Personal Branding

iStock | aurielaki

The term “brand” is 5,000 years old. It comes from branding cattle to prevent theft but grew to mean a mark of origin and reputation. In the ancient world east to west artisans would use stamps and seals on their creations so everyone would know who made them, so the art of personal branding is a long-running tradition. Notably, the personal brand pre-dates product brands, which first appeared in China circa 1000 CE.

Mass production, as we understand it, was ushered in by the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s and early 1900s and gave rise to brand marketing on a global scale. The historic practice of personal branding was relegated to a secondary and all but invisible role. However, in our digital era of globalization and instant communications, the very thing that buried personal branding has been the catalyst for its rebirth.

The labor matrix has become complex and more difficult to effectively navigate. Personal branding is a creative and effective way to break through and become as memorable as McDonald’s Golden Arches.

Personal Branding – What is it?

According to Harrison Monarth’s article in the Harvard Business Review (02/17/22), “Your personal brand… is intentional. It is how you want people to see you. Whereas reputation is about credibility,  your personal brand is about visibility and the values you outwardly represent.”

Defining and promoting what you stand for as an individual is the culmination of your experiences, skills, and values.

Truths About Personal Branding

1.     Reflect on how you market yourself and your career.

2.     Present the image you cultivate through your actions and communications.

3.     It’s a combination of online and in-person presence.

4.     It helps you define who – and what – you are.

5.     Your brand is subject to change.

The first step to molding those into a brand is to adopt a branding mindset.

Adopt A Branding Mindset (From Arruda &Dixon’s “Career Distinction”)

1.     Stand Out: Stand for Something

2.     Be your boss.

3.     Forget the ladder. Think of it as a ramp.

4.     Think like a brand.

Building a personal brand takes patience, strategy, and setting clear goals for yourself. There is no magic wand. You must develop and perfect it over time, yet learn to communicate it on demand in the present.

Tips for Building Your Brand

1.     Do your best work and act with integrity.

2.     Collaborate cross-functionally.

3.     Document your wins.

4.     Expand your network and impact.

5.     Build influence.

·      Bonus tip: Clean up your social media.

Easy, right? Get that to me by noon! Remember, your personal brand “is how you want people to see you,” but for it to have any integrity you have to follow up your ideal version of yourself with successful action. At some point, you must walk the walk, and that comes with experience. If you want to lead, influence, and achieve, don’t wait for the opportunities, make the opportunities come to you.

Lead, Influence, and Achieve

1.     Ask for new opportunities.

2.     Use facts and data to promote your points.

3.     Bring people along for the journey.

4.     Come up with alternative solutions.

5.     Don’t underestimate your influence.

·      Bonus tip: Find a sponsor/advocate/mentor.

·      Bonus tip #2: Learn what makes others tick.

The most difficult personal brand to cultivate is that of a leader. The visibility of the trials you may face means there is always an equal possibility of reward and disaster. Over time, your achievements must be impressive and well-communicated but if you want to be seen as a leader you can take the steps right now to establish yourself as one.

Establish Yourself as a Leader

1.     Expand your role boundaries - influence is taken, not given.

2.     Inspire consensus.

3.     Nurture your visibility strategically, track and celebrate victories, and own your losses.

4.     Understand how an organization likes to communicate.

5.     Invest in professional development.

·      Bonus tip: Leverage your new experiences to reposition yourself.

·      Bonus tip #2: Think proactively and flexibly in driving career paths.

·      Bonus tip #3: Take your performance review really, really seriously.

To review, you can act in your long-term interests by staying on brand in your words and actions throughout your professional life while also delivering an ideal version of yourself based on your real-world strengths right now. Your personal brand does not exist in a vacuum.

The next step is to market it like your Coca-Cola with a much smaller budget. Much smaller. So small in fact it’s limited to communicating through the standard tools of contemporary professional life – your resume and LinkedIn profile. The glamour!

