Personal Branding

Haven't you yet been killed with too much of personal branding advice ? Well, if you are reading this, I guess you are still alive, and the pleasure of putting you to death is now all mine !

Why do we need to brand ourselves? That is a dumb question, considering the fact that we have been doing it since childhood. Those of you who have siblings, you started your personal branding endeavor the moment your sibling arrived. The lucky ones that get undivided attention, you started branding yourselves as soon as you realized that your crush and/or first love needed to be competed for attention and affirmation. For those lucky ones with no siblings, and those who got lucky with crush/first love or both without a need to put up a fight; if you got married, you worked on personal branding to deal with at least two love triangles if not more:
1) spouse : mother : mother-in-law triangle
2) spouse : father    : father-in-law triangle
...not to mention that you dont get married to just your spouse but to your spouse's family and their extended family. For those who have not had any of these issues, well you never had a life to begin with!

Personal branding is pretty much the same game, be it at home or work. We show 15% of ourselves (the best parts of our personality) and most of our personal branding revolves around flouting these attributes with an intent to connect with the audience. The strength to our personal brand actually comes from the hidden / behind-the-scenes 85% of our personality. This is where people face challenges when they brand themselves and the branding is not backed up by most of the constituents of their personality. I guess we need to focus on three things:
1) What we brand
2) The brand itself (in this case ourselves and what we stand for)
3) The branding message

I share one anecdotes from one of my past stints, around the branding exercise by IT folks. Similar to people who are uncomfortable with their bodies and hence are embarrassed to take off their shirt while at a beach, some time ago a couple of us decided to brand our initiatives instead of branding ourselves. The branding exercise was successful, and our initiatives were much talked about. Slowly we got distanced from the initiatives as people with much better branding skills worked their way to identify themselves with initiatives under the spotlight. Felt much like Steve Jobs thrown out of the company he created! Under the umbrella of this branded initiative, a lot of business departments went about procuring their own IT needs. Now we had business departments buying IT products and services under the brand created by IT without involving IT ! A lot of us were chuckling even though the joke was on us! We then decided to brand ourselves to get the business departments come to us for their IT needs instead of buying all by themselves. A realization then dawned that when we were not comfortable with ourselves as we projected. Introspection, then resulted in some of us chiseling away parts of our personalities that were irrelevant and bridging the gap with the needed. After a great deal of effort, we saw a close resemblance between ourselves and our aspirational brand image. This effort would have worked against us, had we failed to sustain the perceptions we ventured out to create. This is possible only if the 85% of real you actually grew, evolved and transformed to back up the 15% show-cased.

We have always been taught to play to our strengths. Our core strength areas could be our ability to learn fast, a strong sense of right and wrong, flexible belief systems, tolerance, effective story telling, strong memory, logical reasoning, empathy etc. It makes sense to brand ourselves around our core strengths rather than otherwise. Our conduct and our branding needs to be in perfect harmony. Our personalities will reflect the real us at some point or the other. It would be detrimental to brand ourselves otherwise. A strong story-teller core value could be a great asset in sales or influencer or mentor role. One can brand themselves at fantastic presenter and a sales guru. A person with flexible value systems would make a great go-getter and innovator when playing within the corporate rule framework. It is important to recognize our core strengths and bring them to work, apply them in our individual fields of expertise and gain success. The most fundamental step to branding would be to discover ourselves first. There is no use of branding ourselves as leaders if we have created structures, perceptions and methodologies of management around us. We will be ridiculed if we brand ourselves as direction setters, while our teams do nothing but order taking. It is important to align both the hidden 85% and the 15% window dressing. CIOs are just as good or as bad as their teams. Any personal branding a CIO does, will need to be backed up by their teams in action, letter and spirit. A CIO will end up being ridiculed as a manager and a leader if he creates a ME and THEM as a part of his personal branding exercise. The CIOs personal brand will most definetly rub off on their team and will have consequences. Hence, in performance driven cultures, personal branding can become a very powerful tool.

Sometimes, we can kill ourselves due to lack of finesse in communicating our personal brand. I was delighted  with a DBA, who said her core strengths was her ability to think straight in times of duress. The way she came across the interview table, every part of her body had "nerves of steel" branded all across. Three of us interviewing, felt exactly the same way! People mostly come up and say they are a strong DBA! I heard a CIO describe himself as one who can do anything. Having known him for almost a little over a decade, I know he meant that he is comfortable with the unlearning and learning and has enthusiasm and inquisitiveness as a part of his personality. Due to these attributes, he constantly dabbles with different new technologies all the time. He is a risk taker and due to this he is one of the few guys who would pilot almost every new technology in his enterprise! All of this came out as "I can do anything"! I love the way fevicol has been branded as a bond that never breaks. Been racking my brains on how to get creative around my personal branding.

