Should Companies Ban or Limit Personal Branding for Employees?

“Personal branding” is about people, not about organizations or companies. But many organizations make personal branding mistakes by influencing their employees in the following three ways:

(If you'd rather listen/watch instead, play the video below. Otherwise, keep reading below the video.)

Mistake #1 – First, some companies explicitly prohibit their employees from building their personal brands in certain online platforms. For example, there are companies in the financial services industry that monitor employees’ LinkedIn profiles and dictate what employees can and cannot write about themselves in those profiles. This ends up limiting how much those employees can use LinkedIn to build their personal and professional brands, which, of course, also limits the employees’ abilities to use their profiles to secure new jobs at other companies. Some companies also have restrictions on what employees can say on their personal social media accounts, particularly if those employees have job positions that make them seem more like official representatives of the organization.

Mistake #2 – Second, some companies actively discourage their employees from building their personal brands. These organizations don’t necessarily have formal rules, but management looks down on employees who strive to build up their personal and professional brands and may even overlook those employees for promotions and other rewards. These companies build into their corporate culture the idea that “if you’re working here, you shouldn’t have any need to build your own brand that might take you elsewhere.” I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve mentioned to someone that their LinkedIn profile is out of date, and they’ve responded that they don’t want to upset their boss by revising it and making it seem like they’re “on the job market.”

Mistake #3 – The third mistake companies make with respect to personal branding is not encouraging their employees to build their personal brands. For a great many organizations, the idea of employees building their personal brands is never even considered. As long as the employees do their work and don’t embarrass the organization with inappropriate social media posts, management is content. They don’t actively suppress personal branding, but they also don’t go out of their way to encourage any individual development in the areas of personal and professional branding.

This leads us to the following question: Why should building employees’ personal brands be important to an organization?  Here are three strong reasons:

Reason #1: Deals are made between people, not only between organizations. People work with other people to develop agreements, and not everything in the agreement can be formally written into the contract. At some point, there’s some level of trust, and trust is built through the development of your personal brand or reputation or image (or whatever you’d like to call it). Organizations benefit when their employees have strong reputations, whether those reputations are purely professional or are primarily personal.

Reason #2: Personal branding helps improves employee satisfaction. Employees want to feel good about themselves. One of the best ways to keep employees happy is to allow them, and even encourage them, to grow as individuals and to feel good about themselves. As employees learn new skills, gain new certifications, encounter new experiences, etc., it’s worthwhile to encourage them to broadcast these new skills to the world, which will make those employees feel accomplished, and at the same time, will build their personal brands. Is there a chance that your employees will then be able to secure new positions in other organizations? Yes, but that’s much better than the alternative of keeping them from progressing so they never have other opportunities and as a result having them be less productive for your company and maybe even having them resent your organization at a later time.

Reason #3: Strong personal brands lead to strong organizational brands. People who are serious about building their personal brands start to understand more fully the importance of brand-building for the organization for which they work. They notice activities and circumstances that help and that hurt the organizational brand and as a result, they’re more likely to build processes that will build the organizational brand, even if they only do it because they know that having a strong organizational brand will also help their own personal brand.

There are other reasons as well, but this is a good start as to why organizations should encourage (and never discourage or prohibit) their employees with respect to building their personal and professional brands.

"If the leaders of organizations truly believe that an organization is only as good as its employees, then those leaders should encourage their employees not only to develop themselves professionally, but also to develop the personal brands that represent them."

If the leaders of organizations truly believe that an organization is only as good as its employees, then those leaders should encourage their employees not only to develop themselves professionally, but also to develop the personal brands that represent them.

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What are some personal branding limitations you've heard of from the organizational side? Also, what are some suggestions to those who have to work under these circumstances? Feel free to discuss them in the comments below.

Anthony

P.S. Join me over at YouTube (YouTube.com/AnthonyMiyazaki) for videos and interviews covering marketing strategy and tactics, brand development, effective communication, personal and professional branding, marketing yourself, marketing leadership, and whatever other relevant and related topics come this way.