“So if I asked your friends or teachers what they think of you, what would they say?”
My eleven year old son looked up at me, taking his eye off the just arrived barbeque chicken wings he had been waiting patiently to devour. “I thought we were going to talk about our fantasy football draft!” He exclaimed glancing over to the stack of magazines on our table.
“We are but first I just wanted to know what you think people at school think about you. If I said your name to them, how would they describe you?” He began to mention some really nice attributes. “Let’s write them down,” I directed. He obliged.
When he was finished, I asked him to do the same exercise, except this time, I wanted him to tell me what he wanted them to say. The truth is that the lists were pretty close. But they weren’t exactly the same.
In between chicken wings, we talked about the small gap between what he wanted his brand to be and what he perceived it to be. We also talked about how his actions, comments, classes he takes, teams he joins and overall results he has, will help reinforce the brand he wants, as well as those things that could hurt it. We never did get to prepping for our fantasy football draft as we spent dinner talking about him and his personal brand. I was surprised how much it resonated with him.
Who would have thought a 6th grader has a personal brand? Better yet, that a 6th grader is now aware of it and purposely making plans to achieve the type of brand he wants? Credit my friends Larry Linne and Patrick Sitkins, co-authors of the book Brand Damage: It’s Personal. I interviewed them for a blog post earlier in the year.
As I sat down to the read the book a few weeks ago, I expected to immediately engage in the business applications of personal branding. I’ve been very purposeful in managing my own brand and company brand over the years and was looking forward to their perspectives on this.
The idea to do this branding exercise with my son came from chapter one where Larry describes walking his daughters through a similar exercise as the one above. I thought to myself, “Really, Larry?” But the more I read, the more intrigued I was about (literally) stealing a page from Larry’s book and using this with my family. As the book pointed out, we all have a brand already. It’s not something you can run from. Once you realize this, you’ll likely become a lot more interested in controlling and managing versus leaving it to others.
As I was paying the bill and tipping our server, my son said, “Dad, do you do this with each of your employees?” I said no and immediately began to question why we didn’t. “Should we?” I asked him.
“Yeah I think it would be really good. I mean when you made me do this tonight I didn’t really want to. But it was actually pretty cool,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to listen to your parents and all, but I learned something anyway. Since you’re not the parent of your employees, I bet they’d really listen to you.”
Oh son, if you only knew!
What’s The Risk?
By not actively managing our brand, it doesn’t mean we don’t have one. It just means we’re allowing others to define our brand for us. We’ll still be known for something, but is it what we want to be known for?
Like this simple example with my son, why don’t we as leaders spend more time helping our employees with this? Sure we probably coach our sales people to build their LinkedIn profiles. We advise them on what to post on Twitter. But I don’t recall sitting down and truly engaging with them on a personal level, let alone the rest of our team, about their personal brand.
The more I thought about what my son said, the more it resonated with me. The franchise value of our organizations are at risk. As leaders we have the right and a duty to address it. Besides, we can likely have a hugely positive impact on those in our organization by helping them proactively define and live their personal brands. And, as my son said, they’ll probably listen to us since we’re not their parents.
