Revealing Genius | Brand Strategy for Accomplished Leaders

Category: Executive Personal Branding

Use Executive Personal Branding to Drive Your Team’s Success
Personal and group assessments help team members more fully tap their performance potential.
Executive personal branding may seem, well, very personal. And it is.
When you do executive personal branding with Revealing Genius, you’ll spend time in each of the three steps of our time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process. You’ll do important self-reflection about how you’d most like to spend your energy. You’ll learn to talk about your brand with conviction. And you’ll affirm your developing brand until you feel the conviction of it in your bones.
After going through the process, you’ll be better equipped to more rapidly achieve your next career goal, whether that’s a new job, a promotion or a board seat. And you’ll be better able to negotiate win-wins.
But interestingly, executive personal branding isn’t just about you as a leader. You can also use it to strengthen your team.
Successful Teams
In just a moment, we’re going to dive into how the work you do in executive personal branding can ripple out and benefit your team. But first, let’s see what experts describe as the best practices of successful teams.
“Teams that succeed are often made up of individuals who are working on something that feels important on a personal level,” according to this article from Forbes. “The work has meaning that goes beyond just satisfying the company (to having) … personal value to the individual.”
Looking at this idea from a different perspective, this article from SHRM cites “diversity not valued” as one of the common barriers faced by teams that are striving for high performance. When this obstacle is present, “team members do not value the diversity of experience and backgrounds of their fellow team members, resulting in a lack of diverse viewpoints and less successful decision-making and solutions.”
You can be instrumental in positioning your team for success by getting to know what matters personally to each member—and helping each learn about the other’s diversity. When this happens, your team members will be better able to draw on their similarities and differences to drive top performance.
When you go through the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process with Revealing Genius, you’ll not only bring to your team full clarity about what matters most to you but also a treasure-trove of tools and ideas to help your team members clarify and talk effectively about their own uniqueness.
Assessments From Executive Personal Branding Aid the Team
Assessments are a key example of tools you can pick up doing executive personal branding that can benefit your team’s performance.
When you leverage the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process to develop your executive personal brand, you’ll get connected with a significant number of science-based assessments that you’ll first use to better understand yourself—but that you can then share with your team members to help them better understand what they stand for, too.
All of this is in keeping with best practices in team performance management. According to information published by the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library at The George Washington University, “assessment of individual members as well as assessment of the overall team are essential to enhancing teamwork.”
An assessment that we at Revealing Genius love that’s often applied specifically to team-building is the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. TKI looks at people’s styles through six lenses: spirituality, health and style, family and friends, work and finance, recreation and fun, and mental and education. It can help you and your team members understand which styles you prefer to use—and how using different conflict management styles affects interpersonal and group dynamics. With this knowledge, you and your team will be empowered to choose the best approach for any situation. Participants in the Revealing Genius Brand Leadership Summ it get introduced to the TKI quadrants on Day 1, when they use them to self-assess how they prefer to spend their energy.
Ready to use executive personal branding can do for you—and your team? We’d love to help. Learn more about our time-proven strategies by signing up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in our online course or Brand Leadership Summit. We provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
October 27, 2023
How to Use Executive Personal Branding to Negotiate Win-Wins
Knowing what you stand for sets you up for success both when navigating career obstacles and in key conversations.
After several decades with the same company, a C-suite organizational development leader retired and went into consulting. When it turned out that entrepreneurship wasn’t for her, she worked with Revealing Genius to do executive personal branding and create corresponding messaging. Her efforts to reposition herself are helping her reach global companies with 20,000 or more employees that need her expertise. For example, she met with QVC (22,000 employees worldwide)!
Using the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process from Revealing Genius to develop an executive personal brand helped this executive negotiate a tricky period in her successful career. Soon it will be a tool she can use to best negotiate a job offer.
Developing your brand can help you negotiate better too! Read on.
Executive Personal Branding a Guiding Light
As we’ve discussed before on this blog, your executive personal brand can be a North Star when navigating complex environments. As our opening example illustrates, this includes complex moments in your career.
