Learn from established personal brands, then excavate your own.
During the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit, we use 10 seemingly straightforward questions to help leaders do executive personal branding. One of them is, “What is the big, audacious change you’d like to make in the world?”
Each leader’s answer to that question can help them better understand their executive personal branding—or “excavate” it, as the first step in my time-proven ETA™ excavate-tell-affirm executive branding process is called.
While this blog explores how others have answered this key question, think about how you’d answer it. Some key categories of big change come up often, including things like protecting the environment and promoting world peace. Here, we’ll consider brands that embrace two more popular themes: improving human health and social change.
Executive Personal Branding Connected to Improving Human Health
An amazing woman we’ve all heard of care deeply about helping to improve human health—and their passion for these causes points to their personal brands.
Arianna Huffington believes so deeply that our society would be better if we placed greater importance on regularly getting good sleep that she wrote a book about it.
Published in 2017, The Sleep Revolution explores the latest science supporting Huffington’s idea that our shared perception that “time spent sleeping is wasted” compromises our health, hampers our decision-making, and undermines our work and personal lives. In the book, she takes on the sleeping pill industry and all the ways our addiction to technology disrupts our sleep. She also offers a range of recommendations and tips from leading scientists on how we can get better and more restorative sleep—and what doing so could mean for us as individuals, spouses, community members and world citizens.
Huffington’s commitment to helping us all get better rest is an important part of her overall brand of helping people avoid burnout. Her Thrive Global company provides behavior change technology and tools to help employees live and work with less stress, more productivity and greater well-being.
Executive Personal Branding Rooted in Social Change
Other leaders build their personal brands around giving specific groups of people a leg up.
For example, Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen believes in offering more people access to financial services so they can buy a house or a car, help their children go to college, improve their homes and plan for retirement.
In a 2021 article Chen wrote for Fortune magazine, he explained that he believes
that cooperatively owned financial institutions—credit unions—can make special headway into serving typically underserved or unserved people.
He believes in that change so strongly that NerdWallet deposited $2 million from its traditional bank account into a certificate of deposit at Self-Help Federal Credit Union, Modesto, California, which serves low-income working families in California, Washington, Illinois and Wisconsin.
This action dovetails perfectly with Chen’s executive personal branding as head of a company dedicated to providing the tools, information and insight people need to navigate all of life’s financial decisions.
Andrea Stevenson Conner, the president of Stevenson Conner Global Enterprises, calls herself a “fierce advocate of the gender multiplier effect.” Conner defines the GME as the ripple of good that goes out when you help one woman and she helps many others.
Conner’s passion for this idea, her long history of overseas development work and her current work with Springboard Enterprises to support the success of female entrepreneurs all underscore her executive personal branding around the value of helping women and watching many people reap the benefits.
Executive Personal Branding Based on Your Passion for Change
So, let’s go back to your answer to the question, “What is the big, audacious change you’d like to make in the world?”
What is the big, audacious change you’d like to make in the world?
How you respond—whether that’s eliminating hunger, helping people communicate better in polarized times, telling stories to inspire people to improve their lives or supporting affordable housing offerings—will likely give you some important clues to your executive personal brand.
To find out more about how Revealing Genius helps people identify their executive personal brands, subscribe to my e-newsletter by adding your email at the bottom of this webpage and signing up for our 7-Day Brand Genius Summit.
