Comments on: Personal Branding…Is it personal?

By: Critical Alpha

Critical Alpha — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:13:18 +0000

Monica, they’re great points that you make. With respect to CEOs who don’t want talent to shine outside the organisation, this is surprisingly common. What’s more, this same behaviour is almost inevitably happening inside the organisation. Many CEOs are, unfortunately, overly ego driven and their egos are at the same time surprisingly fragile. That means that instead of growing, nurturing and supporting talent within and beyond the organisation, they instead smother and seek to control that talent.
It’s a complex subject and it has many facets, but it’s not surprising that they object to positive public profiles for talent. It’s symptomatic of much larger organisational issues.

By: Joanne Spain

Joanne Spain — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:44:07 +0000

Monica, this is a great post. Thanks for referencing to my slidehow also.

I consult in business and social media. One thing that I do a lot of is individual online profiling. As if business development and sales wasn’t a challenge enough when self-employed. I am selling a service that as you and other suggest many large companies reject.

I think if the benefits are communicated to organisations in terms of metrics they want to achieve then rejecting the concept of profiling top talent would be super hard for them.

From an HR / talent perspective – a more engaged workforce, faster self-led professional development, enhanced company culture, profiling top talent as experts in their field, talent attracts talent.

From a workflow / efficiency perspective – speeds up communication and information needs.

From a marketing perspective – If top talent all have an impressive online profile they are all contributing a micro amount to how the company looks online at a macro level (it is like free marketing). Also, employees take greater responsibility for the wider promotion of the company.

By: Matthew Dent

Matthew Dent — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:30:15 +0000

Monica, great post! Problem is, when it comes down to it, employers only care about themselves and the bottomline. Ironically, the practice of hindering personal promotion or hiding yours stars will only hurt the company. This seems to be common practice at established/smaller companies where everyone working in the ivory tower has been in place FOREVER! Is this a common a trend or are younger companies just as at fault? Thanks again!

By: Monica

Monica — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:22:34 +0000

Thank you for your comments. As always, even better food for thought than the original post! Steve´s experience is very commonplace and it is just engrained in big organizations to fear losing their talent. It takes awareness of the issue and real guts to see the benefits, but as the world shrinks before our eyes it will become inevitable that stars will shine. Wally’s suggestions are of course right on for leaders interested in changing this and yes, Dorothy we will have to wait and see. For now, I direct readers to three wonderful resources that will help you get to know these thought leaders up close and personal:

Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog
http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/12/21/babies-and-big-people.aspx?ref=rss

Dorothy Dalton’s Future Perfect Carreer Transition Strategies
http://dorothydalton.wordpress.com/

and of course follow @LeadToday on Twitter, or better yet…if you get the chance to hear him speak, go for it.

I am left with the question then, What to do if you are the one growing your personal brand, as Steve describes. That’s a great subject for another post…

By: Steve Keating

Steve Keating — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:05:40 +0000

Very timely post for me. Tomorrow I begin a 16 city tour over the next few months. I’ll be speaking on various topics but mostly leadership. While in front of hundreds of people I’ll talk about many things related to developing your leadership skills. One thing I absolutely will not talk about is my personal twitter feed, LeadToday. There is some good leadership insights posted there but as I said, it is my “personal” twitter feed. I work for a rather large company and there is more than a little concern about “self-promotion” so even though the LeadToday twitter could help these customers of my company they will never know about it.
It’s interesting because I have almost total freedom as to the customers I work with, where I go and when I go. The topics I present are mine to decide and I manage my team with almost no oversight. But building a “personal” brand is really scary for big companies for reasons that truly escape me. I’m sure they know I’m not going anywhere, I’m well compensated and I love the industry (golf) that I’m in so there is no reason for concern there. Guess it will remain a mystery to me.
I agree with everything you say Monica, there are indeed many benefits to an organization when their people have a strong personal brand. If anyone doubts this maybe they should ask themselves this question: Would you like strong people responsible for your business or weak ones.

By: Wally Bock

Wally Bock — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:52:47 +0000

What a penetrating and thoughtful post, Monica. There are organizations who worry that “their” people who have strong personal brands are likely to be hired away by the evil competition. The solution, they believe, is to prevent their stars from getting known.

I suspect that these are the same companies who don’t believe in helping managers develop a broad base of valuable skills because it makes them more attractive to recruiters like Dorothy. They’re misguided in both situations.

Personal branding is nothing new. There are only some new tools. The fact, though, is that either in 1990 or 2010, everybody in an industry knows who the stars are. Any recruiter worth his or her salt knows who they are, too.

The solution is to embrace development and branding. Help your people develop their skills and become known for them. That will make your organization a great place to work.

Some of your people will jump ship anyway. Deal with it. But you’ll have more good ones than most and those good ones will have a higher mean performance level and more developed social networks. It’s one of those situations where control is futile, so stand back, encourage and help and you’ll come out better.

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Twitted by timdouglashr — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:23:19 +0000

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By: Dorothy Dalton

Dorothy Dalton — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:12:39 +0000

Monica – this is a great post and a thought that I know is bothering many organisations. What do they do when the brand of some key employees is in some cases as visible, if not more visible, than the corporate brand? Truthfully I think we are only at the tip of this particular iceberg. I’ll be interested to see how all of this is handled in the year to come.

Best

Dorothy

By: Twitted by monedays

Twitted by monedays — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:06:18 +0000

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