By Randy Chittum, Ph.D
What is your leadership brand?
You absolutely have one. It may not be what you think it is. Others decide what your brand really is.
Why does it matter? People want leaders to predict within broad ranges what to expect. In a world increasingly characterized by uncertainty, it becomes crucial to have some core things upon which people can depend. As a leader, your brand provides a sense of order.
Your brand is another way of saying what you stand for. It clarifies what is important to you, what you value, and what others can expect. It is a declaration about who you aspire to be as a leader. Because it is aspirational, we expect to fall short while also expecting that we will constantly strive to be who we desire to be.
We often focus on the behaviors of leaders and that lens is important to our brand. The stating of the brand is equally important. Being transparent and powerful about my leadership brand gives others the framework for how they should evaluate my leadership. Your brand will probably consist of strategic intent (what matters to you) and a set of descriptors that depict what you value as a leader. A strategic intent might be something like “building a cross-functional team to create a new sales strategy.” A set of descriptors might include words like bold, creative, future-oriented, courageous, and heartfelt.
The power is in putting those two things together. So your branding statement becomes something like this . . . I will be bold, creative, future-oriented, courageous, and heartfelt so that I can build a cross-functional team to create a new sales strategy. Then you have to deliver that statement with powerful presence and live it in a bold and authentic way.
Leadership presence is commonly misunderstood. We often conflate it with charisma. Because presence is an authentic reflection of our way of connecting with others, each of us will have a unique presence about us. We cannot learn presence by watching someone else. This is related to brand in the sense that our brand should be aligned with the type of presence we most naturally possess. When I work with leaders in this type of presence I’m more often than not trying to get the interference out of the way, not create something new.
Finally, I have had some leaders tell me that discussions about their brand or legacy feels selfish in some way. It feels like it is about them. I would simply respond that you are part of a system, and as you change, so changes the system. If this work makes you better and stronger, it makes the system the same.