Once we manage to brand ourselves in a certain manner, we need to be cognizant of the fact that organizations face the challenges of playing in a game, where changes in eco-system and business dynamics is a constant feature. This needs the organization to innovate, change and transform; and all of this demands different competencies from its workforce to meet such challenges.A CIO who is seen to bring stability thru standardization and process discipline\ to the organization might become a liability when organizations needs change agents to compete effectively. One needs to keep an eye on one's own branding and how is it seen relative to organization's medium and long term needs. One needs to decide when and how a shift needs to occur in personal branding, with the passage of time, as organizations need to deal with different challenges. I particularly like this book "SHIFT" by Peter Arnell and recommend reading it.

I personally think the best way to brand oneself, is to play to our core strengths and put our true selves on display thru blogs, tweets and the enterprise social fabric for people to see us to be for who we are. One needs to be constantly looking for feedback to mould and shape our messages to ensure that the messages are being consumed exactly as they were meant to be. Personal branding exercise is all about the perception we want everyone else to carry about us. We need to play to our strength, play full on and visibly so.

Business Analysts - Key to success

The CIO round table on "war for talent" at the gartner symposium, brought forward someThe CIO round table on "war for talent" at the gartner symposium, brought forward some very key aspects around success having been delivered more often than not, when there is deep involvement of good business analysts.

We debated on the need for BAs to be part of the IT team and not as part of the business teams. The interesting question posses by fellow CIO of Cannon, was wether it would then be fair to say that business teams can then bring on board technical analysts! Aren't most business folks technical analysts any way!

Grooming BAs to the point where they really start delivering value is a long process. In environments that are friendly and embracing g, BAs could be productive in their second year. In large complex environments, sometimes it takes 3 or 4 years to really deliver value.

The grooming program is the key to success. These BAs need to spend at least 6 to 8 weeks in each of the key depts and SBUs working as apprentice to the line function 2 to 4 weeks each in the other depts of the organization. Once the business operations are clear, these guys should shadow the SBU leaders for 3 weeks and dedicate a day to be spent with SBU head exclusively one-on-one. These guys then been to serve as apprentice to the C layer for a week each.

Couple of aspects to be kept under active observation for grooming interventions in the first 6 months of their active deployment.

1) Do these guys come up with their own ideas for the Organization or do they come back with a list of things to be I proved upon as told by the business teams during the induction and the grooming program

2) Their attitude and their next steps after some of their plans are either rubbished or politely turned down due to prioritisation.

3) their approach to building their individual credibility and branding in the first 4 months of their productive deployment.

4) Their ability to assess risks and their approach to project planning where risk of failure is high

5) Their ability to effectively interact with the C layer and their ability to hold their own under the spotlight.

I have been in the past, been able to very quickly slot the guys into 4 buckets:

1. Self starters - self explanotary.
2. Efficient executors - they need to be told what needs to be done, and then you don't have to follow up
3. Solomon's spiders - keep trying repeatedly when faced with failure. They never give up
4. Batman - two faces, both strong suites
5. The Spielberg - builds larger than life plans and projects. Loves to take Complex projects. When handed over a simple project, paints a larger than life picture about it. Inspires participation from one and all.

Each of these strong suits are detrimental at one level. I don't generally work with BAs who have one strong suit and a equal or relevant mix of other aspects. I like to bring together people with these exclusive strong attitudes on one table and work with them as a team. The learning are immense. However, this results most of the time into an emotional drain on oneself. So if you don't enjoy roller coaster rides at work, maybe a different approach needs to be evolved.

The opposite of work is play. Human beings, I believe are wired to play. We need to choose our game and invite the players to team up. I love picking BAs from college. Good BAs work inside the business teams and get pro-activity going for IT. Instead of being told by the business on what needs to be done, IT can start defining for business the best path forward. For this to happen, the grooming process is key.

Couple of advantages with this approach:

1) CIOs will be integrated on the business plans at the SBU level by integrating the BAs into SBU structure. This move will be welcomed, if the BAs KPIs are similar to that of the SBU heads KPIs

2) The CIO can plan SBU's directions and can have more meningdul discussions at Mancom/ExCo - travesring the journey from order taker - agenda setter - strategy co-creator - pace setter.

3) Evolve the BAs to digital strategy officers