Your Resume and the Age of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social media for serious and ambitious working professionals. Owned by Microsoft, it has over a billion users in over 200 countries that speak twenty-six languages and 67 million registered companies. Your resume and your LinkedIn profile are great vehicles for your personal brand, networking potential, and, if the case should arise, a place and tool to find (and land) a new job.

Craft Your Resume and Digital Identity

Take a “public relations” approach to your career reputation management.

·      Know your audience.

o   Potential future employers.

o   Executive recruiters.

o   Industry experts.

o   Fellow students.

o   Your current employer and its employees.

You need a strong resume and LinkedIn profile with a professional presentation. Focusing on LinkedIn, there are simple tricks to maximize its integrity and visibility. This is your game – you control the message but you should be thoughtful about what you include.

1.     Create a complete profile. LinkedIn likes complete profiles for search and credibility.

2.     Use a professional photo.

3.     Headline – 240 characters MAX.

4.     About/Summary – 2,600 characters MAX.

5.     Tell who you are and what you have to offer.

6.     Load it with keywords.

7.     Include a call to action.

8.     Demonstrate your impact via achievements.

9.     Keep your content and tone professional. Don’t get too personal.

10.  LinkedIn has many members but only 3 million users (out of over a billion) post every week. Be a regular content creator to stand out.

·      Bonus tip: Share your news and work.

·      Bonus tip #2: Like, Share, and Comment on other’s posts.

·      Bonus tip #3: Get Recommendations.

·      Bonus tip #4: Stay on brand.

Final thoughts: If you have the resources, the LinkedIn Subscription is worth the price of admission. Do your homework, but there are many benefits. LinkedIn is great for networking and allows ambitious proactive users to build a professional network and nurture existing relationships. Find your people and join their community.

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Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

Is That Huge Raise Really Worth It? Dan Hurley Didn't Think So

iStock | Alexandr Lebedko

You may have seen the internet explode recently when news broke that Dan Hurley, the head men’s basketball coach of the NCAA champion University of Connecticut (UCONN) Huskies, turned down a five-year $70 million ($14 million a year) head coaching position with the Los Angeles Lakers, arguably the crown jewel franchise of the NBA.

The general reaction has been illuminating, with many lay critics saying Hurley must be crazy to turn down that kind of money. To keep things in perspective, the Lakers’ offer represents a substantial raise. UCONN pays him $5.2 million a year, so he’s leaving roughly $9 million a year on the table – a figure that already puts him in the top 0.1% of income earners in the United States so it’s easy for us to shrug off Dan’s decision to stay in Hartford. What does it matter? He’s already rich! The fact remains that Dan turned down a significant pay raise and there are good reasons for it.

So, let’s bring the numbers down to something more relatable to those of us who earn more average salaries. Let’s say you make $75,000 a year and, like Dan Hurley, you are offered a 180% increase in base salary. That’s a total of $210,000! That’s a lot of creme-filled doughnuts. What reasons could possibly exist for anyone to say “no” to an extra $135,000? Let’s look at the factors to consider with the much bigger paycheck:

• Work-Life Balance: If someone gives you a $135,000 raise, accepting this kind of offer will be life-altering in more ways than money, most notably potentially cutting into your work-life balance. If you don’t want your company calling you during the middle of your daughter’s wedding demanding you get on a conference call, you may want to reconsider accepting the 180% pay increase.

• Work Culture: Money is, without question, great, but the work culture of your new employer will impact your life in many more ways than the money. The exasperated exclamation, "They don't pay me enough to deal with this kind of [fill in the blank]” has been uttered more than once in the workplace, but the reality is that work dread does not take cash, stock options, or equity. If your work culture is a breeding ground of toxic despair you will inevitably reach a point where you might accept pocket lint as payment if you can just get out. Without knowing the full story, it’s okay to wonder if Dan Hurley had concerns about the current work culture of the Los Angeles Lakers (without naming names of course).

