Online Reporter
Welcome to Personal Brand: Executive Perspective with Michelle Madziva, a weekly column dedicated to the art and strategy of personal branding.
There is a stage in every professional journey when something remarkable begins to happen.
Your name starts working for you.
You are mentioned in a meeting you are not attending. Someone recommends you for an opportunity you never applied for. A client asks, “Who do you know who can help us with this?” and your name comes up. That is when personal branding becomes real. It happens when your reputation begins creating opportunities in your absence.
Over the past few weeks, we have examined authority, reputation, visibility, resilience and the everyday behaviours through which leadership is experienced. The next question is what all of this ultimately produces.
A strong personal brand should produce recognition, trust and preference. People should not only know your name. They should understand what your name represents and the value it carries. This is where many accomplished professionals struggle. They have qualifications, experience and impressive positions, but their reputation remains too broad. People know that they are successful, but they cannot immediately say what makes them distinctive.
Your position tells people where you work. Your title tells them what you do but your positioning tells them why they should remember you.
I often ask leaders a simple question: When your name is mentioned in a room you are not in, what do you want people to say? That question is more important than it first appears. Perhaps you want people to associate your name with strategic thinking, innovation, integrity, customer experience, leadership or a particular area of technical expertise. Once you know exactly what it is you want to be known for, your responsibility is to provide evidence.
If you want to be known for strategic thinking, your conversations, articles and decisions should demonstrate strategic thinking. If you want to be recognised for leadership, people should experience leadership in the way you communicate, solve problems and develop others. One’s reputation is not built by announcement, it is built by evidence repeated over time. That evidence is what eventually creates confidence.
The real value of a strong personal brand becomes evident when your reputation begins doing some of the work for you. The value of your brand might be seen when prospective clients hear your name and they already have a sense of the value you bring or even when a conference organiser approaches you because your expertise is already associated with the subject they want addressed. This is the point at which personal branding begins to generate what I call reputational momentum. Your reputation starts travelling ahead of you. It creates recognition before the introduction and can open doors before you even knock on them.
It means that every article you write, every presentation you deliver, every difficult situation you handle with maturity, every promise you keep and every person whose professional life you positively influence is contributing to something much larger than that single moment. You are building an asset that travels with you. This is particularly important for executives because careers change, organisations restructure, titles evolve and opportunities come and go but your reputation, however, can continue working long after a particular position has ended.
So I encourage every executive to ask three questions and these are, what do I want my name to represent? What evidence am I consistently giving people? What would people confidently recommend me for?
These questions reveal the strength of your personal brand. Ultimately, your brand is not what you say about yourself, but what people consistently associate with your name.
When your name carries trust, value and distinction, it begins opening doors before you enter the room.
Michelle Madziva
Founder & CEO, Grand Curations
Corporate Strategist | Personal Branding Consultant
