct reports and get you in the habit of meeting one of your three courage commitments every single day.

I go into this methodology in a lot more detail in our Leadership Beyond the Theory Program, but that just gives you the bones of it.

Set the tone for the people around you, enlist their help, and be clear on where they fit into the picture.

2. Your habit tracker.

I’ve been using this for years to keep myself honest when it comes to the personal habits that I know make the most difference to me… and, let me tell you, when I’m not on point it becomes really obvious… really quickly.

My habit tracker gives me a visual record of my personal performance over a daily, weekly, and monthly period. It’s just a simple Excel spreadsheet that you can use to define and record and track pretty much any habit you’d like to adopt.

The magic number seems to be 90. Of all the research that looks into the formation of sustainable habits, 90 days seems to be the threshold that prevents backsliding.

If you can keep up your intended habits for 90 days, you’ll be much more likely to make them stick in the long term.

You can set up a habit tracker specifically to cover the things that you most want to build into your leadership brand. But just remember – the simplicity and focus principle really applies here. Don’t try to change too much at once. You’re looking to get the biggest bang for buck from any dedicated effort that you might choose to apply.

As a bonus resource, you can get access to our free habit tracker spreadsheet template here.

BUILD YOUR BRAND FROM THE INSIDE OUT!

If you take nothing else out of this newsletter, I’d like you to think about one core principle:

You can’t change your leadership brand with a new suit, a photo shoot, and a few AI-generated blog posts.

You have to change yourself from the inside out.

If you’re setting out to reinvent your leadership brand, you have to accept that nothing changes unless you do the work to change it…

But if you commit to making a change for 90 days, you’ll discover that even the most elusive qualities can be built into your permanent leadership repertoire.