Building Your Leadership Brand: Some Key Guidelines
As a prospective leader, you should make every effort to prepare yourself for the day that you take up the leadership mantle.
With this in mind, some of the key abilities you need to focus on to become an effective leader include:
- Influence
- Self-awareness
- Learning agility, and
- Effective communication.
It is also worth remembering that all employees, whether they know it or not, already have some sort of leadership brand.
Your brand is simply defined as how you get your work done, what you deliver, and how you interact with others to produce the work.
Research shows there are four major steps aspiring leaders need to take to build their leadership brand:
- Decide on your personal vision
Ask yourself what it is that you want in all aspects of your life, i.e. what makes you special and unique, your values, and what you stand for
- Define your personal leadership brand
Your leadership brand needs to capture your personal vision, which is the essence of your uniqueness and strengths. It helps to ask yourself exactly how you can integrate your strengths into your unique personal leadership brand, and pinpoint any ‘blind spots (or areas of weakness), you may not be aware of
- Always ‘walk the walk’
To be an effective leader, it is essential to incorporate your leadership brand statement into your behaviour. This means you need to ‘live it’ and always deliver on what you promise
- Stay vibrant
Your leadership brand should evolve naturally by being self-aware and willing to learn. And don’t forget to celebrate your successes along the way, and to enjoy the journey.
By Mike Peeters
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