Open LinkedIn and there is always another task waiting. Update the profile. Share an opinion. Post a career lesson. Talk about what you are building. Stay visible. For many, being good at the job now seems to come with an added assignment: making sure people know that you are good at it.
Look at the Indian business landscape and the shift is hard to miss. Deepinder Goyal, Anand Mahindra, Harsh Goenka, Nithin Kamath, Bhavish Aggarwal, Vineeta Singh. Their names travel with the businesses they are associated with, their opinions have audiences of their own, and their public personas have become part of the brands they represent.
Lloyd Mathias, independent director, angel investor and business strategist, said business leaders were once able to remain largely faceless. “I think it was a time when business leaders and managers could remain largely faceless. They let their business do their talking for themselves,” Mathias said.
That has changed particularly for founders, he said. “Today for startup founders, they are synonymous with their clients and their businesses. So their business, their personality spills over to the founder. The startup nature has made businessmen far more visible and it has become fairly important for a brand owner to be visible.”
Mathias said CEOs are also increasingly expected to communicate directly with the media and tell their companies’ stories. The growing investment culture has added another layer, with investors paying closer attention to companies, founders and promoters.
Harish Bijoor, Business & Brand-strategy specialist & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., said personal branding has become increasingly tied to career growth.
“Career growth is quite closely associated with the kind of a brand you are and have become over the years. The brand essentially is a magnet,” Bijoor said.
Dr Rutu Mody Kamdar, founder of Jigsaw Brand Consultants, said the change is less about inventing personal branding and more about the infrastructure that now surrounds it. “Personal branding itself is not new. People have always built reputations, associations and meaning around themselves. What has changed is the infrastructure around it,” Kamdar said.
Is being good at your job enough?
Mathias believes the answer is increasingly no, particularly for people in leadership positions. “Absolutely. I think right now there’s no choice. You can’t really have too many faceless CEOs,” he said.
“You can’t hide behind your corporate communications team. I think today people expect a much higher degree of accessibility.”
For consumer-facing companies, he said, that visibility can become particularly important during a crisis. “People need to know who you are. People need to reach out to you in an emergency, in a crisis. If you’re not available, they will badmouth your firm anyway. They will badmouth you and your firm.”
Bijoor agrees that professional ability alone may not guarantee recognition. “We are definitely in a world where being good at your job is just not enough. You need to have attraction beyond the job,” he said.
But he warned against pursuing visibility for its own sake. “The key important thing is that we must not run behind the discoverables.”
“We must create a persona which is discoverable with the truth, honesty, integrity, and the real inputs that go to create all of these poured into this persona,” Bijoor said.
Kamdar does not believe everyone needs to become a prolific content creator. “I don’t think everybody needs to ‘build a personal brand’ in the performative sense of constantly posting content. But I do think professionals increasingly need clarity around what they stand for, what they are known for and why someone should remember them.”
Reputation versus personal brand
For Kamdar, the distinction is between what a professional repeatedly demonstrates and the meaning that eventually gets attached to that person.
“Reputation is accumulated evidence. A personal brand is accumulated meaning,” she said. “The strongest personal brands are therefore not invented. They are distilled from repeated behaviour, expertise and point of view.”
Bijoor similarly sees professional reputation as the foundation. “There is a nuance that needs to be appreciated between having a strong professional reputation and having a strong personal brand. A strong personal brand can get to be hollow but a strong professional reputation is that much more solid,” he said.
His own approach puts most of the emphasis on that foundation. “My practice in personal branding focusses on something like 95 on professional reputation, which is solid part of it. And four of it on the liquid part of it with the drama that is necessary to keep your persona brand interesting, alive, and kicking. And 1% of it being that bit of gas which sadly is becoming a part of the norm,” Bijoor said.
He also has a straightforward approach to authenticity.
If you’re a wolf, I will brand you as a wolf. If you are a sheep, I’ll brand you as a sheep. But I will not brand you as a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” Bijoor said.
John Ternus and the limits of personal branding
Apple CEO John Ternus offers a counterexample to the idea that every senior professional needs an active personal brand online. His LinkedIn profile has not been updated to reflect his new role.
For Bijoor, Ternus demonstrates why professional reputation can matter more than online presentation.
“Turners is a classic example to tell all of us that your professional reputation is that much more important than anything that you build is fluff around it. Branding, particularly personal branding at times, can be visualised to be fluff and bluster,” he said.
Mathias sees Ternus as an exception, at least for now. “But I think, over time, Ternus will also have to acquire a personality. It goes with the job. There will still be, of course, some people who choose to be faceless. But I think it’s increasingly more and more difficult,” he said.
When everyone becomes a personal brand
The growing popularity of personal branding also creates a problem of sameness.
Kamdar said the language around personal branding is already becoming standardised. “The language of personal branding has become highly standardised. Everyone is ‘passionate’. Everyone is ‘building in public’. Everyone has five leadership lessons to share. Everyone has a personal story attached to a professional insight.”
“Once everybody starts using the same codes, those codes stop differentiating,” she said.
Mathias said social media has also blurred the line between personal branding and influencer culture. “The whole culture of social media influencers has obviously pushed a lot of people to now create their own personal brands,” he said.
But he cautioned business leaders against allowing their public persona to overshadow the businesses they run. “You might do a little bit of personal branding to build around the persona, how to help your brand. But that cannot become your sole purpose.”
“I think when you become too big, and you begin to assume that you’re the rock star, you’re the movie star, I think that’s when the danger starts creeping up.”
Bijoor said the distinction ultimately comes down to credibility.
“There is a thin line of difference between the credible and the incredible. You cannot become an incredible persona. You need to continue to be that credible persona,” he said.
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