Eman Deabil Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP) and Accredited Chartered Manager (CMI) is a regular contributor to Woman This Month and has written invaluable articles including ‘Women’s Path to The Boardroom’. This month, Eman shares her insights on the importance of building a personal brand for young professionals, and shares her three essential steps for getting started.
One of the key messages I’m keen on conveying to my mentees of young professionals is to start building their personal brand early on.
According to Personalbrand.com, “Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, widen their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.”
In simpler words, your personal brand is the way you define yourself to the public. It’s how you express what you stand for, it’s the approach you’re adopting to influence people and make your voice heard.
Needless to say that the exponential explosion of Social Media (SM) contributed in one way or another in strengthening and accelerating the process of building personal brands – be it positive or negative. However, just to clarify, building your personal brand is not equivalent to being famous on SM – though it’s powerful, it’s just a tool/mean. In fact, it’s quite easy to become famous on SM in absolutely no time; the simplest way is to be awkward and provocative, doing awkward deeds and saying awkward words!
Here are three essential steps to building your personal brand:
Laying the Foundation
To build your personal brand, you need to start by asking yourself some fundamental questions:
Who am I?
How can I define myself?
How can I differentiate myself and stand out in the crowd?
If there is one thing that I would like to be known for, what would it be?
Who’s my audience?
To which circles I belong?
Coming up with answers to these questions will help you draw your roadmap and put milestones to eventually reach your desired destination. When you’re clear about where you stand and where you want to be, you know exactly what needs to be done to be there; it’s a transformational journey that requires SMART action plan to accomplish it.
The plan could consist of three main elements: Knowledge, Experience, and Network. Under each element you can define a number of objectives and KPIs to monitor your performance.
Placing the Bricks
To start the building process, it’s essential to acquire the required knowledge, develop and improve the needed skills, bridge the gaps in experience, and grow the network. This can be achieved by leveraging different means: studying, reading, attending events/conferences, participating in voluntary activities, attending professional gatherings, posting, blogging, and seizing every single opportunity to boost your self-confidence – that also includes “dressing to impress”.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
The more knowledge you accumulate, the more confident you will be to voice your opinions and share your thoughts. This in turn will help you gain more trust from your audience.
Acquiring knowledge has become easy with the plethora of learning platforms and sources. What’s not easy is accumulating knowledge and building experience, for which you need to roll-up your sleeves and get your hands dirty by not only acquiring knowledge but applying it, maintaining/upgrading it along the way and defending it if required.
To grow your network, you need to be present at first – be it physically or digitally. Hijack the circles that are fit for your purpose, assess the value you’re adding and the value you’re gaining from these circles regularly.
As time passes, you’ll be able to observe how your horizon has widened, your network expanded and your views crystalised, and you’ll smoothly switch hats and look at things from different perspectives. You’ll be called by a friend of a friend of another friend to give advice and resolve matters where no alternatives are available! That’s how strong your brand can be.
Maintain and Upgrade
Your roadmap, milestones and destination are not necessarily static, being dynamic and adapting to changes along the way is a vital part of the game. Sometimes you need to alter the roadmap, introduce and/or remove milestones. In fact, in some cases, you need to change the destination itself!
Regular and ad-hoc assessments to your knowledge, experience, and network are essential to keep the ball rolling. You may seek a professional advice or engage a coach or mentor.
Short Story
At one of the recent events I attended, one of the attendees introduced me as “one with many professional qualifications”, the hidden message here reflecting how keen and passionate I am to learn new things! Is it something that I wanted myself to be known for? Absolutely. I’ve done the Gallup Strengths Finder assessment a few years earlier and “Learner” was my first strength. Was it easy to collect professional qualifications? Not easy nor quick; it took me 15 years of continuous learning, studying books, clearing exams, obtaining qualifications and applying/maintaining/upgrading the knowledge!
What’s more, one of the young university students approached me once to conduct an interview and she said: “I was searching on Google for project managers in Bahrain and your name came up. It was the first in the list”. This wouldn’t be possible 10 years earlier, it took me time to build that reputation and be the first!
Building a personal brand is essential these days, and very much possible. Be sure to be consistent and leverage all your resources and you are sure to succeed in all that you do.
