This month, I’m providing a career management tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own career management activities.
Today’s tip: Marketing AND Delivery Support our Personal Brand.
To be fair, I’ve been hard on those that promote Personal Brands. You see, I truly believe that the development of the Personal Brand is an important differentiator of a person’s work in todays workplace.
My issue has been that creating the brand is not enough: you must live the brand and do the work that promotes the personal brand — after all, personal branding is about doing.
This cautionary tale is amplified by Seth Godin’s article on “What are you hiring for?” where he notes:
If you’re trying to hire someone who presents well to strangers, creates documents without typos, is good at seeking out interesting new opportunities, can think on her feet in an interview and can network with strangers in search of a goal, your current hiring system is probably perfect.
Unfortunately, those skills don’t apply to most jobs.
As a result, we end up hiring people who are good at self-marketing, not at what we need them to do.
It is the “self-marketing” of the personal brand and not having the actual skills and task delivery by the person that causes me to pause.
Marketing your brand is not just doing the job. And doing the job is only partially marketing your personal brand.
Today, we need to both market our personal brand with innovation and integrity while delivering on the tasks necessary that support our brand.
Scot
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