Adapting your Personal Brand in a Volatile World (Event)

A thought provoking breakfast session at TeleTech consulting.

Whilst I attended to think about my own brand and how I can support others with their own it was really an event that worked at multiple levels – individual, team, department, organisation, etc.

The three recommended strategies:

1. A growth mind-set vs. fixed
2. Clarity of self, strengths, passions, differentiation (vs. other, technology…)
3. Understanding value (the market…)

nicely align to some of my recent work, including via the strengths based positive mentality.

This brought my mind back to the Mercer/HBR paper I picked up at the Leadership Symposium on “Bottom-Up Leadership” and their own Venn diagram showing the need to combine personal strengths, personal interest and business needs.

I was particularly interested in attending after a recent event where I saw some old colleagues for the first time in c.5 years.  Those interactions highlighted the long term perceptions people hold and the TeleTech event described this as the weighting of perception on one trait rather than taking a balanced view.  The personal brand was described as the “story people tell about you behind your back” so I guess we all need to get back to basics and reflect on our expertise.  I also thought this paralleled with the idea of the weight we give to first impressions.

The three fundamentals of the brand outlined as:

1. Credentials
2. Passion
3. Market Needs

The sweet spot, the trait to focus on, being the middle point of these three.  The challenge here was to “go big” on the sweet spot, this posing a test for me as I would like to be seen as being good at a number of areas of L&D competency.  However, when I was looking for work a couple of years ago, I suspect I was not “selling” myself well enough due to too broad an interest?  I also thought there were challenges around what I could do and what I have actively done a lot of – the two do not automatically line up but that is not necessarily a bad thing if it can be justified in the middle ground of the 3 brand items.

Author: iangardnergb

My name is Ian Gardner and I am interested in various topics that can be seen as related to learning, technology and information. To see what I am reading elsewhere, follow me on The Old Reader (I.gardner.gb) and/or Twitter (@iangardnergb). View all posts by iangardnergb