• The Nature of Your Work: Some professions exist for one purpose – to make money. People who are the happiest with their careers and life, however, are people whose work has a purpose. Back to Dan Hurley. Working with college students, many of whom will not compete in organized sports after college, has a purpose beyond winning back-to-back NCAA titles. You are more than a coach. You are a mentor and a friend.  Coaching professional athletes has only one purpose – winning a championship to make the billionaire owner happy and keep the advertising and merchandising dollars flowing. Still great, but not the same.

• Your Co-Workers: Different work cultures and purposes mean different people. There are very different workplace environments, and they value different things. Do your values align enough with your coworkers to “keep up with the Joneses?” when end-of-year evaluations take place and you’re ranked and rated against them? The internal competition and backbiting resulting from higher salaries can be fierce.

• Relocation: The East Coast and the West Coast are practically different countries. Small towns are different than big cities. Hartford and Los Angeles are as different as Mars and Venus. Your pay raise will not go as far if you’re relocating to a more expensive area or city, whereas your standard of living may be higher in the market which requires you to earn less money to sustain it. Relocating also means leaving family and friends and, if applicable, uprooting your children and making them start over in a new place and school. You may move from a low-traffic area to one where you’re going to spend two hours in your car every day so you can afford to buy a house.

These are some factors you may want to consider when weighing the totality of a mind-blowing job offer. That isn’t to say that Goldilocks scenarios don’t exist, and you can end up with a dream life and salary, which is definitely possible. It’s just important to remember that money isn’t everything – and Dan Hurley proves it.

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Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

Yes, Big Brother Is Watching You At Work – Welcome To The Age of Bossware

iStock | Sashkinw

The memorable phrase, “Big Brother is watching you,” comes from George Orwell’s masterpiece novel “1984,” and is an example of “doublespeak.” Doublespeak is “evasive, ambiguous language that is intended to deceive or confuse.” (Dictionary.com) In today’s work environment, you have Big Tech’s latest thing: “bossware.”

Corporate phones, computers, emails, texts, and the like are the property of the company and can be monitored 24/7. Employees are not entitled to privacy, though many employees forget that the IT department is monitoring the websites they visit, and accounting is combing through the phone bill to flag your long-distance calls to Caribbean hotels. Or, even worse, employees erroneously believe they are entitled to privacy but are not in any way, shape, or form.

That brings us to “bossware,” a whole new level of employee monitoring packaged with product names like “CleverControl” with sales pitches that include phrases like “promotes employee well-being.” This type of software can monitor everything you do right down to the number of keystrokes you execute every day. If that doesn’t scream, “well-being” to you, you may not be cut out for the hyper-control post-pandemic pathway many employers are opting to take.

If a camera on your corporate laptop is taking videos of you every time you turn it on, it’s called quality control. It’s kind of creepy, but it’s completely legal.

Employees should be aware that they have little to no right to privacy in their professional sphere and advanced technology is now being employed on a granular level to monitor everything you do, regardless of what you do, where you work (i.e., remote or in-office), or what position you hold in a company. According to a recent Wired article, “There’s been a surge in mechanisms that facilitate location tracking… video/camera monitoring… document scanning… and attendance tracking.” (Wired, July 2023). Add in wearable biometrics and artificial intelligence and you have a recipe for employers having absolute control over their employees. Big Brother, eat your heart out.

Look, chances are your company employs some kind of monitoring system. Perhaps it’s as simple as your manager staring at you from across the office. Or security cameras everywhere recording what happens. Or maybe it’s the latest version of bossware that, along with the biometric shirt you’re wearing, is making a second-by-second record of everything you do along with your heart rate and how often your neurons fire. All in the name of maximum productivity. Likely, your employer is not open about what, and to what level, they use monitoring tools.

Most simply, from a job hunter’s standpoint, buyer beware. If you are a job seeker weighing an offer, you may consider asking about monitoring tools before you make a decision. No recruiter wants top talent voting with their feet because they have to disclose the company will track everything they do once they’re hired. That may be the only slice of leverage you have before you agree to let Big Tech Brother into your life.

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Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.