Most of the leaders we work with suspect that personal branding is a little bit vain, and very few of them say so directly. It arrives as a hesitation before the first session, or a joke about self-promotion, or a carefully neutral question about whether any of this is really necessary at their level.

Underneath the politeness sits a serious objection which deserves a serious answer: surely, if the work is good enough, it speaks for itself.

The work does not speak for itself and never has. What speaks is whoever happens to be in the room when a decision is being made, and what that person is able to say about you when you are not there to help them. Everything else in this article is detail.

What actually goes wrong

The leaders who come to us are rarely unknown. Most of them are extremely well known, for the wrong thing.

They are known for a title, or for the last large project, or as the person you call about one specific technical problem, which is useful right up to the moment they want to be called about something larger. Ask what they are known for and they can usually answer without pausing. Ask what they want to be known for and the answer tends to arrive more slowly, in some version of “not this”, or “not enough of it”.

That distance is not a visibility problem, whatever it looks like from outside. Plenty of them are highly visible. What they are dealing with is being visible for something they did not choose.

They are rarely unknown. They are known for the wrong thing.

Why it gets harder the more senior you become

Early in a career, what you are known for and what you do are more or less the same thing, since you are the person doing the work and the work is the evidence.

Further up, the two come apart. Your effect on an organisation becomes progressively harder to point at, and the things you are genuinely good at by then, judgement, knowing which risk is worth taking, saying the difficult thing early enough that it can still be acted on, leave very little visible trace. Meanwhile the title becomes a shorthand that other people reach for instead of understanding you properly.

The reputation carries on forming regardless. It simply forms without your involvement.

What a personal brand actually does

Strip away the language and a personal brand is a decision about what you want to be asked for.

That decision does three practical things, none of them cosmetic. It tells people which conversations to bring you, which is how the work you want begins arriving in place of the work you have outgrown. It gives colleagues a consistent account of you to repeat, which is the only way influence travels through an organisation when you are not present. And it gives you a defensible basis for saying no, which is the part most leaders underestimate until they have it.

Without any of that, you remain available for everything and known for nothing in particular.

The confusion underneath

There is a second problem beneath all of this, and it is where we spend most of the time.

Leaders forget that they are not the job; they only do the job. Over a long enough career the two fuse, until the way somebody introduces themselves has become a list of roles and responsibilities with no trace left of why any of it mattered to them in the first place. The description is entirely accurate, completely forgettable, and makes the person sound considerably smaller than they are.

The work is to enlarge that definition again, which is not a matter of inventing a persona but of restoring the parts that got edited out of the summary somewhere around the second promotion. If the idea of doing that publicly makes you uncomfortable, you are not unusual, and we have written about why confident marketing is not bragging.

Where to start

Answer two questions in writing, and be honest about the second one.

What are you known for now, and what do you want to be known for?

If the two answers match, you have no need of us. If they do not, the distance between them will not close on its own, and the evidence for that is simply that it has not closed so far. Closing it deliberately is what our work with leaders consists of.