As a manager or supervisor, you probably wonder how your employees and bosses view your reputation at work. You may spend a lot of time fretting over a recent mistake and if it made others doubt you as a leader. You may wonder if the employees under your supervision look up to you as a leader. If you tick all of these boxes, maybe it is time for you to consider defining your personal leadership brand.
What is a Personal Leadership Brand?
We all have a personal brand in our family and social circles that define what we stand for, our values, and our priorities. At your job, your leadership brand is how you go about in the social process of leading your team. It is how you interact with your fellow employees to get the desired results.
Defining your personal leadership brand will help you focus on the values you want to portray. Once you’ve clearly defined what you want to be known for, others will know and understand you better. It makes it easier for coworkers to interact with you and for them to better understand what you want to accomplish.
What Results Do You Want to Accomplish in the Next Year?
The first tip that can help you define and build your personal leadership role is to write down what are the main results you want to achieve at work in the next year. Depending on your job, you might consider the following three groups:
- Employees
- The organization
- Customers
Many people trying to find their personal leadership brand are promoted to a managerial position, never having to worry about their leadership brand before. A promotion comes with new tasks and expectations. To succeed in this new position, one of the first things most people learn is they have to become more deliberate in the way they lead others. A manager that goes back and forth only confuses fellow employees. They need a new personal leadership brand.
Those in this position should first focus on the expectations of those they will be leading rather than trying to identify their personal strengths. One of the first things to learn is that a leadership brand should be outward-focused. Defining your strengths is necessary and will help clarify what others expect of you.
What Do You Want to Be Known For?
There are descriptors that you should consider that balance your natural qualities with those that will be important in the new position. If after writing down your descriptors you’re still confused, you can ask peers and bosses if these traits are important for the new role. Some of the most popular descriptors include:
- Independent
- Deliberate
- Collaborative
- Results-orientated
- Innovative
- Strategic
Defining Your Identity
To better focus on your new personal leadership profile, you can further define your descriptors by combining them. You are not limited to just one. You can combine them like:
- Strategically collaborative
- Independently innovative
- Deliberately results-orientated
You can continue this process until you find who you want to be and how you want to be viewed by others.
Finding Examples of Personal Leadership Brands
You can look around and watch people you respect and how they define themselves in their personal leadership. Or you can find movies that depict inspiring leadership skills such as Apollo 13 (streaming on DIRECTV STREAM). It is a great example of how great leadership combined with teamwork can result in everyone achieving their goals.
Your personal leadership brand defines your identity at work and how you deal with others and ultimately achieve your goals and the goals of your team. To begin, you will define and then redefine what your goals and visions are. And build your personal leadership brand from there.