Executive personal branding will prepare you to handle any circumstance in a way that speaks volumes about your leadership style and personal brand. Do you have to make a tough decision that affects real people? Your executive personal brand will help you make the right choice. Are you considering two career options that seem equally desirable at first blush? Looking at them through the lens of your executive personal brand could be what tips the balance toward one over the other.
Executive Personal Branding Aids Compensation and Promotion Negotiations
Executive personal branding not only can help you navigate career obstacles but also help you with all kinds of negotiations, including initial salary offers, promotions and raises.
“When one thinks of negotiation strategy, personal branding may not always come to mind,” writes Kwame Christian, CEO of the American Negotiation Institute, in this article from Forbes. “The reality is your brand plays a huge role in your ability to persuade or negotiate successfully.
“Being able to understand your ‘why’ leads to clarity and specificity in your messaging, which can allow you to better speak to the values and challenges your opponent is experiencing,” he adds. “The most important trick is to have a clear long-term vision for where you are going and who you are serving.”
Executive Personal Branding Can Help You Negotiate Getting Startup Funding
In addition to working with C-suite executives and physicians, Revealing Genius also helps founders of healthcare companies powerfully message what they do and why. This can make the difference between a pitch deck that doesn’t get any traction and one that secures $8 million to fund a health and well-being brand. We know this from experience! It’s important to get the key messages across when raising capital to support complex medical breakthroughs.
Ready to do the kind of executive personal branding that will help you successfully negotiate many different situations? We’d love to help. Learn more about our time-proven strategies by signing up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in our online course or Brand Leadership Summit. We provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
October 20, 2023
Energy Rising
The neuroscience of leading with emotional power
Harvard Business Review just released this book, written by a neuropsychologist, who explains that success in life – at work and at home – rises when we harness the energy that powers our brains. Her lab and clinical work substantiates that our drive to create change, catalyze impact and build relationships all come from neuroelectrical energy: when this energy rises within us, we feel empowered and dynamic. But when this energy falls, we feel down, stressed and defeated. For those of us who feel like we don’t control our emotional energy, that it’s an inevitable consequence of the world around us and the forces bearing down, it’s not the case.
The Hope
“To reach our full potential, we can learn to harness the energy in our brains,” says Dr. DiGangi.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
October 1, 2023
Use Executive Personal Branding to Build Your Best ‘Exit Strategy’
The Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process can help you envision fully—and then leave to achieve—your next milestone.
Top leaders talk a lot about having a good exit strategy. Whether they’re making a career move, selling a business they’ve founded and built, or getting ready to retire, they need to expertly transition from what they’re doing now to what they will do next. Executive personal branding using the time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ from Revealing Genius can help.
Let’s look more deeply at three key times when having a solid exit strategy grounded in executive personal branding can help healthcare leaders like you take the next right step.
Don’t Just Change Jobs; Make a Strategic Career Move
Executive personal branding using the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ from Revealing Genius is designed to help you excavate not only who it is that you most want to serve, but also the unique transformation that only you can make. Once you’ve done executive personal branding, you will be able to authentically answer the question of whether the career move you’re considering is just a job change or whether it’s a strategic career move that dovetails beautifully with your brand.
During the tell step of our executive personal branding process, you’ll craft and refine your transformation statement, writing down what you’ve excavated earlier in the process. Next, you’ll affirm your brand in the big picture. In all, the process can help you know whether taking a particular promotion, making a lateral move, jumping to another company or even shifting to another industry is—in the big picture—the right move for you.
If you just want to change jobs, you can do a Google search and read lots of articles about such logistics as emptying your workspace well ahead of your departure. What we’re talking about here, in contrast, is using executive personal branding to envision your full potential—and then letting that vision for who you are and what you are uniquely meant to do lead you through.
Moving on From Your Business to the Next Right Thing
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a traditional definition of business exit strategy is “a plan that moves a business toward long-term goals and allows a smooth transition to a new phase, whether that involves re-imagining business direction or leadership, keeping financially sustainable or pivoting for challenges.”
