Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Personal branding is a complex idea comprising various elements, but at its core it is simply the way you project yourself to the world and, consequently, how you are seen by others. Your personal brand is not only defined by what you do and where you are headed; it is also about how you do it and why. The great dance master, Martha Graham, said: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.”¹ For any leader, creating a strong personal brand and projecting executive presence begins with an awareness of how you look, speak, engage, and interact with others. While there are intersections between someone's personal brand and the level of executive presence they exhibit, the two are not the same. Put simply, your personal brand is what people expect from you while executive presence is how you deliver on those expectations. To develop and maintain a strong personal brand, focus on the elements of presence detailed in this chapter and then make adjustments to your communication if elements are not aligned. As always, consistency is key to ensure the traits and behaviors people have come to expect from you are indeed what they experience. This will not only help you advance in your career, it will also allow you to develop as a leader and be more effective at influencing those around you. Presence comes from intentionality and connecting in an authentic way with others, be they peers, bosses, or clients.

In 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, a 35-year-old former English teacher in Hangzhou, China, began to notice how the Internet was changing the way people did business. Jack Ma saw this tech boom as an opportunity with unlimited potential, so he, along with a small group of others, decided to create a company that leveraged these new technologies to help small businesses in China compete on a global scale. What began as a website helping small manufacturers sell their goods, eventually grew into the Alibaba Group, a global leader in online commerce that today boasts a value of $360 billion. For the past 18 years, Jack Ma has shaped Alibaba's global image and his personal rags-to-riches story has become an integral element of the company's brand.

Ma's success in life did not come easy. While growing up poor in communist China meant daily struggles, Ma found creative opportunities to develop his skills. One way he did this was by riding his bicycle 45 minutes each day to a hotel where international tourists would congregate. There Ma would often engage them in conversation or offer free tours of the city so he could practice his English. But as the years passed, his career trajectory seemed to lack momentum and direction. Ma had failed his college entrance exam twice and was having trouble finding employment. “I went for a job with the police,” recalled Ma. “They said ‘You're no good.’ I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy [not hired].” At one point Ma was so desperate for work that he applied for a job at a local hotel. “My cousin and I waited for two and a half hours on a very hot summer day in order to apply for a job as a hotel waiter. After an interview, my cousin was accepted and I was rejected—the reason is he was taller and more handsome. Thirty years later, today, he is still working in that hotel, in the laundry room. And I changed my life.”²

Ma has always positioned himself as an underdog, a fighter battling the odds, learning from each setback and failing forward. This is also reflected in the way he has positioned Alibaba as the company has expanded, fending off competition and defending itself against charges it traffics in counterfeit goods. Ma understands how branding impacts the way others view his company and see him as a leader. He knows how his inspiring personal narrative connects directly to the brand of Alibaba and, consequently, it has become a story he tells as often as he can. A born promoter, Ma is not above boosting Alibaba's brand awareness with unorthodox stunts—he once rode a motorcycle into a staff meeting and performed a Michael Jackson dance tribute for the company's 40,000 employees. More recently, he acted in a Kung Fu movie opposite action star Jet Li that was seen by over 100 million people in the first month it was released. He is also involved with various international organizations and charities, which allow him the opportunity to build relationships and extend the Alibaba brand even further. And Ma's efforts have paid off. In 2014, when Alibaba went public, it enjoyed the biggest IPO in history. Today, Jack Ma, the former English teacher who couldn't get a job serving chicken at KFC, is the richest man in China, with a net worth of over $46.6 billion.³

Branding

The concept of “personal branding”—the practice of people marketing themselves in the same manner a corporation does—first emerged in 1997, when Tom Peters, an expert in corporate branding, wrote an article for Fast Company suggesting individuals can be every bit as much a brand as companies such as Nike or Coke. According to Peters, by carefully defining one's personal brand, “Everyone has a chance to stand out . . . to be a brand worthy of remark.”⁴ Your personal brand is as much about your background, experiences, and goals as it is about your career or profession. Everything that has brought you to this moment is a part of you and will define how you act and how others will perceive you. But as it turns out, people are generally not very effective when it comes to personal branding. According to a recent article in Forbes, less than 15 percent of people effectively define their personal brand and only 5 percent consistently live that brand in the workplace.⁵

