Use Your Personal Brand to Strengthen Your Leadership Identity

The following excerpt is from Glenn Llopis’s book The Innovation Mentality. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Understanding and strengthening your leadership identity is the first real step in embracing the innovation mentality. And that starts with the question every leader must ask and keep asking: What is my leadership identity?

This may seem like an easy question to answer, but most leaders I’ve met have trouble with it, because they have very little experience answering it. You may understand that your leadership identity defines who you influence and how you influence business evolution, but what defines your leadership identity? The answer: your personal brand and its value proposition (what your personal brand solves for).

So defining your leadership identity starts by defining your personal brand. You can’t turn around your business until you turn around yourself. Understanding who you are and what you solve for is how your leadership will define the evolution of the business in the new normal.

The concept of personal branding — the idea that success comes from how you authentically present and market yourself and your career as an individual — has been around for 20 years or so, but the workplace hasn’t encouraged us to develop our personal brands, let alone live them and use them. Thus, a lot of leaders talk about personal branding, but few connect it to leadership in this way and thus hold themselves accountable to it to evolve.

The importance of a personal connection to leadership — of touching the business every day — cannot be understated, as…