While you can find lots of other online articles on business exit strategy, what’s often left out of them is a personal playbook for the founder or CEO once they step aside. And that’s where executive personal branding comes in.
If you’re a CEO or founder who has done executive personal branding, you will have excavated your personal “why.” You’ll know your North Star and be able to tell others what you stand for. You’ll have done science-based assessments to affirm your brand so you believe in it with conviction.
Equipped with your executive personal brand, you’ll be more ready to make sound decisions about the best next steps for your business and yourself.
Re-tirement Means ‘Getting New Tires’
One of our clients who is retiring often says he still has “lots of gas in the tank.” Other leaders think of retirement as a time to “get new tires” so they can go do something new and rewarding.
You may be a leader who feels the same way. You’ve had a successful career. You know it’s time to move on to the next great thing—and you think you might be one of the many leaders who find the “just take some time off” strategy to be sorely lacking. Doing executive personal branding can help you clarify how you can best step into a highly rewarding retirement.
In this article from Chief Executive, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith and his daughter Kelly say there’s no time like now to work on your retirement exit strategy. They recommend considering these three variables: 1) making sure the company or your team is in the best possible shape when you leave, 2) working to develop a great successor and 3) planning for a great rest of your life.
Unfortunately, the Goldsmiths write, “Many CEOs who we have met get outstanding scores on the first, mixed scores on the second and dismal scores on the third.” They recommend investing “significant time and energy in planning” your life after top leadership. They emphasize the importance of considering options you will find meaningful and love doing. You’re probably seeing by now that doing executive personal branding can help here too.
Step Into Executive Personal Branding
Ready to clarify your brand in support of building the best exit strategy for your next transition?
We can help. Sign up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in our newly released online course or 7-Day Summit. We provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
September 15, 2023
Executive Personal Branding a ‘Gem’ for Healthcare Leaders
Gain clarity about your keystone goals and be authentic in your interactions with others.
The word “gem” refers to a precious stone—or anything truly great. Executive personal branding is truly a gem in that second sense. It’s a great tool for healthcare and other leaders who want to set career and life goals that align with their unique purpose and to authentically live that out.
According to a May 2023 article from Entrepreneur magazine, “personal brand leadership works for anyone … tired of faking it and truly interested in making it. It works for anyone trying to live an authentic, genuine life and be of authentic and genuine value to their clients and shareholders, be they employees, family members and/or investors.”
The article continues: “Personal brand leadership is being able to be comfortable in your skin and never having to remember your lines because you live unscripted, reliant upon the lessons you have learned and (what your) … education, experience and expertise gained delivers up to you next.”
For years, Revealing Genius has used our time-proven, bespoke and fun Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process to help healthcare and other leaders create, become steeped in, talk about and deliver on their personal brands. Let’s talk in more detail about two big benefits you can experience when you go through this process: gaining clarity about your “keystone” goals and becoming a more authentic leader.
Gain Clarity About Your Keystone Goals
Since I hail from Pennsylvania, nicknamed “the keystone state,” I like to call the executive personal branding goals I help leaders like you set “keystone” goals.
Pennsylvania got its keystone moniker for its position as the middle colony of the original 13—and because it’s shaped like the keystone in an arch—the key building block that holds the whole structure in place. In keeping with this, my clients’ keystone goals play a central role in their work to use the time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process to excavate, tell and affirm their executive personal brands—so they will not only know with conviction their unique reason to serve but always be ready to talk with others about it.
The first part of the process, “excavate,” is when we dig into who you are and what you stand for, confirm your keystone goal and objectives, work on your statement of your purpose, and prepare to develop your succinct and powerful elevator pitch.
Become an Authentic Leader
With the advent of artificial intelligence in so many aspects of life—and certainly in healthcare—being an authentic leader has never been more important. These days, knowledge is easily accessible—humanity, much less so.
When you do executive personal branding, you’ll become poised to unmask, to show and more fully be your true, authentic self. You may even be able to better come to terms with your flaws because you can also better articulate your genius!
