Soft Skills

The personal brand

Amitava Sengupta on positioning oneself in an organisation as a personal brand.

Employees need to nurture and sustain their own personal positioning. This ‘positioning’ defines who you are within the organisation and what the company can expect from you. Frequently, most of these ‘personal brands’ happen inadvertently—however, given some thought and a clear action plan, it is possible to build your own ‘brand image’.

The term ‘positioning’ was coined by Gary Sinclair and Marty Reilly in 1969 in their paper “Positioning—a game people play in today’s me-too market place”. In their ground-breaking book ‘Positioning: The Battle for your Mind’ the concept was further expanded. The word has subsequently been used largely in the marketing context where organisations try to create an image for its products and services. This is a relative term vis-à-vis competitors in the same target segment.

Personal positioning

‘Personal positioning’ is an image or perception that individuals create within an organisation on what they stand for, excel at or have a potential to achieve. Like marketing, personal positioning is also a brand image to your peers, juniors or seniors within your organisation and is also a relative term. These images often transcend the organisation to create a perception within the larger industry context.

Similar to marketing, you can ‘manage’ your personal brand. Again, similar to marketing survey techniques, feedback mechanisms are a powerful tool to enable you to judge and plan your personal brand positioning.

It is important to understand that personal brand cannot be nurtured and built contrary to your personal strengths and weaknesses. It is also critical that long-term career objectives should leverage your strengths. Your personal brand management is just one more tool to enable your progress towards your goal within the organisation. Towards the end of the book ‘First, Break All the Rules’, the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman talk about how a manager can look into the mirror and understand their core strengths and weaknesses. This is the first step towards leveraging your strengths and managing around your weaknesses—I feel that all professionals should read this book towards gaining an understanding on how strengths and weaknesses have to be dealt with towards building a personal brand image.

This article takes a look at different personal brand images within an organisation and some of the core strengths that can be leveraged towards building that image. It also explores simple techniques to practice in day-to-day life to enable the journey. I have deliberately left out the ‘negative’ images that you see in an organisation—we will examine them at a later day.

While managing a team of five people, I used to use the following terminology to characterise their dominant personal brand image. I am sure that there are familiar figures that we encounter every day at our workplace.

The pillar: Reliable, always gets things done, never lets you down

The thinker: Always comes up with options, thinks of possibilities, can think one step ahead

The passionate: Gives 200 percent, boundless energy, always walks one more mile to make you happy

The professor: Very knowledgeable in his area, can quote from 20 different journals and books, depth

The amiable: A pleasure to work with, liked by everyone and has no enemies

Basic personal brands

We begin by taking a look at the basic personal brands usually visible in organisations:

The loyalist: One who stands for the organisation or whoever is in power within the company. Their dominant characteristic is to align with the powers that be and provide unquestioned support to those powers

The expert: Specialist in a domain. One who is listened to and respected for knowledge in that area. A valued contributor

The strategist: Lateral thinking, strong analytical powers, ability to think of options and outside the box. Immensely valuable in a strategic role

The adversity artist: Enjoys the challenge, the first to volunteer to take up seemingly impossible goals, thrives in a difficult and turnaround situation, usually aggressive

The reliable guy: Structured and organised, has a great temperament, believes and works on the basics, great to have in the team

Each brand significantly enhances the power of the organisation, contributing in unique ways. Overlaps occur quite frequently, but these characteristics are often found standalone and are at their best in their contribution when displaying their personal brand in situations which appear tailor-made for them.

SWOT on basic personal brands

Each of the basic personal brands displays unique strengths and weaknesses. In studying these strengths and weaknesses, you can look at how your personality traits and behavioural patterns may help you fit into each of the brands.

The loyalist

Strengths: Counted on by the organisation to push alignment. Trust is their defining characteristics, usually very committed and put in an immense amount of hard work

Weaknesses: Often boils down to the level of personal commitments, often seen negatively by the other bands, usually does not use feedback constructively

The expert

Strengths: Knowledge, propensity to learn, focus

Weaknesses: Usually does not contribute outside their areas—impact is often localised, not seen as strategic despite their expertise

The strategist

Strengths: Lateral thinking, analytical abilities

Weaknesses: Most often hands-off, prefer to work from the corporate offices rather than the field

Adversity artist

Strengths: Enjoys the challenge, leverages restlessness, aggressive

Weaknesses: Pushes the team, ruthless, gets bored during stability

The reliable guy

Strengths: Organised planner, good temperament

Weaknesses: Usually not very good change agent, dislikes sudden changes even when required, usually lacks aggressiveness

In other words, you can leverage some of your basic personality traits and behavioural pattern to see which brand would work for you. As each of these brands are of immense value within the organisation, this would help you match into a role that matches your profile and consequently which you will enjoy most.

Five-step rule

Though it looks simple enough in black and white, it is often difficult to understand your own core strengths and weaknesses and may be an emotionally challenging task. When in doubt, it would be helpful to spend some time with your mentor towards getting this feedback. To help you in the process, you could also consider getting professional help in understanding your basic psychological DNA.

Once you understand your core strengths and weaknesses, it is relatively easy to understand where you can potentially fit in within the basic personal bands and what your positioning statement should be. It would be an interesting experience to consider doing a small personal exercise:

Step 1: Write down what you want to achieve in the organisation

Step 2: Write down your ‘Top 3’ strengths and ‘Top 3’ weaknesses

Step 3: Match your strengths and weaknesses to potential personal brand positions

Step 4: Write down your own personal positioning statement

Step 5: Define the next set of activities you will undertake towards building, nurturing and sustaining your brand

This simple five-step rule, when put to practice, will enable you to build and live up to your personal brand promise.

Developing, nurturing and sustaining a personal brand image will help position you within your organisation. As in marketing, depending on your progress or lack thereof, you may need to ‘reposition’ or ‘deposition’ your brand statement. However, developing your personal brand is important as it sends out a clear message on where you see yourself within the organisation.

Additional reading

i) ‘Positioning—The battle for your mind’ by Gary Sinclair and Marty Reilly

ii) ‘First, Break All the Rules’ by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

Amitava Sengupta is Global Relationship Manager, TCS. Email: a171070@yahoo.com