It is no secret that your personal brand can greatly impact your career mobility and progression. Personal branding can be particularly critical for a woman’s career, especially when it comes to securing sponsorship. According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor, your personal brand could be one of the most impactful ways to secure sponsorship and propel your career forward. For women, developing and promoting their personal brand presents unique challenges. The likeability conundrum is the notion that women want to appear agreeable and adhere to gender norms. Self-promotion, which is often necessary to expand our personal brand, doesn’t align with society’s gender norm, which may cause cognitive dissonance. Without a strong personal brand, it can be difficult for others to recognize your accomplishments, skills, and abilities, which is why developing a strong personal brand is so instrumental for career development and success. Latesha Byrd is the founder and CEO of Byrd Career Consulting, a consulting agency designed to help millennial professionals progress in their careers. Much of Latesha’s work includes helping her clients expand their personal brand and she has coached over 800 professionals in 30 industries, with clients landing jobs at LinkedIn, Google, Amazon and Salesforce among many others. Latesha sat down to discuss how women can best develop their personal brand, some common branding mistakes that women make, and ways that women can strengthen their personal brand today.
Janice Gassam: As an employee, what is the value of having a personal brand?
Latesha Byrd: I think that having a personal brand is official. It’s something that’s a necessity. It’s reputation…it’s what people know you for, it’s what people come to you for, and what I see is that…if you are working for an employer, it could be challenging to understand what your own personal brand is. From my experience as being an entrepreneur, I’ve literally had to focus on building my brand. When I was in the corporate space, I was being very intentional on what people knew me for, how I was actually advocating for myself…unless you’re planning on being at the same company your entire life, you have to be able to separate your own brand from the company. You always want to make sure that you are putting your brand first.
Gassam: Why is it important for women to have a personal brand?
Byrd: At the end of the day, everyone has a brand, whether you define it yourself and you showcase your own personal brand…women are naturally caretakers and we typically take care of everyone in our family and that can kind of spill over into the corporate [work] place…if we speak up for ourselves, either we’re seen as aggressive or we’re seen as sensitive. It is important for us to learn how to self-advocate. Someone is going to give you a brand, regardless.
Having a good brand identity is going to put you on the path to leadership. If you brand yourself right, it’s going to put you in place to get ahead. People have to understand what your skillset is, what you bring to the table, and they really have to understand the power that you have…if your team or leadership doesn’t know what your skills are, they’re not going to give you those special projects. They’re not going to be able to advocate for you if you’re not advocating for yourself. Sometimes we’ll put the power [in] the company’s hands instead of taking that back ourselves. I have a lot of clients, and I coach mostly women and mostly women of color and they have some unique challenges because…they feel like they are not being respected, people don’t really trust that they can do their work…you have to make sure that you are setting those expectations for them in terms of the work that you want to do, the projects that you want to be placed on but also how people should respect you…[A personal brand] is important because that’s what’s going to get you those opportunities that you really deserve and if people don’t know what it is that you stand for and what you bring to the table, you’re not going to be able to get those same opportunities.
Gassam: In your experiences, what are some of the common mistakes that women make when it comes to branding and marketing themselves?
Byrd: There are so much! The first one that I will say is leaving it up to the company to tell you… ‘this is what we want your future to look like.’ Instead of leaving it up to the company, really think about what it is that you actually want…two, is waiting for a promotion or sitting around waiting for a raise. Men, as we know, always ask for more money. Even in my experience as a recruiter, I very rarely came across a woman that actually asked for more when we sent her the offer. The men always asked for more even when they had less experience and less skills…it’s important to…constantly ask for feedback, even if it feels uncomfortable. One thing that I would recommend is a ‘brag sheet’. That’s something that I have all of my clients put together…creating this brag sheet that essentially lists all of your accomplishments, from each of your positions. You should know where you’ve shown up at your team, how your work has contributed to the overall good of the organization so that you can speak to that. Don’t be shy about it…be comfortable about speaking up about the work that you’re doing.