According to research published in 2022 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, “When a leader self-discloses a weakness, s/he can be perceived as authentic, leading to positive downstream consequences, such as enhancing employees’ desire to work with the leader. This research suggests that leaders can consider sensitive self-disclosure as a tool to achieve positive outcomes—for themselves, their employees, and the firm alike.”
Clarify Your Goals and Become More Authentic
Ready to clarify your goals and lead more authentically while you achieve them? We can help.
Sign up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in our newly released online course or 7-Day Summit. If you want to accelerate the process, we provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
July 28, 2023
Transform Your ‘Transformation Statement’ Through the Executive Personal Branding Process
Drive top performance and more rapidly achieve your next career milestone with a message you can deliver with conviction.
In healthcare, patient histories and testing help us define and refine treatment plans. Similarly, in executive personal branding, unique brand stories and testing help us define and refine key brand collateral, including our bespoke “transformation statement.”
Executive personal branding is at the fore because healthcare leaders who know their purpose deeply—and can effectively talk about it with others—are better positioned to deliver top performance and more rapidly achieve their next career milestones. When you do executive personal branding and excavate the transformation you are uniquely able to nurture, you’ll be better poised to give an incredibly effective all-staff presentation or TED Talk, get promoted into your dream job, achieve a board seat or even attract more of the right-fit clients that rave about your service.
We’ve previously posted on the Revealing Genius blog about how to develop a transformation statement—a carefully constructed sentence that encapsulates the essence of your personal brand. Today, let’s take a deeper dive into the key steps you can take to test and refine your statement, also known as an “elevator pitch,” or 30-second commercial or positioning sentence.
Testing and refining to affirm the transformation statement and all elements of brand collateral developed in the time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ is the final step in the executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius. This takes your brand to the next level, where you’ll be able to use it with conviction because you feel in your bones that it meaningfully expresses what you do singularly best in the world.
A Quick Review of Transformation Statement Development
Just as healthcare professionals listen actively to patients as they describe their unique medical stories, Revealing Genius listens actively to leaders as they tell their unique brand stories. Telling brand stories typically leads to an all-but-perfect transformation statement as this simple but effective formula gets filled in:
I <action word> <my beloved avatar> how to <do what they want to accomplish> so that they can <have the result/transformation>.
As an example, here are two iterations of the transformation statement of Revealing Genius:
1.     To guide healthcare leaders to clearly identify what they do and why, so they become recognized for their brand value and swiftly achieve the fulfillment they deserve in their careers.
2.     To guide healthcare leaders to purposely identify and articulate their brand value so they become recognized experts and rapidly achieve the next milestones in their careers.
A transformation statement isn’t done, though, until the leader has time to try it on.
Testing Your Transformation Statement During Executive Personal Branding
The first step in testing your transformation statement is to say it out loud to yourself over and over. Does it resonate? Then try it out with a trusted inner circle of family, friends and colleagues. What is their reaction? Does it perfectly fit who you are and what you stand for?
An important next step is to refine your transformation statement with a trusted business network. One option is to take our new online course or join our 7-Day Summit, during which participants help each other refine their elevator pitches by reflecting on such questions as the following:
•       Does the action word in your statement make sense? (And is it truly “active”?)
•       Can I form a clear picture in my mind’s eye of your “beloved avatar,” the person you most want to serve?
•       Is “what you want to accomplish” crystal clear?
•       Is the transformation only you can make happen specific enough?
•       Overall, does the statement create an emotive response?
Online course and Summit participants also get access to an unlimited number of complimentary monthly Zoom calls to continue to test and refine their statement with a live group.
To see how this works, try answering each of these questions about this sample transformation statement:
“I teach state and federal policymakers whose decisions impact vulnerable populations how to effectively evaluate new healthcare initiatives so they can implement the best solutions for mental health patients.”
Learn how to define and refine your transformation statement as part of the Excavate–Tell–Affirm executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius by signing up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in the newly released online course or our 7-Day Summit. To accelerate the process, we provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
June 30, 2023
Authentic Personal Branding Is a Leadership North Star During ‘Age of Outrage’
Let your ‘transformation statement’ be your pathway to calm assurance and top performance.
