6 things you need to know about personal brand

Being authentic and believable helps you get the best out of your relationships with colleagues and employers - but you won't go far if the message about who you are isn’t consistent.

This was the thrust of our Career skills series: Personal brand evening on June 9, where Newleaf founder and career coach Susan Binnersley spoke to ACT members about the importance of developing and maintaining a personal brand. This is especially important when you have so many formats available for representing yourself, from live in person to your CV to Facebook to LinkedIn.

Why does personal brand matter so much?

Your personal brand matters because most decisions are made on who you are and not just what you have achieved. Understanding what messages you transmit and whether others accurately receive clear and consistent messages about what you stand for is essential to ensuring you develop the best working relationships.

Having a high personal awareness or emotional intelligence (EI) helps you to secure and perform in the career roles and environments that are right for you. Indeed, your work experience and likelihood of career success can be undermined if you don't fit the company, and while cultural fit is critical, it works both ways: Do you fit the company culture? Does the company culture fit with you? Empathy shouldn't be underestimated - psychologist Daniel Goleman has shown the need for us to recognise our own feelings and those of others - so by developing a high level of self-awareness, you can get the best out of yourself and those who work with you.

The essentials of your personal brand

Successfully managing how other people perceive you is the result of developing a personal brand that's strong, clear and puts your best self out there. These 6 essential elements are tools to help you do this.

Essential 1. Understand the four cornerstones of emotional intelligence

• High personal awareness – you need to find out what your reputation is.
• Self management – if you like what you’re hearing about yourself, do the right people know this? Are you giving everyone the best possible chance to hear this? If not, how do you change this and how do you show people once you have changed?
• Social awareness – what impact is appropriate here? In your office environment the team leader creates the tone for the team and you all need to understand what would work within this team and whether you fit.
• Relationship management – consider your audience and what impact will influence them most.

Essential 2. Don’t forget about non-verbal communication

Psychologist Albert Mehrabian looked at the importance of non-verbal communication and devised numerous experiments for looking at how our vocal expressions, gestures, postures, and movements, can amplify, restrict, or even deny what our words say.

Mehrabian’s 7–38–55% Communication Rule reflects the impact of our verbal and non-verbal interactions:

• Words are only responsible for 7% of your message
• Pitch and tone represent 38%
• Body language makes up 55%

Essential 3. Manage your visual image

Psychologists say it takes a tenth of a second to make a decision on whether you trust someone. So you have to think about how you present yourself all the time, not just when you speak. Remember that you are never ‘off camera’.

Newleaf's top tips for managing your visual image:

• Always consider what you look like ‘top to toe’ - what message are you conveying?
• Be comfortable and wear clothes that fit well.
• Be aware of your non-verbal habits. Think about how you look before and after key meetings. For example, when you are about to do a presentation, how do you look when you walk in the room? How do you greet the people you are going to present to before you start your presentation? What do you do when the presentation is finished?
• Ask a good friend or colleague to give you feedback.

Essential 4. Create a CV that stands out

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The first thing a new employer will receive from you is your CV, so it's your first chance to highlight your skills. Transferable skills are vitally important and being able to illustrate them in your CV is key. Be aware of your hidden skills (the things you are good at but didn’t realise you were good at) and your blind spots (the things you think you are good at but that’s not how you come across). You can always develop your skills and competencies – you just need to know what to develop!

Tailoring your CV to the role and organisation is a must, of course, but you should also keep in mind to:

• Bring out your personality and what you did to make a difference. The STAR acronym (an interviewing technique) is a useful tool to help you bring this out – Situation, Task, Action and Result.
• Have a succinct opening summary - recruiters are busy and you need to grab their attention.
• Make sure your CV is in the past tense, and remember to go through it and check your tenses and spelling.
• Spend time thinking about what the company is looking for – you don’t need to put in everything you have done within a role, but highlight any relevant skills.

Essential 5. Showcase your best at interview

Interviews are another place where showing your transferable skills is critical to success. The key thing to remember is that everyone at the interview has positive intent. You are there because they have spotted something in your CV that they like.

Make sure you highlight the things you are proud of and use the STAR technique to shape what you say. This will also help you to come across in a succinct way and show the interviewer what you are proud of.

Essential 6. Know the value of networking and how to use it

By building your network you will get to know different people and companies, and understand which companies best fit with your values.

When you are networking you should look at conveying information about yourself in a short and succinct way, making sure you get across the answers to these 3 questions:

• What am I looking for?
• What am I brilliant at?
• How can I be reached?

My thanks go to Susan Binnersley from Newleaf for her insightful presentation, and to Peter Nolan from Aragorn Financial and Colin Tyler from the ACT who took part in the panel discussion.

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