Your personal brand is based on how you behave and what you accomplish, as well as expectations others have about you based on their previous experiences interacting with you. The process of selling yourself is the key to persuading others to buy into your message or ideas. And, in this case, your brand is your product. None of us want to come across as phony or self-promoting—otherwise our brand will be viewed as inauthentic. Which is why establishing and then working to protect your brand through consistent and authentic behavior is vital. It takes focus and constant, careful consideration of the choices you make.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

—JOHN DEWEY

Every experience you have had up to this moment has provided you with lessons and insights that affect the way you make decisions and behave today. When he was a child, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (and world's richest person in 2017) spent summers on his grandparents' ranch in Texas repairing windmills. At the time, young Jeff may have preferred doing something else with his time off from school, but those experiences spent tinkering with windmills helped spark his curiosity for design and innovation. Eventually, it inspired Bezos to explore his penchant for experimentation, which led to the creation of Amazon itself, now the largest and most successful Internet retail company in the world.⁶ Similarly, Steve Jobs probably had no idea that taking a calligraphy class in college would eventually inspire the typography that would one day be used in Apple computers, but it did.⁷ These formative experiences not only informed the way Bezos and Jobs would go on to conduct business, they changed how we all now conduct business.

In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle discussed the three means of persuasion a speaker must utilize to influence another person: ethos, pathos, and logos.⁸ Ethos speaks to the decency and character of a person or speaker. Does the person with whom I am interacting seem genuine and honest? Can I trust them? Logos goes to believability and credibility of the person's message. Do the ideas this person is putting forward seem logical and believable? Do they make sense? And pathos is the third means of persuasion. It involves passion and emotion. Does the person seem excited and engaged? Does the message they are delivering make me feel something? When all three means of persuasion are present and aligned, it provides a strong architecture for your personal brand. Jeff Bezos has said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.”⁹ Personal branding is where you and your career intersect, and every single interaction you have with other people will affect, positively or negatively, the feelings they develop toward you. This extends to interactions you have in person as well as online. Successful brands all make strong emotional connections with the public and the same goes for an individual developing their own personal brand.

Take a moment and think about the ways in which branding is used by celebrities and media figures. Choose two or three famous faces and try to define their personal brands in your mind. What words would you use to describe them? What feelings are generated when you see them? What have you come to expect from the way they behave and communicate with others? Think about the differences in personal branding between Jimmy Fallon, Mother Teresa, and Vladimir Putin—three influencers with decidedly different brands. As you examine each of them it is easy to understand just how much their brands are influenced by the ways they communicate and put ideas out into the world.

A positive personal brand can be valuable for anyone who works as part of a team or organization. It is what draws people toward you or, conversely, pushes them away. Beyoncé makes $50 million as a spokeswoman for Pepsi.¹⁰ George Clooney was paid $40 million by Nespresso¹¹ and George Foreman made more than $200 million to put his name on a grill.¹² The reason these celebrities get paid millions of dollars to endorse products is because their personal brand is trusted and recognizable, thus giving it value. So, when it gets associated with a product, it reaps rewards for that product in the form of more sales or better name recognition. In a similar way, your personal brand also has value. The ways in which you deal with stress, manage time, and collaborate with others all contribute to your brand and affect the expectations people will have about you.

Once you establish your personal brand, maintaining and protecting that brand over time becomes an ongoing process. As Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi once remarked during a particularly rocky period for his company, “There is a high cost to a bad reputation.”¹³ Public figures who tarnished their strong personal brands through behavior inconsistent with what the public had come to expect from them include former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, a rising political star who ended his career in disgrace when convicted of sending obscene material to a minor. Cyclist Lance Armstrong won a record seven Tour de France titles before being banned for life and stripped of all titles for his role in a doping scandal. An organization that acted inconsistently with their curated image is the Catholic Church—one of the oldest and most profitable brands in history. When the church's sex-abuse scandal came to light in the 1980s, the behavior of the abusive priests was shocking to the public because it was completely unlike how a Catholic priest should behave. Repeated inconsistencies between how you want to be perceived versus how you are perceived begin to create a narrative that will change what others think of you and can redefine your brand in a negative way. One example of this took place in 2016, when Philadelphia linebacker Nigel Bradham was arrested at Miami International Airport and charged with attempting to bring a loaded gun onto an airplane. It was the professional football player's second arrest in three months. When asked to comment on the situation, Jim Schwartz, Bradham's coach, responded, “You do dumbass things, pretty soon you're going to be labeled as a dumbass.”¹⁴

Brand is just a perception, but perception will match reality over time.

