Do Your Colleagues See You As a Pig?

You can find out by asking them. Here’s how.

Whether you like it or not, you have a personal brand — just like Disney and Wells Fargo have corporate brands.

What is a personal brand? According to branding consultants David McNally and Karl D. Speak, in their book Be Your Own Brand, a personal brand is “a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes your outstanding qualities and influences that person’s relationship with you.”

For example, if you do excellent work, but regularly arrive five minutes late for meetings, you may be viewed as the ‘Johnny comes lately to meetings’ minion. Despite your stellar work, the ‘late-comer’ image may trump your otherwise luminous accomplishments.

Before you go out on the Twitter-verse to project your self-perceived brand, learn what your brand is, as perceived by the people in your world. You can start by asking these members of your community to chime in with their two cents about what they believe your ‘outstanding qualities’ are (for better or worse).

There are lots of ways to do this. Many organizations offer this in the form of a tool called a 360 Assessment. Such vehicles allow you to ask your colleagues to provide anonymous feedback on your ‘Naughty and Nice’ traits without fearing repercussions for telling you are a bully and ogre.

I must admit these types of anonymous surveys have always freaked me out.

I’ve taken a different track than the ‘standard issue’ 360 Assessment. Instead, I sent out surveys with the below questions to eight people in my professional and social life, who provided me their input:

1) How would you describe me to someone else in 2–3 sentences? A kind person who can be very funny once you get to know someone.

2) If my name were a brand, what would the 3 key attributes be?

3) What do you think is my specific expertise?

4) Is there a special unmet need that I fill? What for?

5) What’s an example of a problem you’d look to me to solve?

6) What do you think I am most passionate about or interested in?

7) Are there any specific skills I could learn or build on to enhance my life and/or my career?

8) What’s something that holds me back, professionally or personally? How do you suggest that I work on this?

From my friends and colleagues’ responses, I learned a few things. For example, several respondents said that I’m adept at making friends, in networking and in working the room. These responses surprised me to the Nth degree. As a mid-line introvert, I’m sooner ready to hide under a rock or be a wall fly than to be a super-networker. It was refreshing to learn that I’m viewed otherwise.

What might you learn by pinging your network with the same eight questions that I asked mine?