Leadership Brand Definition: How to Build a Leadership Brand

A leadership brand is your brand identity as a leader, largely represented through key character traits you emphasize as you guide and oversee your organization. Your personal leadership brand is somewhat symbiotic with your organization’s brand as a whole. After all, the way you lead your company has a large bearing on its identity.

For example, if you act as a hospitable, inviting, and empathic leader, it follows that the rest of your staff will try to enshrine these same attributes in your company’s digital marketing strategies and online presence. Otherwise, there’ll be something of a mismatch between your own values and the organization’s as a whole.

Building a personal brand can prove essential to your leadership development as a whole. Here are just three of the main benefits you can expect from developing your leadership brand:

1. 1. Better marketing potential: If you increase your own brand value as a leader, your company’s brand value will likely follow suit. As you strive to embody your company’s key values in your own leadership, your team can use your guidance as an avatar for the company’s commitment to its mission on a broader scale. This sort of branding strategy can help increase market share and entrepreneurship opportunities as a whole.
2. 2. Greater self-awareness: The more you understand your current brand as a leader, the more you’ll also understand yourself. For example, a thought leader must embody intellect, charisma, and an ability to communicate in an illuminating way. If you do not innately possess these attributes, you can work on acquiring them through practice. Self-awareness is the prerequisite to self-improvement. Additionally, the better you understand yourself, the better you can help the rest of your organization understand itself, too.
3. 3. Increased clarity of purpose: A leadership brand can serve as a sort of basic mission statement to spur you on to acquire the leadership skills necessary to lead your company in a powerful way. As soon as you commit to a leadership brand, devote yourself to advocacy for your company in concert with your stated values.

Building your leadership brand can feel daunting, but it’s easier than you might think. Follow these steps to build a leadership brand of your own:

1. 1. Assess your competencies. As a starting point, evaluate your current strengths and weaknesses. Everyone can bring unique value to the organization they lead, and your leadership style should be consistent with your character as a person. Rather than rely on mimicking successful case studies of other leaders, begin by asking what attributes you have specifically that make you a good leader. By all means, learn from the examples of other leaders, but keep an eye out for areas of differentiation as well. These are the places where you can excel in a personalized way.
2. 2. Clarify expectations. As a senior leader, reach out to those you’ll be leading to see what they expect of you. These key stakeholders are your first target market—the internal group who will need to buy into your leadership brand (as well as your leadership in a more general sense). Next, evaluate customer expectations to see how you can lead in a way they will find consistent and inspiring as well. These coworker and customer partnerships can help you better understand yourself and how you can lead effectively.
3. 3. Crystallize key words. Take what you’ve learned from your self-evaluation and your stakeholders’ input. Boil down the attributes you already possess and what your team requires of you into a few key words. For example, suppose you wrote down you’re an authentic person and a team member also said they need a bold leader. In this case, you could write down “bold and authentic leadership” to begin laying the groundwork for a firmer brand identity.
4. 4. Define who you are. Take your list of key words and begin to brainstorm how all of them fit into a strong leadership brand. Ask how you can lead your organization’s individual initiatives into the next year and beyond. Draft a personal leadership brand statement as a tagline to remember and try to stick to it. For example, this personal mission statement could read something like: “My leadership brand matters because my team needs authentic and bold leadership to generate reliable results.” There’s no specific format for this, so feel free to experiment.

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