Communicating your presence without being in the room

A while ago, I was interviewing a senior leader for a role in Jombay’s Development Journey Practice. He described the organizations he worked at and his roles and his years of experience. But somehow, at the end of the conversation I wondered to myself; has he carried the brands or have the brands carried him? I couldn’t put my finger on a narrative, a story or the kind of a persona he had.

Now full disclosure – I had already visited his Linkedin profile & scanned his social media presence before the interview (Like we all do before interviewing candidates, meeting friends who we’re seeing after a long time, and before a date :)) And I couldn’t infer his persona there as well. We want it or not – social media is the defacto destination to go look people up on for conversation starters. And in fact, Social media is also an opportunity to keep building on our personal brand. However, most of us use social media to talk about our education, good experience but the articulation on WHO we are as a person & how different experiences have influenced our personality is almost always unclear.

This is also a problem some managers and leaders have – they are intelligent & smart but can’t articulate what is unique about themselves. Personal branding is about projecting that unique you – and projecting that consistently! It is not about projecting falsehoods – but amplifying the most interesting part of you. It is really about communicating a presence without being in the room. Because if you don’t help drive your own narrative, others will make their own narrative about you, which may be quite an inaccurate one.

Identifying and building a narrative becomes an important focus area in Jombay’s “Branding & Storytelling” Program & #DevelopmentJourneys that we enable for customers. Some of our takeaways here include:

• Choose WHAT about you, you want the world to know, and stick to it consistently
• Stay AUTHENTIC
• Weave in PERSONAL STORIES to make it appealing

What do you think?

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