Personal Brand

I expect you've noticed too. The world of work is changing.

Start-ups and Fin-Techs are challenging some of the worlds biggest and most established businesses. They are picking profitable niches and exploiting them, forcing companies to react to survive.

These companies must restructure (cut costs for efficiency), innovate or create the BEST customer experiencein order to keep their market share. 

In an environment where the business landscape is shifting, you remaining relevant has never been more important, .

So this week lets talk about your personal brand and how you can manage it to stay relevant - in uncertain times, you need to be remembered for the right reasons.

When I say personal brand, I'm talking about how people who interact with you describe you. Typically people will associate you with 3-4 words or phrases. For example: kind, delivers results, passionate, does what they say they will, hates change, promotes diversity, funny etc etc. 

Humans like labels. They create nice shortcuts in our brains and mean we get to think less and preserve energy. It's much easier for our brains to think 'Hey there's Bob, he's always late' than have to start from scratch every time we meet people. 

We take short cuts and make assumptions based on our own frame of reference. But there are things you can do to maintain or grow your personal brand, so that 'typically' people have a consistent view of you and how you're likely to behave.


Here are some ideas to help you get consistency in your personal brand:

1) Be authentic. Trying to behave in a way that doesn't come naturally to you will make you and others uncomfortable. I'm not saying don't try anything new, I'm all for experimenting with different styles to see what fits for you. 

But once you find a leadership style or set of skills that works, that feels genuine and like 'you', stick with them. It's easier to be consistent when you're being natural. For example if you're naturally passionate, it will shine through. Fake enthusiasm is pretty obvious!

2) Be adaptable to change. Know that business restructuring is no longer a 1 in 5 year event, it's every year and it's here to stay. With the business constantly evolving around you, you need to be able to adapt. Perhaps a new training programme lands - get on it early and start adopting the techniques. 

Maybe a new product is launched - learn about it and talk about it. A new system comes in to bring efficiencies - be an early adopter. Demonstrate that you're keeping up with this fast pace. The people sat in the corner complaining about the new system aren't going to be there much longer.

3) Become known as a problem solver. Share your ideas and get creative about solutions. Corporates are starting to adjust to the pace of change and are now more interested in bold 'out there' ideas that would have been dismissed a couple of years ago. 

There are lots of problems to solve - showing that you can think clearly and come up with solutions puts you in a good place to join a growing digital or innovation team. You don't necessarily need experience in these areas (they're new to lots of businesses) - you just need to show you have a growth mindset and have the mental tool kit to problem solve. 

So knowing your own personal brand is more important than ever. Evolving it to stay current and relevant in a modern workforce is important. This doesn't mean changing who you are - authenticity is king. Just think about how your natural strengths, already a core part of your brand, can be promoted to show how much value you bring in this environment.

If you're worried about changes in your workplace or want to broaden your skill set to stay relevant, drop me an e-mail and I'll help you.

Wishing you all the best

Kat