Three Steps To Accelerate Your Personal Brand Development

Ok. You have chosen the right job. You are comfortable with the trade-offs. Your boss is not exactly someone whom you spontaneously see eye-to-eye but you have managed to find a way to make it work. The question now is how do you accelerate your personal brand development? In my opinion, it comes down to three factors:

1. Identifying your unfair advantage

2. Avoiding the trap of visibility

3. Becoming a specialized generalist

In this post, I am going to go over the specifics of each one.

Identify Your Unfair Advantage

In my earlier post about finding the right job, determining what you are good at and not good at involves a healthy dose of iteration. You try a number of roles, find out what you like and do not like and eventually arrive at your sweet spot. In other words, you find your unfair advantage. What exactly is the unfair advantage? It is a condition, circumstance or skill that puts you in a favourable condition over others and what you can use decisively to your benefit. Its what Indra Nooyi, the ex-CEO of Pepsi, dubbed as her hip-pocket skill and credited it as one of the reasons for her success.

Lets go over with an example.

Several years ago the company where I worked at decided to transition to SAP as the enterprise for managing maintenance work. The change was critical as it affected the core operations of the business. Hundreds of people had to be re-trained and enormous amounts of data had to be migrated. Naturally, there were a lot of sticking points and people were on edge.

There was an individual (lets call him Bob) who had joined the company about two years ago. In this previous job, he worked extensively with SAP and know how to use the program very well. In this particular case, Bob had an unfair advantage. He knew the nuts and bolts of the system the company was migrating to and was well ahead of everyone else. Bob quickly gelled in with the project team and became an in-house expert. He developed modules on how to use the software and quickly positioned himself as an advanced user. Other people reached out to him when they ran into problems. Not surprisingly, he was recognised and rewarded for his contributions.

Find Your Sweet Spot

The key aspect in identifying your unfair advantage is knowing what you are good, what you like doing and what the market is willing to pay for. Here in lies the key point – what the market is willing to pay for. There is no real benefit if the company does not stand to benefit from what you are bringing to the table. As John Rex says in his article, you get paid for what value you bring to the table. The more overlap you have, the better off you will be.

Avoid The Trap of Visibility

By and far, the most important aspect of developing your personal brand is avoiding the trap of visibility. What exactly does than mean? In my experience, I have seen numerous people who end up in job roles that are totally irrelevant to their area of expertise or field of education. But why does that happen? It is because people fall into the trap of visibility – by signing up for initiatives or projects just because it happens to be management’s flavour of the month. There is an assumption behind the belief that the visibility will be good for career enhancement.

Again, lets go over with an real-life example.

One young person I knew was a mining engineer by profession (lets call him Ravi). Ravi was an eager young man who had gone through a fair amount of water-cooler gossips. He had internalised the belief that making himself visible through management was the sure-fire way to acing the annual performance review. Once upon a time, a management executive was shepherded to our company from another location. The executive decided to launch a radical “improvement initiative” to improve the bottom-line. The initiative was launched with a great deal of fanfare and excitement. An entire new team was created for it. Sensing the opportunity, Ravi signed up for the gig.

The Trap

However, the issue was that the work was outside Ravi’s field of education (although he did not see that as an issue). The job involved pulling huge amounts of data, slicing and dicing it and then throwing it at departments to try to get them to change their traditional approaches. Not even close to mining engineering.

After about an year, the initiative lost steam as the results produced were average to say the least. After two years, as priorities changed the executive left the company and another one replaced him. You can probably guess what happened with the “initiative”. It went out of the company with him. The team he put together was downsized. Ravi ended up wasting the better part of two years. He later joined (or more precisely re-assigned to) another “opportunities for improvement” team.

Chisel Your Personal Brand To Perfection

In the real world, such occurrences are common. Companies will create specific job roles and launch special projects given the need of the hour. Those job roles may only be valued at the specific company you work at and could very well be rewarded. However, if the role is not related to your profession, it might be regarded as irrelevant in the broader industry. Just imagine Ravi applying for a job as a mining engineer – do you think his data analysis experience is likely to impress?

To develop your personal brand, it is best to choose job roles that deepens your expertise and compliments your education. Chasing visibility is not a fool’s errand – as long as what you are doing is adding to your knowledge base.

Become A Specialised Generalist

Should I specialise? Should I be a generalist? Most people often ask that question when it comes to careers and personal brand development. There are pros and cons to both. Specialists can command higher paychecks and generalists are better off in economic downturns or adapting to technological changes. There are other variations as well – such as the size of the organisation.

In my experience, I found that the definition provided by Tim Ferriss to be the most valuable. Essentially, Tim advocates for aiming to become a specialised generalist. What exactly is that? Rather than focusing on a developing a singular skill-set, it is much better to combine two skills that are much more valuable together. For example, if you are an accountant it is also helpful to become a good public speaker. Combining hard technical skills with soft skills can give you a competitive advantage that can bring you into the top percentile of earning power.

Having spent a fair amount of time leading a team of engineers, I can speak from my experience that the key differentiating factor between the excellent and the average is the ability to communicate. Technical proficiency is a powerful asset. However, those who are able to simplify difficult concepts so that lay people can easily digest them are the ones who stand out among the crowd.

In The End

Developing your personal brand is a marathon, not a 100 metre dash. By focusing on your unfair advantage, carefully choosing job roles that builds your repertoire and developing a rare combination of hard and soft skills, you can greatly accelerate your development. It can make you valuable to the company and increase your market value in the industry.

Yours truly,

Rizwan.