6. (Building Great Careers) Cultivate a Personal Brand
“If you are not a brand, you are a commodity.” — Robert Kiyosaki
As part of my series on “Building Great Careers”, after exploring the merits of taking a systematic approach to career building, I covered two major categories that go into building great careers. Under “Mindset”, I covered the importance of treating career journey as a long game which garners compounding benefits with time. In that blog, I also touched upon the value of a multi-disciplinary mindset in building great careers.
After that, I covered a number of topics under the category “Approach/Strategy viz., vision and ambition, bootstrapping your career, playing to one’s strengths and working around one’s weaknesses and identifying if you more suited as an ant or a wasp.
Now, I will explore the category of “Nuts and Bolts” over a series of articles starting with the current one on the importance of cultivating a personal brand.
“You too are a brand. Whether you know it or not. Whether you like it or not.” — Marc Ecko
I believe most of us engage in cultivating an image of ours for the world to consume. Few of us may indulge in it unconsciously and few may do it rather overtly.
To improve cognitive ease, we, human beings, tend to categorize what we observe. Once formed, we tend to mainly interact with these categories — more than the real entity behind the category. In the context of personal branding, people interact with the image that they create of you. What does this mean? People will make ready assumptions about the motivations behind your actions — based on your caricature image in their mind. And then they react or respond to these supposed motivations. This means that if you want people to favourably react to your intended motivations, you should ensure that you create the right kind of image of yours in their minds — in other words, you may want to fashion a suitable personal brand.
“Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken.” — Oscar Wilde
I believe that the real value of a personal brand accrues only when it is authentic — i.e., when it represents the values that you truly live by. If it were anything else, maintaining your brand will involve doing things that may not align naturally with your lifestyle and personality — this can prove very costly over a period of time, rendering return of investment significantly sub-par.
If a personal brand gives the best value when it authentically reflects you then why is there a need to explicitly cultivate it? Because very few people may know your authentic self — given that most may not have significant face time with you, which is essential to get a good sense of your true self. And because in the absence of a true understanding of your real self, they may make incorrect assumptions about you which will result in inefficient and less-than-ideal collaborations and relationships.
“The keys to brand success are self-definition, transparency, authenticity and accountability.” — Simon Mainwaring
You build your brand by letting others know what your values are and the sustained demonstration of these values in action. The best way of letting others know of your values is by showing them in action — in small and big acts, in private acts as well as in public, in covert affairs and in overt opportunities.
Anything and everything you do contributes towards building your personal brand. Being inconsistent in the application of your stated or implied values also goes into building your brand — a quality of being unreliable or even dubious. Human beings somehow are prescient to the quality of authenticity. Very few people have the ability to create an image which may seem authentic but may not really be. For most people, a put-up (un)authentic image will be detected by people sooner or later. So, the best and perhaps the easiest way to create an authentic image is just by being authentic in everything you do.
Bottomline
“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.” — Jeff Bezos
A personal brand will help you influence and control people’s reactions — both in active interactions in your presence and also when you may not be around or involved actively. This ascribes personal brand the quality of high leverage — i.e., once a brand is created, you may be able to derive value from it for a long time from it with minimal incremental efforts. A personal brand is not created as much as it is cultivated. That is, it is not a matter of putting together a set of ingredients (or processing them). A personal brand is developed by actively and consciously doing a number of things. In a way, personal brand is as much as an adjective as it is a noun — it does not just reflect who you are, but it indicates how you do things. Cultivating and building a brand is not as much about doing specific things but it is about how you do anything in general.
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Thanks for taking time to read this. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals and desires. I share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, please do share it with others — of course, only if you do not mind it.
A bit on my background
I worked in India and the USA with most of my work experience with large global organizations. My last corporate role was the Head of Technology for “Treasury and Trade Management Solutions” for Citigroup South Asia cluster. At Citi, I set up from my Business Unit and grew it from a team size of 1 to over 1900 Citi employees in a span of eight years.
I quit Citi in 2021 to focus exclusively on my interest area of improving decision making. In the last 2 years, I studied this topic closely and developed a training course to systematically improve decision making ability. I’m also an Investment Advisor (RIA) registered with the Securities and the Exchange Board of India (SEBI). As an RIA, I analyze and prepare financial plans to help people achieve their financial goals.
I have done MBA in Strategy and Finance from Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota and B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.
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