The Art of Personal Branding and Its Influence on Modern Leadership

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Victoria.

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She is a C-level executive, an author and a marketer.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks for having me Happy to be here.

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Why don't you take a minute or two to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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I'm a career-long B2B professional services executive who's also built and bought my own companies.

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I have sat on multiple boards for over the last 15 years, published author two books out, a third coming out later this year and I'm also a professional public speaker and I speak on things like personal branding, which to me, is integral into how do we market ourselves, our businesses and build connection with people.

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Personal branding, self-marketing two of our favorite topics on this show and you just recently did a TED Talk too, right?

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I?

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did One of my other favorite topics of resilience.

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Awesome and that'll be out soon.

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People can check that out soon.

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So why don't you share with us a story we're ready to be inspired about some of the best marketing that you've done, the marketing you're most proud of?

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I'm very proud.

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It's been a long journey.

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When I stepped into my first executive role, I'd come out of banking operations and all of of a sudden I was the COO of a large private called BPO business process outsourcing, and it was a massive stretch role for me.

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I was leading every function of our business except for finance, and sales and client management in particular were new to me and I needed to find a way to create differentiation.

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I'd never been in a position to just blindly respond to RFPs etc.

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And I've worked very hard, and I don't think I had the language back then, the vernacular, to refer to it as the branding and the way we do it today Certainly at the macro level for the business, but certainly not for the people that are out there directly selling.

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And so for me, having worked on that for so long now, I'm proud to say that when I worked for IBM a number of years ago, linkedin ranked me as IBM's number one social seller worldwide, and that is more than just the strength of your brand.

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It's about your network, it's the content you create, how you engage with your network.

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But so much so that IBM had asked me to develop the personal brand training for its other executives, and so what was probably 20 years worth of work to that point culminated in this recognition and, in particular, my employer leveraging that to grow other people in the business.

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But also it made me a very public face for them and in the business of consulting and technology and services people do well everywhere people do business with people they like and trust and want to do business with.

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But very much when I think about a lot of the consulting space, you are literally by the people, so that was one of the most impactful for me.

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It's pretty remarkable to become a top sales influencer for one of the largest brands in the world.

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I think you shared one of the secrets from it already, which was you put many years of effort into doing it right.

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It didn't happen as an overnight success thing per se, right.

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Absolutely, and I do some personal brand coaching now and I need to be really clear with the people that I'm working with that it isn't going to translate overnight into sales.

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It does take time and don't get me wrong, there are some immediate benefits that come from it, but definitely you need to be strategic, you need to be intentional and you need to be consistent in being out there with that brand.

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In addition to the fact that the most committed people always win, what other advice do you give about personal branding, because it seems like a pretty hard thing for a lot of people to actually master?

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Agreed.

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And actually the reason I wrote the book on it was I actually found so many people in career transition over these last couple of years and they're starting to build a brand now, when they really need it.

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And, as we just said, it takes how to build connection and doing what I believe is the foundational element, but none of the other pieces.

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I believe there's four steps to an effective or foundations to an effective personal brand.

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The first is your subject matter expertise.

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So what did you go to school for?

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What's the experience you have?

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Is there a particular industry you're known for?

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That's the what.

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But then people need to go beyond that, so that's foundational.

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The next is the storytelling what makes you passions, interests, values.

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That builds connection with people.

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That's the hook, if you will.

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And then the third part, although it's very connected to the second, is what makes you different, your unique value proposition.

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So, for me, I'm radically candid.

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I, particularly in the world of consulting many consultants will tell clients what they want to hear, not what they need to hear, and I'm going to do that from a place to borrow from Kim Scott, who wrote the book on radical candor.

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I'm going to do that from a place of care and compassion.

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I'm also doing that because I built a relationship with you, so that, for me, is both an element of who I am, but it's also something that makes me very unique and different.

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So figure out what that differentiation is.

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And the last piece is about impact and legacy, and what do you want to be known for?

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So, for me, I've been successful in business.

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I've been a part of supporting something like 40 mergers and acquisitions.

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I don't want, when I die for people to talk about the revenue and profitability as you're built for these companies.

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I want it to be about who I was as a human, and so that's what I think about when I'm out there with my brand.

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It's all four of those things and woven together and every piece of content that comes out.

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I like those four things.

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If people do these four things, what other finesse or nuance is required for people to be really successful in building their personal brand on top of these foundational four things, would you say?

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It was a four-star review, but they said they felt like they needed to give them five.

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They needed how do you put it in action?

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Maybe that's a call for my next book, but so once you've figured out that brand identity and I will say, eric, for your listeners, we should get comfortable with recognizing that we can take pivots.

