| Unleashing the Power of IT by Developing the Human Side of Technology and Changing the Conversation About Strategy, Culture and Talent |
| | Changing the IT Narrative Through Personal Branding
by Anita Leto, Vice President of IT Talent Transformation, Ouellette & Associates
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| Where is your next great hire going to come from? More importantly, why is such a superstar going to sign on with your organization? This is a question every CIO needs to be asking, because it’s harder than ever to hire the kind of top-tier talent that will drive success in a fast-changing, hypercompetitive marketplace.
IT leaders can do a lot to put out an attractive face to the world, from how they craft key roles to the perks and benefits they offer. But your best candidates will care about culture and opportunity, which is not something you can effectively proclaim in a job description. If you want your company to stand out as a stellar place to do interesting work and continue building a meaningful career, you need to invest in brand ambassadors.
The most effective brand ambassadors are engaged, successful employees whose enthusiasm comes across wherever they are: catching up over coffee with former colleagues, networking at events, chatting at weekend barbecues, and reviewing your company on Glassdoor.
One of the most effective, yet overlooked, tools I’ve found in my work with transformative IT departments is the concept of the personal brand. Helping your workers build their own brands makes them better team contributors, and helps keep your best talent engaged, growing, and uninterested in moving to another company. And it creates authentic voices representing your brand to the talent marketplace.
Leading a Brand Revolution
First up, a CIO’s personal brand has the potential to be a strong talent magnet. Savvy CIOs recognize that they need to be out more—with customers, speaking at conferences, and yes, writing and getting quoted in the right publications. This is not self-promotion but good business given the war for talent we all combat. We see CIOs in not-very-sexy companies attract great talent because people believe in them. We know one CIO who moved to a stodgy insurance/financial services company that was operating in the stone age of technology and innovation. Within two years, 200 top-notch IT leaders and staffers had followed him there. (More, actually; they just stopped counting at 200.) His CEO and board knew that this leader would take a lackluster IT organization and transform it into an “Innovative Anticipator”, setting his company up to become a disruptor.
So by all means, CIOs must continue to burnish their individual brands. But we’ve had great success using the concept of personal branding across the IT organization to help CIOs better develop the talent of their teams and to improve the outcomes IT delivers. And staff have been very responsive—at the same time CIOs are struggling to get the best talent, workers are worried about skill sets that seem to atrophy overnight, and are eager to increase their relevance to the organization.
This is highly relevant to the IT organization’s overall evolution. Every IT staffer’s personal brand not only represents your team outside the company, but throughout your business. Every team member’s personal brand has the potential to improve the perception of IT’s value across the larger enterprise by establishing trust, credibility and respect through each daily encounter. This is especially powerful in a time of transition, whether due to mergers or ongoing waves of digital transformation.
The Basics of Personal Branding
As a leader, you can help team members build their personal brands through direct mentoring, but I’ve repeatedly seen a programmatic initiative boost engagement, morale and performance across the entire organization.
Many of your employees will initially be uncomfortable with the idea of personal branding. (Maybe you can relate.) But this isn’t cheesy self-promotion; it’s the opposite. Personal branding is about authenticity, relationships, and real interactions and results—not driven by ego and chest-beating.
The first step is to communicate what a personal brand is. In our Talent Development workshops and IT Skill Builder software platform, we teach the practical how-to’s of personal branding, while defining it as an approachable, endearing, enduring reflection of yourself. It has to be authentic—true to who you are, what you do, and the customer you do it for.
Encourage your employees to approach personal branding from three angles:
- Know your brand. Help team members define their brands in a positive, clear, statement of who they are (be realistic) and who they want to be (be aspirational).
- Deliver on it consistently. Remind them that every interaction is what we call a moment of truth: Did you deliver on, and develop, your brand, or did you set yourself back?
- Know your goals—and work toward them. Encourage your workers to think about their own development. What responsibilities do they want to take on? What do they want to accomplish? What do they want to learn? And make sure you run the kind of organization that provides those opportunities.
Not everyone gets this right away. A couple of good tips for getting people into the right frame of mind: First, remind them that everyone already has a brand. Tell them, “If you were leading a new team, who in this room would you pick first? That’s your colleagues’ personal brands in action.”
Secondly, encourage them to think about the colleagues they respect and admire, as well as the experts in their field who they might follow online. What qualities make these folks compelling? How do they demonstrate and develop those attributes? Take inspiration from the people who inspire you.
Change the Narrative
This exercise is going to make a lot of your folks realize that their current brand reputation is not positioning them for the next great job or project opportunity. This is your chance to coach your people on the need to change their narratives. With the dramatic shifts taking place in our profession, IT leaders and staff need to recognize that we are each the author of our own career narrative.
And that lesson also applies to organizations. The collective, organizational talent brand will help determine success as you work to build the best possible team at a time when talent is scarce and competition is furious.
And if you don’t like your current talent narrative, then it’s time to change it. The techniques above are a great start.
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| The Human Side of TechnologyO&A focuses on Developing the Human Side of Technology. We prepare every member of the IT team to take their game to the next level, becoming Strategic Partners and Innovative Anticipators ™. We are changing the conversation about IT strategy, culture and talent by employing the new "core" competencies and an attitude of "we ARE the business."
For More Information
Today's leading executives are leveraging The IT Maturity Curve to change the conversation about IT strategy, culture and talent. Start your journey today! Call O&A at (603) 623-7373 or email Tracy Dinu at tdinu@ouellette-online.com. |
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Anita Leto, Vice President of IT Talent Transformation at Ouellette & Associates, has been helping leaders and their teams transform the way they work since 1988. A contributing author of "Unleashing the Power of IT: Bringing People, Business, and Technology Together," she works to quickly understand an organization's culture as the first step in inspiring positive change.
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