Thought Leadership – Building Your Personal Brand: The Key to Career Success
Authored by: Peter Berry, Managing Director, PBC
The concept of personal brand has become very popular in the world of leadership and business literature, including Forbes magazine and the Harvard Business Review.
Personal brand is about building one’s value proposition to enhance private and professional success. It’s about having an elevator pitch around what you want to be known for. This can include your purpose, values, strengths, skills, passions and leaving a legacy. People with a strong personal brand often have the narrative and stories to support their personal value proposition. They get noticed.
At PBC we have always believed in the importance of building your personal brand. Personal brand is one’s reputation in the workplace. One’s brand is the key to career success.
The starting point is to build self-awareness. The best data to use is the combination of Hogan personality and 360 assessments. The bright, dark and inside of personality measure your natural behavioural traits, as well as your motivations in life. It’s like looking into a mirror to discover the real self. Because the results are presented as percentile scores relative to others, you get strategic self-awareness, i.e., how am I similar and different to other people.
The Hogan 360 is a multi-rater assessment that captures your reputation as seen at work, typically by one’s boss, peers and subordinates. The 360 presents an overall score so you can quickly establish how your performance and behaviour is viewed relative to benchmark scores.
Personality captures the private person, while the 360 profiles the public person. This data is critical in the continuous improvement journey, it provides the self-awareness to then move towards self-management and eventually self-mastery. After all, the best leaders are the best learners. It’s about becoming the successful person you want to be.
Great leaders create high performing teams and employee engagement to deliver superior business outcomes. Leadership drives engagement and performance. Leadership is about results. Teams deliver results. Therefore, we should judge the leader by their team.
The journey for many careers is from strong individual contributor to successful manager and eventually as c-suite leader. The competencies at each level are very different. The best managers are hard-working, capable and action-oriented, while the best leaders are visionary, positive and motivational.
We have an enormous amount of data correlating personality and 360 results, with the Hogan Competency Model (HCM). The HCM has 62 competencies. The validity and reliability are first class.
When it comes to building your personal brand, three meta competencies stand out. They are:
- Emotional intelligence is a distinguishing feature in one having a successful personal brand. We define EQ as being effective with self-management, relationship management and relationship results.
- We also know that high performance matters a lot. This includes being achievement focused, strategic and inspiring. It’s about driving the purpose, strategy, and values of an organisation to deliver outcomes.
- One’s personal brand finally includes engagement. This is a leader who shows passion and influence in getting results from relationships.
LEARNING LEADERSHIP
Leadership skills can be learnt if a leader has the motivation and desire to improve. Effective leaders understand that their team influences and reflects their reputation. Being a better leader means being a better learner which requires motivation and deliberate practice to build new competencies and mitigate negative behaviours.
Leadership behaviour drives strategy, team performance, employee engagement and culture. High performing teams should be a goal in business.
There needs to be a strong strategic planning cycle, focusing on both the long term and the short term. A one-page business plan should be used for high-level clarity, accountability and communication. Key performance indicators should cascade into second tier teams. A balanced scorecard approach should be taken, which includes a measure of employee engagement. The focus on strategy and people needs to be connected by understanding that people deliver results and engagement is not an end in itself but the means to delivering superior results. The leader’s team is absolutely the core driver of performance.
Self-awareness
The starting point for improvement is accurate self-awareness gained through personality and 360 data. Strategic self-awareness only happens when a leader benchmarks their results against others, which can be confronting. The purpose of the assessments is to provide the scaffolding to deliver behavioural and reputational change to improve individual and team performance, and employee engagement and business outcomes. To accurately identify areas for improvement, leadership development and coaching needs to be science-based and tied to performance outcomes.
Leaders are encouraged to use assessments to best gain an understanding of their competencies at a single point in time, and more importantly to identify areas of untapped potential. We encourage people to begin with the end goal in mind – who do they want, and need, to be?
Deliberate practice
Once a person understands that they can take personal responsibility for their reputation, the journey to becoming a better version of themselves begins – it takes focus, desire and drive. PBC’s approach is to coach a leader to build new behavioural and business competencies through strategic and targeted effort. Deliberate practice has four components:
- Specific goals must be set.
- Goals must be measurable.
- The leader should consciously step out of their comfort zone.
- The leader must seek continuous feedback.
New habits come from repeated actions which teach the brain new neural pathways. Over time the new behaviours and confidence become second nature. The hard work is rewarded with a better reputation, results, and career success.
Personal brand matters
Your personal brand is important in life. It is the key to your personal and professional success. It is defined by Dr Hogan as “getting along, getting ahead and finding meaning.”
Building a brand should be a journey of learning, discovery, and deliberate practice. It starts with Hogan Personality and 360 Assessments, so that science informs the development. The three meta competencies that stand out in building one’s personal brand are emotional intelligence, high performance and engagement.
