Four Reasons Why Business Managers Need to Build an Outstanding Personal Brand.

Your personal brand and your reputation are not the same. Everyone has a reputation, but not a personal brand, especially an outstanding one.

Building a personal brand is much more intentional. It is how you want people to see you. Your personal brand is about your visibility and the values that you outwardly represent. To sum up, personal branding is the process of developing and promoting a distinct image or identity that distinguishes you from others in your profession.

Dayo, a young manager in the banking industry with a prestigious MBA, was turned down for a promotion. When he asked his supervisor about the decision, his boss replied, “nobody knows you.”

That came as a surprise to Dayo, who had received regular praise for his strong work ethic and good results. He thought everyone knew him in the small firm. What he found was that the senior managers at the decision-making table had no idea what he stood for and who he was as a person.

Dayo made an error that many of us make early in our careers. We feel that our efforts, education, and performance are sufficient to outcompete our colleagues and gain prospects for promotion. We ignore (or are just not taught) the importance of building a personal brand.

Four serious reasons you need to own an outstanding personal brand in 2023.

1. Personal Branding Clearly Differentiates You From Your Competitors: Supervisors at Dayo’s company knew he was a strong performer; but that wasn’t enough to land him a promotion; because, at certain levels, everyone is exceptional. Therefore, to clearly differentiate your value and what you bring to the table, you need to do more than have a good reputation. You need to have an outstanding personal brand.
2. Greater Respect (Within the Organization or Business and Within the Industry): As competition gets tougher, this year, building an outstanding personal brand and becoming a thought leader in your industry not only bring you respect but also promotes your organisation or business.
3. Job security: Something else that managers like Dayo did not realise was, having a well-established personal brand that attracts additional leads and money for his organisation would weave him more deeply into the fabrics of his organisation or business than other managers. Although, this would not have made him indispensable, it does provide him with some job security.
4. Makes you visible: Having a strong personal brand makes you visible, unlike Dayo, who was unnoticed in spite of his peak performance. Once you have some substance behind your personal brand, you will begin to receive all kinds of requests that will help spread awareness about you.

Judging by Dayo’s case, he struggled with differentiating himself from his competitors, gaining new opportunities, and increasing his earning potential due to lack of a personal brand because “nobody knew him.”

Don't be like Dayo.

There's no better time than now to start building your personal brand.

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