“Almost every leader in every sector is now dealing with angry stakeholders.” This is the powerful phrase that opens the recent Harvard Business Review article, “Managing in the Age of Outrage.”
We’re hearing stories right now about team members who are so politically polarized that they’re afraid to talk with one another, consumers posting angry comments about their company to social media and board members in turmoil due to a director gone rogue. Can you relate?
Given that context, how can you as a healthcare leader display calm assurance and deliver top performance in even the most challenging situations? The answer lies in developing a transformation statement that serves as your North Star. Consider it, along with authentic personal branding that creates it, a secret weapon to ensure that you are solidly grounded to play at the top of your game.
Although we may not be able to prevent conflicts before they arise, we can prepare ourselves to handle any circumstance in a way that speaks volumes about our leadership style and personal brands. Having a transformation statement to remind us why we do what we do is an important first step to managing tricky situations in business, experts suggest. The best time to repair the roof,” as the saying goes, “is when the sun is shining.” It is good advice to develop norms and procedures and tools for navigating conflict at work before a crisis emerges.
At Revealing Genius, we help leaders look within themselves and develop their North Star using the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ authentic personal branding process. As part of the process, we co-create a “transformation statement” that defines what we are uniquely poised to do in our world. This reflective work helps us stay grounded and poised—and deliver top leadership performance—in both good and difficult situations.
Let’s dig into what exactly is a transformation statement, then look at an “age of outrage” scenario in which having gone through the process of developing a transformation statement is helpful to a healthcare leader.
The Transformation Statement
First, let’s clarify what we mean by a “transformation statement.” Also called an “elevator pitch” or 30-second commercial or positioning sentence, a transformation statement encapsulates the unwavering essence of what we do and why. It’s created by telling our unique brand stories.
Most of us are modest about the life stories that stand out —but it turns out that telling them out loud to someone who’s actively listening can clarify a great deal about our unique reason to serve. That’s why telling brand stories is what we highly recommended during the Revealing Genius newly released online course, live 7-Day Summit and in our 1:1 executive coaching sessions.
Telling brand stories typically leads to an all-but-perfect transformation statement as this simple but effective formula gets filled in:
I <action word> <my beloved avatar> how to <do what they want to accomplish> so that they can <have the result/transformation>.
The transformation statement isn’t done, though, until you have had time to try it on, saying it first to your trusted inner circle of family, friends and colleagues and later testing and refining it in professional settings until it clicks. When the try-on process is complete, you’ll know your executive personal brand deeply.
Applying Authentic Personal Branding to Diffusing Political Conversations at Work
There’s no doubt that political discussions and other polarizing behavior in healthcare workplaces over the last few years have created challenges for leaders. Having conviction about your unique genius as revealed by going through the Excavate–Tell–Affirm executive personal branding process will help you stay grounded as you navigate situations of all kinds in this “age of outrage.”
Meet “John,” a fictional healthcare leader we’ve created based on our experience working with many executives in the field. John’s work leverages research and policy to produce better outcomes for adults with serious mental illness. He went through the Excavate Your Brand Genius online course to develop and refine his transformation statement.
Recently he’s gotten to the point of “trying on” the most recent draft of his statement, written based on the formula: “I teach state and federal policymakers whose decisions impact vulnerable populations how to effectively evaluate new healthcare initiatives so they can implement the best solutions for mental health patients.”
A key part of developing the transformation statement for John was clarifying who he most wants to serve—his “beloved avatar.” For John, that’s state and federal policymakers with the political clout necessary to change the game for adults with serious mental illness. This clarity is helpful when John is faced with colleagues are misaligned at work. His first response when the political discussion at hand doesn’t impact the people he works hardest to serve is to step aside.
When the discussion is closely aligned with his purpose, John draws on his unique ability to teach others about how to best evaluate mental health initiatives with the patient in mind. He goes forward with calm assurance and continues to deliver top performance, even in emotionally charged situations, because he knows in his bones what he stands for.
