Be Younique. Be Different. Stand Out.
Employee Personal Brands Sell.
The personal brand of the employees within our organization is what validates our company brand. Brand helps people choose to do business with you, work with you, work for you, and trust you. Unfortunately, as business leaders, we spend a lot of time and money polishing our business brand but very little time understanding the people's personal brands within our organization.
We do very little to empower people to discover their personal brand and teach them how to promote themselves and share their stories. This is not about being self-promoting. This is about being inspiring.
Recently, I learned about a $450M healthcare project a company was actively pursuing. This was a targeted project. After being short-listed, they interviewed with confidence. Leadership was so confident that they had this project that they added it to Awarded Not Booked. They scored the same as their biggest rival competitor. The interview committee decided to use Google and social media to make the final decision. Each person listed in the proposal was researched. They used LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, the company website, and Googled these names. Unfortunately, the project team was absent on most of those platforms. The project was not awarded to them. 75% of people today use social media to help make decisions.
Suppose you are looking for ways to stand out and be different. Here are a few ways to get started:
Get a Professional Headshot and Hobby Photo – Make a connection with people by allowing them to see your eyes to build trust and creditability. In addition, a hobby photo helps make a connection to others by showing your interests beyond the jobsite, office, or boardroom.
Identify Professional Purpose – Why do you do what you do, and why do you continue to do it every day. Highlight your strengths and passions.
Develop the Story – storytelling gives you a glimpse into your personality, passion, and contributions to projects, professional growth, and the community.
Build an Online Presence – when building an online presence and being discoverable online, people will become more familiar with you, curious about you, and build trust and creditability. Research shows that after six employees share on social media, a company receives: 3 company page reviews, six job views, and one new follower. In addition, social media helps with recruiting efforts, brand awareness, employee retention and impacts sales.
As contractors, we use BIM, Augmented Reality, and other technology to aid in building our projects. However, when we sell our projects and share our employees with the marketplace, we still use paper resumes and project profiles. Personal branding will yield results and bring people back to the forefront of business. Personal branding will WOW! your clients and customers with the quality of your employees, make employees feel important and valued as a part of the team, help employees get to know the other employees within the organization, help recruit top-notch employees that want to stick around. It shows you value the human capital in your business.
Be Younique. Be Bold. Stand Out. Employee personal brands are your differentiator.
Shelly Peterson has spent the last 27 years in the construction industry completing over $3.5B in project. She is the founder of Promoting Me.
She is a consultant who is passionate about people & helping them make a name for themselves.