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We're going to change, and that will evolve over time, but just start.

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The next piece, though, is how do you implement that?

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And so, for me, it's also what are your goals for doing this?

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I see people who go and they post on LinkedIn and I'm like, but I gag a little bit when I see some of their posts and I'm like.

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But why and what is this connected to?

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Because to date, I haven't seen anything that has built any kind of a brand.

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I'm going to build connections, so why are you doing it?

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Is it just because you want more followers and likes, or is there a real purpose and intent behind why you do this?

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Is it to get more sales?

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Is it because you want to be known as a thought leader in the space?

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So that's one.

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Two is who's the audience connected to that goal?

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Because you shouldn't be all things to all people and I'm a social liberal, so I'm not going to appeal to everyone.

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When I talk a lot about diversity and inclusion and social justice, there's some people who are just not going to agree with that, and that's okay.

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I know that it's not going to prevent me from sharing my message.

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And then the last is you need to build a plan.

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You don't just build an identity and set it and forget it.

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You need to be consistent.

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You need to be relevant for what's happening out there in the world or in the space that you want to be connected and know to, and the intentionality is also where you go and make those placements in terms of your content.

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For me, it's very much a LinkedIn world and maybe a little bit of Instagram and Facebook, but for others it's TikTok and Snapchat.

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That just is not where my audience to hire me to do certain things are.

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So figure out what that plan is and where to go and if you don't know, get help.

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I think that's fantastic advice and it seems like you're living the dream, if you will, of creating a great personal brand in many aspects, with being an author and the TED Talk and being such a great influencer for brands you work for, like IBM.

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Tell me what you find most rewarding and highest impact about having a great personal brand like this supporting and highest impact about having a great personal brand like this.

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There's no hiding that.

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There's no different version of Victoria that you will see digitally versus IRL.

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That's my young one in real life would say, and I am authentically me and I show up in all the places speaking about the things that are important to me, that make me who I am and I have built.

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The extension of having a strong brand.

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For me has been an incredible network.

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Because of its strength.

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It's attracted people who want to connect and engage with me, and I also have a very different way of the way I look at my network.

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It's about relationships, and so I've just built this amazing community broadly.

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Don't get me wrong.

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There's various circles of who's in the inner and who's on the outer, but having a really strong brand has built these massive concentric circles of people in my network that I built relationships with.

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And do you have a inner circle group that you rely on for advice, almost like a personal board of directors, if you will?

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100%.

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So I have.

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The two most close to me are my husband and my best friend.

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You have to hear a little bit of everything about me but then I go out to I have another like friend group and a big part.

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I want people who are going to challenge me, who question my thinking, probe identify any blind spot.

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That is critical for me to be in that close circle.

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probe identify any blind spot that is critical for me to be in that close circle.

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Tell us just a little bit more about your most recent book and why you wrote it.

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So I wrote two.

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It's called Influence Unleashed Forging a Lasting Legacy of your Personal Branding, and so I walk through in much more detail.

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Not only those four foundational elements walk through like brand identity statements and lots of examples of others in the world who have done it.

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So I share some great examples and then with it there's a companion workbook, which is free, by the way, and it's on my website, so I'd encourage you to read the book before you get the workbook, but it'll help you work through and craft that as well.

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You get the workbook, but it'll help you work through and craft that as well.

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So the second one is about leadership and what I refer to as whole human leadership, and there's elements that are similar to personal brand, around authenticity, around transparency and how we communicate.

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And I wrote that one because, as much as we talk about what we expect from leaders and I believe you're a leader, regardless of hierarchy or title Talk about the quiet quitting and great resignation and all those things, we're talking about a different kind of leadership and expectation.

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I have yet to see it put into practice, so I decided to put down.

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I made some horrible lessons when I became such a young executive and I had to learn from that and I'm now happy to say I've built a strong followership of people who want to work with me, and so I figured let me put that pen to paper to help share some of those lessons that I've learned, with lots of years of experience in the corporate world.

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That in the show notes, so that people can easily get to your website and check out your books.

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Any final thoughts?

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you'd like to share with folks today about personal branding or leadership.

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I'm going to say, I think, some of what I will challenge you to do to be successful both in building your brand and being a great leader.

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It can be incredibly uncomfortable and I'll leave with your listeners.

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One of my favorite quotes is from George Adair, and it says that everything you've ever wanted lives on the other side of fear.

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So I think we need to lean into our discomfort, because with that, I think, growth and opportunity comes.

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Amazing advice.

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Thank you very much, Victoria.

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We appreciate your story and your insights today.

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Thank you so much for being on the show.

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Thanks for having me.