Leadership Brand: Deliver on Your Promise

David Magellan Horth, Miller, Mount

• Verlag: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781604917048
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Leadership

Everyone has a reputation. Whether good or bad, your reputation precedes you, and can inhibit or enhance your professional goals. However, how do you actively nurture, develop, and manage how others see you? In this book, we'll discuss how crafting a brand can give you control of how you're perceived at work.From proven strategies from CCL experts, to practical advice you can implement immediately, Leadership Brand: Deliver on Your Promise can help you figure out the leader you want to be, and how to build the brand that can get you there.

How to Define and Cultivate an Aspirational Brand

Now that you have completed an analysis of your current leadership brand, what’s next? How do you use what you’ve learned?

The most successful leaders continue to develop throughout their careers in order to reach their full potential. If you want to model that behavior, think about where you are today and where you would like to head in the future.

An authentic leadership brand will align with your sense of purpose, your values, and what matters to you most. It will reflect the roles you play, the work you spend the most time doing, how you interact with others, and the leadership contribution you consistently make.

You may find, though, that your current leadership brand isn’t aligned with your values or with how you want to be known. In fact, your current brand may be limiting you as you search for new roles and opportunities. You may find yourself wanting people to know who you really are and what you are capable of.

If that’s the case, defining and developing an aspirational brand grounded in your true values can help you move forward and reach your goals.

Grounding Your Aspirational Brand in Authenticity

Being authentic is about leading in a way that is natural for you and a reflection of your individual style and strengths. Feeling authentic and living a life strongly connected to your belief system can be energizing and can promote growth, learning, and psychological well-being.

If you try to be someone that you aren’t, eventually others will see through your deception. Your inauthenticity can become a disruptive force in the organization as others talk about and try to anticipate what you might do next. You can even end up derailing your career.

How do you develop an aspirational brand that will reflect your innermost, authentic self? Before you make any changes, be sure to get a truthful picture of your current image. Take time to understand how others see you and why. Seek input from colleagues, your boss, and direct reports. Ask your friends, children, spouse, or significant other. Each of these points of view will provide insights into how your words and behaviors are viewed by the people around you.

Next, remind yourself that genuine change is rarely dramatic. Leaders making radical changes overnight are likely to be viewed with suspicion. Small, incremental changes that mesh with your values are more likely to be sustainable—and believed.

With that in mind, consider the gap between the image others have of you and the image you wish you were projecting. Decide what you could immediately begin working on and focus on one or two areas where small improvements could have the greatest benefit.

Techniques for Evolving Your Brand

Here are a few techniques you might try as you begin to evolve toward your aspirational leadership brand and change how you interact with others to help create direction, alignment, and commitment.

Tell stories. Give memorable examples that can engage others and interest them in what you are saying. Describe what happened, how a problem was solved, or how someone did something notable.

Master your message. Focus on clarity of thought and message and think carefully about what you want to say. Every question and conversation is an opportunity to share your ideas, vision, and values.

Focus on “we.” Use inclusive language like “we” and “us” in order to inspire others and promote collaboration.

Smile. Tap into your personal warmth. Leaders who project a friendly image are typically perceived as more effective, engaging, and interesting.

Find a mentor, coach, and/or a trusted colleague. Solicit ideas on how you can address especially challenging issues and improve your leadership effectiveness and brand.

Exercise: Linking Your Brand to Your Values

The list of values below is derived from a set of values used in CCL leadership development programs. This tool helps us ensure the development goals of leaders participating in our programs align with the important values they seek to live and work by. These values can be useful as you evaluate how to link your aspirational brand to the things...