Managing your Brand

A concept that I wanted to emphasize that I learned from my Leadership training was around our Individual Brands.

Just as brands are important to business, our individual brand should be important to each of us.  What does our brand say about us. How do others view us as an individual?  The best way to find out is to ask.

What questions should we ask?  Our brand can be broken up into 5 parts. Persona, Product, Packaging, Promotion, and Permission

Persona

Our persona relates to our person skills. How good of an emotional connection do we have with those we interact with.

Product

What are our accomplishments. The stuff that we produce in our daily lives.

Packaging

How do we present ourselves. Do we dress like a slob. Does our packaging fit into our environment.

Promotion

Do we make sure that everyone that we come in contact with are familiar with our work and the things that we produce?

Permission

Have we empowered ourselves to be the best we can be.

Evaluate our Current Brand

When we think of our brand and the way others perceive us, identify our strengths and weakness. Continue to invest in the strengths and work on changing or fixing your weaknesses. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses are key to improving your brand moving forward.

Reference

These concepts and more can be found from “The Personal Brand Company” and the book “The Leader’s Edge“

Training for Leadership

As a person who sees his future career state as an Architect, I found it unusual to have Leadership training pushed from above as a required course of training.  A little hesistant and unsure I went to Dallas to learn what I needed to do in order to be a better leader. What I found was 3 days of self discovery. 

The pre-requisite for the class was to fill out a self assessment and send out a survery to 8-13 colleagues to assess your strengths and weaknesses.  In the end this work answered the following questions: How do you view yourself at work and how do you colleages view you. Are they in synch? The question was answered when we recieved the surveys after the first day of training. In addition we were to define what our core values are, what matters most to us in the workplace.

The first day of training was focused around our individual Brand. Just as Nike, Google and many other companies have established a well know brand we also need to follow the same example and establish our own Brand. What do we want to be known for?

The second day was full of hands on excersises with the group. Some were fun others a little uncomfortable. The power of the excersises were around the immediate feedback recieved from others in the group. The enviroment was very safe so it was easy to accept the feedback given. One of the excersise was recorded to be viewed the next day.

The third day was mostly wrapping things up. The biggest shocker on the third day was seeing yourself on camera as we viewed the video from the excersise the day before. Nothing knocks you off your chair more then to see yourself react in various situations. My biggest eye opener of the whole training. We also focused on how to express your point of view effectively to any given audience.

I know that this is a high level view of the training. I would like to go into more detail in additional posts. Overall this training was well worth my time and would take it again in a heartbeat as this training was down to earth and unlike some other soft skill trainings that I have been to is applicable to what I am doing right now.