If you are struggling to talk about yourself, one really cool trick that I was able to do is instead of trying to talk about [yourself], compare your work to the things that you were doing in the past. So that way, it sounds like you’ve really grown a lot. The other thing I would say is finding commonalities with your teammates or with leadership…it may be on the surface level, there doesn’t really look like you have that much in common but I guarantee it could be a show, music, sports…it is primarily white men in those leadership positions, so we need those allies and we need that support.
Don’t apologize in the workplace—that’s what I see a lot of women doing…saying ‘oh, I’m sorry Pat, I have one more thing to say…’ eliminate saying things like ‘sorry.’ You’re not sorry and you should never feel sorry for speaking up. Also, saying ‘I’ statements, too. This is something I get on my clients about a lot. When we’re talking about their experiences, they’ll say, ‘well, we did this,’ and I’ll say ‘well, who is we?’ Be comfortable saying ‘I’ statements and don’t use those disqualifiers when you are talking about whatever it is that you have to say. So, when you’re speaking up about your ideas, just being confident in that. If you’re not confident in it, then no one else will be confident in it either.
Gassam: How can women uncover what their personal brand is?
Byrd: I would say, self-assessments are great…understanding what your brand identity is, is a result of really having that self-awareness…I’m a huge fan of 16personalities…of course Myers-Briggs, I love the disc…understanding how you actually communicate in the workplace versus how you are perceived…I think that doing the self-assessment is going to be eye-opening but then also getting feedback and asking for feedback. We’re so scared of asking for feedback sometimes because we don’t know what people are going to say…one thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t like asking for feedback but people don’t like giving feedback either…constructive feedback is key…asking for specific feedback about specific things.
‘What are your thoughts on how I handled this situation with this client? What could I have done better?’…you have to know first, what do you want to be known for? My favorite quote for branding is from Jeff Bezos and he says your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room…seeing what are you known for now and figuring out what you need to do to help you basically get from that point A to that point B. Maybe it is getting your company to invest in sending you to conferences that will help you improve your skillset. Researching online. One of my favorite books about branding was Start with Why by Simon Sinek. That helped me get really clear not just on what I do but why I do what I do…another good book that I’d recommend is The First 90 Days. That’s a book I typically send to my coaching clients when they land a new job after working together…this is good for anyone at a new job, on a new team, just got promoted or maybe you want to reconfigure your brand.
Gassam: What are some tools that women can use to boost their personal brand?
Byrd: LinkedIn! LinkedIn is a very new social site. When LinkedIn started 10 years ago, it was more so a platform for people that were looking for work. That’s really not the case anymore. LinkedIn is a social networking platform…when it comes to your brand, use LinkedIn to talk about the things you’re working on. Let’s say you just planned this really bomb event, you planned this fundraiser for your company and raised thousands of dollars…start sharing more of your accomplishments on LinkedIn. I would recommend posting weekly. Before you start posting, you want to make sure that you have a robust profile. That your summary is not just blank, but it is actually a professional summary. A short bio of who you are, what you bring to the table, what you’ve done, so you definitely want to grow an online presence. You want to position yourself as a thought-leader in your industry. So not just posting the things that you’re proud of…but also posting relevant articles, relevant statistics, or even posing questions about things that are going on in your industry. Generating some engagement online and from there you will start to get more engagement on your profile and people will start to see who you are…I had one of my clients, who made a challenge for her to start posting daily. She’s an HR manager, she posted an article from [Harvard Business Review] and said something like HR is an advocate for the employee and her post went viral…I’m talking 300K views…probably more than that.
Depending on what your industry is, maybe even a personal website or portfolio, especially if you’re in the tech space. In terms of other tools, I would say your network. Your network is your tool. With that being said, not only contributing to the workplace but finding professional organizations that you can get involved in, whether that’s serving on the board or being an avid volunteer. Getting involved in these organizations not only makes you look good but also makes your company look good.
For more information on how Latesha can help you build your personal brand and propel your career to the next level, click here.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