Authentic Personal Branding Can Help You Lead More Effectively
Learn more about the Excavate–Tell–Affirm executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius and how it can help you lead in the age of outrage by signing up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in the newly released online course or our 7-Day Summit. If you need to accelerate the process, we provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
June 16, 2023
Executive Personal Branding Helps Leaders Navigate Uncertainty
A deep understanding of your core competencies can help you take your impact to the next level.
There’s always been a lot of uncertainty in healthcare, and recent times are no exception. Every day, you and other healthcare leaders face such challenges as a changing public health situation, new government policies affecting medical decision-making and shifting budgets. Leaders who have done executive personal branding are better prepared to find their way through such complexity—and bring their teams with them.
The time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius can help you boost your impact in these volatile times by clarifying not only who you are and what you stand for, but also how to talk about your brand, convincingly, in a wide variety of situations—from 1:1 conversations to all-staff meetings to board presentations.
And once you know what you’re about, you’ll be better poised to determine what skills you could learn and who you could partner with to make your unique contributions bigger and more meaningful.
What’s the Excavate-Tell-Affirm™ Executive Personal Branding Process?
To help excavate what makes you different from anyone else, the Excavate–Tell–Affirm executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius first invites you to do simple but powerful brand exercises, leverage scientific assessments and tell brand stories that are yours alone. Next, the process brings you strategies for how to effectively tell others about your brand—whether that’s through your LinkedIn profile, in a proverbial “elevator pitch” or on your CV. The last step in the process helps you affirm your brand until you can feel it in your bones.
How Does Executive Personal Branding Connect to Leadership Development?
Doing executive personal branding can help you plan your ongoing development as a leader—something that will be critical for individuals and organizations in the healthcare field going forward.
In this case study of work done with OSF Healthcare, an integrated health system headquartered in Peoria, Illinois, healthcare talent development consulting and coaching firm TLD Group describes the important process of defining, assessing and developing leaders using a customized competency framework.
Under the leadership of founder, president and CEO Tracy Duberman, Ph.D., MPH, FACHE,TLD Group worked collaboratively with OSF system leadership to create a success profile for senior leaders as well as define its executive leadership development strategy to align with the organization’s overall business strategy.
“The leadership skills and competencies that got OSF to this point are not the same as will be needed to succeed in this ‘new normal’ (post-pandemic),” the case study emphasizes. “No one is coming to save healthcare organizations from the current and projected workforce shortages, evolving regulatory requirements and rising costs.” Instead, organizational leaders will need new skills and competencies to be effective in leading the way forward from here.
Whether or not your company is creating a new success model and talent strategy to support its leaders, this case study reveals the important role identifying unique core competencies can have for you, your team and your organization.
Executive personal branding can help you understand what skills and knowledge, when added to your already impressive repertoire, would enable you to deliver an even higher level of long-term success to your team, organization and overall career.
How Can Executive Personal Branding Help Me Identify Good Partners?
Just as executive personal branding can help you discern what to learn, it can also help you identify partners with strengths that complement yours—so you can build even bigger successes.
Is your brand one of expertise with budgeting? Maybe your career and business would benefit from partnering with a hospital administrator who understands numbers well but has an incredible gift for team communication.
Is pulling together teams of people who drive good patient outcomes what you’re best at in the world? Maybe that brand points to teaming up with MD/PhDs who are wildly successful at setting up valuable research studies.
You can boost your impact in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world by doing executive personal branding so you better know yourself, what to learn and who to partner with. Get started today by signing up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or our 7-Day Summit. We provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
May 12, 2023
The Value of ‘Trying On’ Executive Personal Branding
Reflecting on elements of your new—or refined—brand will help you talk about it with conviction.
Just like deciding which new suit to buy is aided by trying it on, trying on the results of each step in the executive personal branding process helps healthcare leaders formulate the first and subsequent versions of their powerful and authentic personal brands.
Here’s an insider’s glimpse into the time-proven Excavate-Tell-Affirm™ executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius, where leaders “try on” concepts during each step of their executive personal branding journeys.
Excavate: Try on the Answers to These Carefully Curated Key Questions for Executive Personal Branding
During the excavate step of the executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius, we offer healthcare leaders a variety of powerful exercises to do. One of them is to write out their answers to key questions designed to help them unlock their unique genius. They are encouraged to spend time reflecting on their responses and see which resonate most.
