Leadership and Branding

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Leadership and Branding

Branding is a very important concept if you want to sell something, including yourself. Branding experts commonly use Coke as an example. Almost everyone can recognize even a portion of the Coke logo; it’s an iconic brand. That’s the level of branding success every marketer seeks. If you put your brand out there enough it will become well known. With today’s internet, if the stars align correctly, maybe even viral.

But what about your leadership brand? Should that be a concern? If you want to be promoted, or even hold on to your job, then I guess it is. But branding your leadership is not the same as branding a product. And social media won’t help. This is a critical point. Lately, social media has become the answer to everything. Want to call out a company that did you wrong, social media. Need to let everyone know about your latest great product deal, social media. Want to cure the common cold, social media. Ok maybe not the one about the cold, but just about everything else. If you spend any time on social media, you begin to develop a personal brand. It’s how others see you. Sometimes the personal brand you develop is real, sometimes it isn’t. That’s an important point when talking about leadership branding. Ask yourself this critical question. Is what people read about me the same as what they experience in person?

Leadership branding is not the same as personal branding. You cannot create a leadership brand with social media. You can only create it by leading. Your leadership brand will be based on several factors, all of which you can control, but none of which you can create by blogging or tweeting.

How do you interact with your workers? Do you treat them with respect, seek out their thoughts, and value their experience?

How about your peers? Do you support them and work together to solve problems?

What about the boss? Can he or she rely on you to get the job done, make improvements, make good decisions, support them?

No matter what you say, these are the factors that will define your leadership brand. Generally, there are three leadership brands; great leader, okay leader, or terrible leader. It’s possible that you’ll actually be branded differently by different groups at the same time.

In one job all the evidence pointed to my organization considering me a pretty good leader but my boss and I had a serious conflict in leadership styles and just about everything else. I don’t think I was branded the same to him as to my own people.

In another case, I had to make some tough decisions that didn’t sit too well with some of the workers. I don’t think my leadership brand with them was what I would have liked, but my boss touted my brand pretty enthusiastically.

I use these examples because they point out the most important aspect of this whole leadership brand discussion. If you must think of leadership as a brand, remember it isn’t about getting buyers to like you. It’s about taking care of people and accomplishing a mission.