—ELON MUSK

It is nearly impossible to talk about branding without discussing the role it played in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Much of the way Trump bulldozed his way into the White House was a result of his ability to connect with his audience and create a brand narrative that energized the slice of the electorate he needed to win. Before running for president, Trump had already established a global brand as a businessman and marketer, with his name on everything from golf courses to steaks. And while Donald Trump will never be considered a great orator in the mold of a Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan, he knows how to engage an audience, build suspense, and keep people talking—all elements he learned as a television performer. As political operative Roger Stone has observed about Trump's ability to influence, “He's got a great sense of theater. He's a showman, above all.”¹⁵ The tools of his trade are emotion and identity and he uses them in a way that makes people sit up and take notice. Michael D'Antonio, a journalist and Trump biographer, puts it this way: “[Trump is] an actor who's been playing himself for his entire life, in much the same way John Wayne played himself in every role. And it's worked so well for him, playing this role of a leader and businessman, that he transitioned seamlessly into his new role as an outspoken candidate . . . enough people bought the act, and he managed to get elected.”¹⁶

Trump's message as a candidate, and the way he delivered it, elicited strong emotional reactions from those who heard it. This was by design. Trump wanted to get people talking and he knew how to keep the cameras trained on him. “Trump didn't need policies,” wrote Joe Klein in Time, “His attitude was the message . . . the fact that he could barely control himself was integral to what he was selling—spontaneity, authenticity, strut.”¹⁷ As his candidacy kicked off, Trump soon realized that every outrageous statement he made—no matter how offensive or ridiculous—dominated news cycles and kept his name in the headlines. By piling outrageous statement on top of outrageous statement, Trump was able to influence the media in a way that delivered him an estimated $2 billion in free advertising.¹⁸ And because the shocking, brawling behavior Trump exhibited during the campaign was consistent with the brand he had created as a brass-knuckled businessman and television star, his base of supporters accepted it as part of the show. He knew his audience and focused his message on them like a laser beam. As Trump famously bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.”¹⁹ In an article in Politico, Glenn Thrush described Trump's candidacy as “improvisational and impulsive . . . impelled by his branding genius and reality-TV showmanship.”²⁰ Chris Jones, theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune, agreed, writing, “Trump is a brilliant performer with particular skills . . . in taking the emotional temperature of a room and filling its needs.”²¹ The former reality television star's freewheeling campaign style paid off. On November 8, 2016, Trump's voters delivered him the White House and the opportunity to expand his brand once again—this time on a bigger stage than he could ever have imagined.

A personal brand represents the total experience someone has or can expect when interacting with you—in meetings, on conference calls and through social media. Each and every one of us is the sum of our experiences, and just like Jack Ma or Donald Trump, every mistake we have made, every triumph we have achieved, and every lesson we have learned becomes part of who we are. Every action we take, or choose not to take, contributes to our personal brand. As the Zen Buddhist saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.

But a strong personal brand does not develop overnight. And just like the brands of major corporations, brands can be made and remade over time. To begin shaping your own personal brand, it is important to start by understanding how you are seen by those around you. If the brand you have created is inconsistent with the brand you envision, you may need to make adjustments to bring them into alignment. Do you want to be seen as bold but your boss thinks you are an introvert? Maybe it is time to be more forceful when advocating for your ideas. If you want to be seen as a team player but your coworkers think you are arrogant and self-involved, you could try listening more and talking less. Defining one's personal brand is not always easy. The way you see yourself versus the way others see you can often be two different things. This is why taking the time to carefully examine how you want to be seen versus how others truly see you is worth the effort. There are many elements that go into the creation and maintenance of your personal brand, including vision, style, experience, passion, purpose, values, strengths, and goals.

