Press

What makes you so special?
Determining your personal brand can boost your career

By Laura Raines
For ajcjobs
Published on: 01/20/08

So what's your brand? Do you have the drive of the Energizer Bunny? The enthusiasm of Tigger? The wit of Jerry Seinfeld? Or are you some combination of all three, with techno-wizardry and sales know-how thrown in?

Personal branding is about "identifying and communicating what makes you unique, relevant and compelling so that you can advance your career or business," wrote William Arruda, founding partner and president of the Reach Branding Club and co-author, with Kirsten Dixson, of "Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand."

Inspired by Tom Peters' 1997 article "A Brand Called You," Arruda developed the Reach method of helping people find their personal brands. A growing number of methods, books, magazines and blogs shows personal branding to be a hot workplace trend.

Lance Weatherby, a venture catalyst with the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech, used the Reach process to help him revamp his Web site in 2004, so that it better reflected his strengths and skills.

"A good friend asked me what I wanted to be known for, and I thought that was a good question," Weatherby said. He used the branding process to find out.

"It's like doing market research on yourself. I'd never thought of myself as a product, but it's very powerful to learn how others see you," he said. "You can't brand yourself as something that the market doesn't perceive you to be."

Surveying his friends, colleagues and employees as part of the Reach process helped Weatherby realize and own his key attributes of being enterprising, driven and smart. He not only redesigned his Web site but also started a blog, in which he could share his unique personality and knowledge.

Weatherby now is recognized as an expert in helping launch technology start-up companies. His next adventure is to start his own.

"Personal branding got me closer to doing what I want to do, but whatever you do to market yourself has to be authentic. It needs to be who you really are and what you want to do, because you want a good fit for your working hours. If what you do doesn't jibe with your skills and attributes, you won't be happy or good at it," he said.

Personal branding is a different way to look at reputation, according to Walter Akana, certified personal branding strategist, owner of Threshold Consulting in Decatur, and career management consultant with Right Management, a human resources consulting firm.

"A personal brand is all about your reputation and your unique promise of value," Akana said. "It's what you can do that no one else does quite like you."

Jobs come and go, but brand attributes always have been a part of who you are, and it's important to know them.

"Someone who knows what makes them unique and what they can do gains a lot of confidence," he said. "It gives them a tremendous sense of focus in their career and helps them stand out from everyone else.

"It's liberating and empowering to know what strengths you bring to the table."

Step-by-step approach

The three-step Reach process begins with an "extraction" phase. As if mining a gem from the earth, assessment exercises help a person look at his or her vision, purpose, values and passions.

"Your passions are what drive you and what you've probably been doing all your life — if not in your job, in hobbies and activities," Akana said.

This phase also looks at your accomplishments and past jobs.

A key part of the extraction process is asking friends, colleagues, family members and others who have known you to fill out an online assessment survey, in which they choose six to eight attributes that describe you, get creative in saying what kind of car or breakfast cereal you might be, and add comments. People's identities are not given with the responses, allowing them to be totally honest.

Step 2, the "express" phase, is how you decide to communicate your unique key attributes and qualities. You may decide to rework your résumé, elevator pitch or business card or to focus your job search on positions or companies more aligned with your brand and career goals. In this phase, you cut and polish the raw data that you've extracted to present your message so that the world sees it, Akana said.

Step 3, the "exude" phase, is about learning to reflect your brand in all aspects of your work and life. Akana likens it to putting a gem in the right setting to show it off. Your brand will begin to affect your choices in office environment, fashion style, and leisure and volunteer activities.

Akana believes that the branding process is a good tool for job-seekers or people looking for the next direction in their careers. The introspection and the gathering of feedback can help them determine what sets them apart.

"You'd be amazed at how many people haven't thought about their own attributes and strengths but, when other people name them, recognize that that's really who they are. There's a little 'aha!' moment for everybody," he said.

Professional help

Akana realized that, because freedom is one of his core values, his coaching career is well aligned with his brand. He is good at helping clients see the freedom of exploring opportunities.

"It's important to engage in personal branding as a coached process," Akana said. "You need to have someone who can ask the right questions during the extraction phase and who can help you analyze the data."

A branding professional can help you interpret the raw data properly and pick out the strategic plums to use in your résumé and other marketing materials, said Susan Guarneri, chief empowerment officer for Guarneri Associates, a career-management coaching firm in Three Lakes, Wis.

"We can be very delusional about ourselves, and getting others' opinions can be a reality check. We want a diagnostic tool that tells us where we are, not where we wished we were," said Guarneri, who is certified as a personal branding strategist, online identity-management strategist, résumé writer and career counselor.

A coach can help a client sort through what looks like mixed results or inconsistencies. For example, persistence is considered a positive trait, but stubbornness is the more negative, flip side of the same trait.

"Different respondents could be talking about the same attribute, but in different situations," she said.

Guarneri had been "a straight-laced corporate trainer," but, in going through the branding process, people kept describing her as spunky, caring, courageous and technologically cutting-edge.

"Someone's comment that I was the 'career-assessment goddess' was a gift from heaven. I realized I was an expert in career assessment and that my talents were better aligned working with individual clients than corporations," Guarneri said.

She believes strongly in the value of personal branding and includes the Reach 360-degree assessment free with all of her career consulting packages.

"I always use it with my clients going through career transition," she said. "When a person takes an assessment themselves, at most they are going to know about 50 percent of their brand attributes and skills. The other 50 percent that comes from others is like having assets in the bank that they weren't using."

Awareness allows people to decide where to put their focus and what they want to do differently.

"We all have a brand, whether we know it or not, so why wouldn't you want to know what it is and make the most of it?" Guarneri asked. "It's an additional tool to help you distinguish yourself in your job and manage your career better. When you know what you're about, you can align yourself with organizations and opportunities that see your value."

When Guarneri first began giving talks on personal branding four years ago, many people weren't familiar with the subject.

"Now they understand the concept and how important it is to differentiate themselves from others," she said. "They want to know how to do it."