Career & Growth
Personal Branding
Being known accurately for what you actually do, by the people who need to know it.
Personal branding has an unfortunate name. Stripped of the marketing vocabulary, it's the question of whether the people who make decisions about you have an accurate idea of what you're good at. You already have a reputation whether you manage it or not; it was assembled from whatever fragments happened to be visible, which is usually your most recent work and your loudest moment. The honest version of this skill is narrow: do work worth being known for, make it visible to the people for whom it's relevant, and describe it specifically enough to be memorable. The dishonest version — being known for more than you do — works briefly and fails expensively.
Scenarios
You did the hardest work on a project and the write-up credits the team generically. What would you do — leave it, since it was a team effort, or add a specific line about what you personally solved?
Your job title and your actual expertise have drifted apart over three years. What would you do — keep the title as your description, or work out the one sentence that says what you're now genuinely the person to ask about?
You're asked to describe what you do at a company event. What would you do — give the broad version that keeps every door open, or the specific version that will be remembered and repeated by one person to another?
Takeaway
- Do the work first. Everything here is a distribution problem, and distribution without substance is a shorter-lived strategy than it looks.
- Be specific enough to be repeated. A description nobody can relay to a third party doesn't travel.
- Claim your own contribution by name, plainly, without diminishing the team's.
- Make it visible to the people it's relevant to, not to the largest possible audience.
- Don't build on borrowed credibility. Proximity to impressive things survives exactly one follow-up question.