For example, here are five of the 10 questions:
1. If you had a minute to offer three to five bullet points that summarize your core strengths, what would you say?
2. What are one to three of your proudest accomplishments, and why?
3. What’s the big relevant change in the world that you are passionate about?
4. What’s your favorite quote or mantra that you live by?
5. What’s your extraordinary why?
Take a moment to answer each of these. Then, over the next few days, spend some time “trying them on.” Which of your responses seem to stick?
Tell: Use This Formula to Articulate Your Brand Narrative
During the tell step of the executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius, healthcare leaders are supported in articulating their positioning statement for their brand in progress.
Also called an “elevator pitch statement,” or “transformation statement,” it encapsulates the unwavering essence of what you do and you use it to tell others what you stand for and how you stand out.
Many people are modest about the life stories that stand out for them—but it turns out there are an incredible number of clues behind them, especially when you tell them out loud to someone. That’s why telling brand stories is a regular activity during the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit and in our 1:1 executive coaching sessions.
Telling brand stories typically leads to an all-but-perfect transformation statement as this simple but effective formula gets filled in:
I <action word> <my beloved avatar> how to <do what they want to accomplish> so that they can <have the result/transformation>.
To use the transformation statement of Revealing Genius as an example, this could be to guide healthcare leaders to purposefully identify and articulate their brand value so they become recognized experts and rapidly achieve the next milestone in their careers.
The transformation statement isn’t done, though, until the leader has time to try it on, saying it first to family and friends and later testing and refining it in professional settings until it clicks. When the try-on process is complete, leaders talk about their executive personal brand with conviction.
Affirm: Achieve the Pinnacle of ‘Trying It On‘
During the last step of the executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius, healthcare leaders dive into various ways to affirm their burgeoning brands. While “trying it on” is key to grounding the excavation and telling of your brand, the affirm step is all about confirming the fit of your brand.
A great thing to do during the affirm step of the process is to complete one or more science-based assessments. These tools give useful insights about who you are and how you approach your work.
Getting assessment results is always really interesting, but their real power lies in trying them on for a while. How do they feel? Do they fit? Answering these questions helps clarify a leader’s executive personal brand until they believe in it so strongly, they can feel it in their bones. That is my wish for you.
Get Started With Trying It On
Clearly, doing the reflection required as you try on and evaluate key brand elements is a key part of the initial development of your executive personal brand. But “trying it on” is also an important step. Here’s a previous blog about how and when to revisit your brand to make sure it’s still on-purpose.
If you’d like to try on the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process from Revealing Genius, check out our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or our 7-Day Summit. If you’d like private sessions to create extra safety while you try on the various brand elements you’re developing, we’d be happy to provide that through our 1:1 executive coaching options.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
April 14, 2023
Avoid ‘Humblebragging’: Authentically Express Your Executive Personal Brand
The way you go about mastering the art of self-promotion matters mightily.
One of the questions I hear most often from accomplished executives is (paraphrased), “How do I talk about myself and my accomplishments in a way that feels good?” Effectively expressing your executive personal brand in an authentic and sincere manner is a good strategy for doing the kind of artful self-promotion that will help you advance your career. Research shows that a well-thought-out approach is way better than humblebragging.
Humblebragging is defined as “making a seemingly modest or self-deprecating statement to draw attention to something of which you’re proud.” The humblebrag has become more prevalent in our social lexicon thanks to the rise of social media. According to a Time Magazine survey of 646 people, 70% could recall a humblebrag they heard recently.
Here’s an overexaggerated example: “With regrets, I’m unable to attend dinner this evening as I have to catch a flight on the company jet to an important meeting.”
You probably know from experience that it feels a bit awkward to be around people who are humblebragging whether it’s done consciously or subconsciously. So why do people do it? A Fast Company article answers: “Mostly because we know humility is a good characteristic to have, but at the same time, we also know the importance of self-promotion, so humblebragging seems to be the answer.”