Defining Your Personal Brand

As an exercise, grab a pencil and paper and jot down three words you would use to describe yourself. Take your time. And be honest. Next, find someone you trust—a boss, spouse, or coworker—and ask them to provide three words they would use to describe you. Once you have their answers, compare them to the three words you used to describe yourself. Do they match? If not, how are they different? The next step in understanding your personal brand is to make a list of your core competencies—the talents and skills you possess that can provide benefit to others. Write down the ones that come to mind. And don't be humble. Which talents do you possess that could be valuable to others? Once you've finished with that, list the major experiences and accomplishments that define you to this point in your life. Awards, degrees, and promotions all count. Then write down your goals. What do you hope to accomplish this year? In five years? Ten years? These can be work-related goals or personal aspirations. What's on your bucket list? Climbing Mount Everest? Taking an acting class? Getting married? Next, write down your passions—any hobbies or activities you enjoy pursuing outside of work, such as music, travel, and exercise. How do you like to spend your leisure time? Finally, describe your values. What do you stand for? What is important to you? And what will you not tolerate under any circumstances?

Creating a Personal Branding Statement

Now that you've taken the time to do some thorough self-analysis, use the information you've compiled on the paper to create a personal branding statement—no more than one or two sentences—that best describes you and the unique value you can offer to others. Think of it as a tagline or catchphrase and make it solution-oriented and unique to you. Your branding statement is not a personal mission statement or job title. Instead, it should express what you stand for, what people can expect from you, and how you will make decisions going forward. Some examples of branding statements for a teacher, a shipping manager, and a real estate agent might look like the following:

1. Teacher: “I help students identify their passions and talents and provide direction on how they can utilize them for future success.”
2. Shipping manager: “I have a passion for logistics. My days are spent managing the shipping requirements of my customers to allow their businesses to grow and thrive.”
3. Real estate agent: “I strive to be the most passionately referred agent in the real estate industry while providing excellent customer service to each and every one of my clients.”

Composing a personal branding statement may take a bit of time, so don't be in a hurry. Once you've composed yours, write it down and tape it to your desk or computer so it is clearly visible. Doing this will serve as a daily reminder for you to stay committed and remain consistent in the ways you present yourself to others. Strong personal brands, much like successful corporate brands, must be developed, maintained, and protected at all costs.

The Power of Executive Presence

Whether in person, on video, or even over the phone, being able to project confidence and credibility to an audience greatly enhances your ability to influence them. The concept of executive presence in business is often highly intuitive and difficult to pin down. It is a combination of many factors, such as magnetism, knowledge, passion, speaking skills, assertiveness, confidence, professional appearance, and more. All of these contribute to a person's perception of you and few people would argue that a positive executive presence will enable a person to get ahead in business. But when it comes to male and female workers, there is a divide between how they each view the importance of executive presence. In Chapter 4 we discuss the specific differences between the way female and male executives lead; for example, one recent study published in the Harvard Business Review found that only 45 percent of women think that executive presence helps people get ahead. And this problem is compounded by another finding from that same report: women are 41 percent less likely than men to receive feedback about their image.²² Without honest and constructive feedback regarding one's personal brand and leadership style, how can they truly understand how they are perceived by others?

We can all think of someone with executive presence—a leader or media figure who engages an audience, displays poise under pressure, and makes it all seem effortless. Communicating with executive presence has many benefits. It can help build relationships, facilitate change, or motivate others. Think of some famous figures, past or present, that you feel exhibit executive presence. Some possible examples might include Oprah Winfrey, Jack Welch, Richard Branson, and Suze Orman. What is it about these leaders that conveys executive presence? What aspects of the ways they behave or communicate contribute to their executive presence?

Elements of Executive Presence

Executive presence is not one trait or quality alone but a combination of traits and qualities that creates your personal distinctiveness and contributes to the overall perception others have about you. Executive presence affects how others see you, whether they listen to you, and whether they will be willing to follow you. Let's take a moment to break down the various elements that make up executive presence. As we discuss each trait in more detail, use this as an opportunity to identify which are strengths for you as well as which ones might offer opportunities for development.