Your Personal Brand is Your Personal Protection from Career Redundancy
Published as “Reaffirming relevance: Make your passions and talents known in your company to ensure you won’t be left behind” by Communications Director Magazine, Issue 11 – 3/2009.
by Jane Chin, Ph.D.
Career Redundancy Protects Companies… Not Employees
In biological systems, redundancy occurs for the most critical pathways where duplication or compensation of components and checkpoints preserves the integrity of the system: if the primary component fails, redundant components prevent the failure of the system. In corporations, redundancy often occurs not in the form of duplication, but in the form of supportive and compensatory networks. These supportive networks enable the optimal performance of a function within the organization, and in times of acute crisis, prevent the complete collapse of the core competencies that confer competitive advantage to the organization.
In today’s economy, and past instances of economic challenge, individuals confront career redundancy, which has none of the protective functions of corporate redundancy or biological redundancy for the individual. Career redundancy is intimately linked to the elimination of corporate redundancy, as companies strive to streamline and “eliminate waste” at the expense of what companies perceive as redundant or superfluous. In other words – as companies are forced to do more with less, employees are often part of the “less” equation.
Therefore, we who work in today’s tumultuous economic times must identify our unique contribution to our companies and indeed, to our domains of expertise, such that our value is not mistaken as superfluous and hence our functions redundant. This requires us to assume personal leadership in managing our careers and in communicating our distinct value to the stakeholders in our careers. These stakeholders would include our clients and customers, supervisors, and colleagues.
Our approach and activities relating to the communication of our value to these stakeholders become a part of our “personal brand” at the workplace.
What Personal Branding is… and Is Not
Every aspect of your presence constitutes your personal branding: your speech, actions, mannerisms, appearance, even your name and perception it may evoke (one of the reasons why companies agonize over brand names, and why some actors legally change their names to one befitting their image). Technology has introduced the virtual element in our personal branding, as we create online profiles and interact via social media in social networks; our online persona is part of our personal branding, but unlike our physical person, we may exert greater control and design over our online persona.
Personal branding is powerful, but no panacea against the prevention of career redundancy when based on image alone. If an employee lacks an expertise or attitude desired by the employer, no amount of personal branding can compensate for the shortcoming, at least, not for long. Personal branding is not about manipulating “what is not” into “what is”, this is an exercise in futility and the manipulation will eventually be revealed. Rather, effective personal branding efforts are born from your identification of your talents and passion, and demands that you translate this self-knowledge into actions and behaviors supportive of the perception you wish your stakeholders’ to form. Alignment of these efforts will encourage your stakeholders’ recognition of your talents and passion, such that you will be thought of when opportunities arise for you to contribute value along these lines.
Assessing Your Current Personal Brand
To assess your current personal brand within your organization or domain of expertise, answer these questions:
I can answer this question from my boss’ perspective: “I think of {your name} FIRST when I need ________.”
I can answer this question from my coworkers’ perspective: “I think of {your name} FIRST when our team needs ________.”
I routinely track my actions and behaviors that are supportive of creating my desired personal brand.
If you are able to answer the first two questions, preferably by collecting data through conversations with your boss and colleagues, you then have information from which you may analyze the degree of alignment of your personal brand as it is perceived and formed by these stakeholders with your own idea of your personal brand. This information enables you to prospectively and proactively reinforce a high degree of alignment – by continuing actions supportive of your desired and existing personal brand – or rectify a low degree of alignment – by initiating actions that will bridge this gap between desired and existing personal brand, and mitigating actions that will risk widening this gap.
Brand Plans Require Congruence
When you are creating your “personal brand plan”, a critical consideration is the criteria upon which your stakeholders rely when perceiving your brand. For example, one pharmaceutical company here in the United States aired television commercials featuring its scientists who talked about making a difference by working as a scientist at the company; while this may have made scientists appear more personal to the consumer and most will not doubt the validity of these scientists claims to make a difference, the consumers have been forming drug companies’ repute based on their perceived high prices of prescription drugs. This attempt to improve the perception of the pharmaceutical industry by increasingly hostile consumers was lackluster in result, and pharmaceutical companies continued to incur negative perception in the minds of consumers worried about their ability to afford lifesaving medicines. Brand plans thus require congruence in stakeholder criteria and your strategy in creating alignment between desired and existing personal brand.
Conclusion
While it appears logical that our personal brand, as is our “repute”, may mostly be out of our control and is conferred upon us by other people, this assumption does not take into account our ability for awareness and action that directly influences the formulation of other people’s opinions of how our contributions may be valuable. Cultivating your personal brand may not always prevent your company from eliminating the role you occupy as “redundant” in tough times, but personal branding should communicate to your stakeholders the unique value you contribute that no one other can duplicate. This, in turn, becomes your competitive advantage as you chart your career.