Unfortunately for humblebraggers, a 2015 research study by professors from Harvard and the University of North Carolina established that humblebragging is ineffective because it is perceived as being insincere.

So what’s a leader to do? Clearly, it’s necessary to talk about our accomplishments. Advancement could be at stake. Financial rewards and even making key connections for your next undertaking depend on people knowing about your core competencies and bona fides.
This article from medium.com suggests doing three things instead of humblebragging:
- emphasizing what you do
- telling your story and
- focusing on how you support others.
Enter your executive personal brand, developed using the time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process from Revealing Genius. Creating your executive personal brand can help you not only effectively—and authentically—answer the age-old business question, “What do you do?” but also give you full confidence in sharing your signature stories about how your work has benefitted others—and the world in a way that feels comfortable and clear.
Excavate Your Executive Personal Brand
One of the problems with humblebrags is they’re often not well-thought-out. They tend to be spoken—or tweeted—in the moment. The beauty of using the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process to generate your executive personal brand is that the results it produces are polished and practiced, even rooted in science, and reflect a person’s larger career contributions.
During the first step of the process, Excavate, leaders focus on digging into what makes them unique in the world and why it matters. At Revealing Genius, we use many strategies for helping leaders get in touch with, at what, they are best in the world. This blog explains three of them that you can try today:
- recall the details of your proudest accomplishments
- consider all of your life’s priorities and whittle your list down to three core ones and
- design your “swan song”—such as your ultimate TedTalk or final presentation.
Each of these exercises will give you important clues about your unique genius.
Tell Your Unique Brand Stories
Another problem with humblebrags is they don’t vividly illustrate an accomplishment. They just briefly boast about it!
In the second step of the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process for executive personal branding, Tell, Revealing Genius helps leaders both identify and speak out loud their signature stories.
Clients are encouraged to write out their signature brand stories, even give them headlines, as well as tell them to others. These are stories that only they can tell. These narratives define you. Stories are critical, as they are the one thing that no other brand can duplicate.
And writing these stories out and speaking them out loud helps to capture all the detail and the authenticity they include.
For example:
- The owner of a healthcare technology firm leads every presentation with why he started his business—because his father almost died. He didn’t want this to happen to any other family.
- During speaking engagements, a physician often shares that he decided to become a cardiologist after his mentor suffered a debilitating heart attack at a very young age.
- A PharmD talks about how she switched careers, despite the naysayers, and went into marketing after she witnessed brilliant treatments that didn’t reach the patients who needed them the most because they lacked visibility.
When they tell their stories with conviction, you know they feel it in their bones. They believe in what they’re saying and their “why” runs deep. These are authentic statements of who they are and what they stand for. Hardly a humblebrag.
What are the headlines of your signature brand stories? What are the details of the stories that only you can tell?
Affirm Your Brand for Authenticity
The last step of the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process, Affirm, helps leaders talk about what they do best in the world without any doubt whatsoever. And having such an authentic core belief in what they’re saying goes far beyond any humblebrag.
A key way leaders can affirm their core competencies as part of their executive personal brand is with science-based assessments. I recommend that my clients do such an assessment at least once a year, taking time to think about what the results mean.
Many useful instruments are highlighted during the 7-Day Revealing Genius Summit. Here is an example of one that is free: The Core Value Index reveals your unchanging motivational drivers and how you are wired to contribute to the world around you.
Spend some time taking such an assessment this month. The CVI takes only about 10 minutes and it’s worth the time and investment to affirm what you may already know to be true. Leave yourself time to reflect on what it means.
Go Beyond Humblebragging to Your Authentic Executive Personal Brand
Revealing Genius has already helped hundreds of executives do executive personal branding using our time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process, equipping them to define and then authentically communicate their unique genius in ways that others receive well.
Executive personal branding is powerful stuff. If you’d like to get a taste of this method for avoiding the humblebrag, check out our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or register for our 7-Day Summit. If you’re ready to dive in deep or prefer private sessions to excavate your purpose, check out our 1:1 executive coaching options.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE
An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals.
March 31, 2023