Managing Your Personal Brand and Value Proposition
With an understanding of the skills and traits for influencing in place (see our previous post "The Principles Of Influence") , now we must get back to basics through building and utilizing our “brand” in influencing relationships in business.
Your values and beliefs are a critical component of your personal brand and being authentic means acting according to your values and beliefs. You would then have a “consistent brand image”. There should be sufficient margin for you to be authentic in the context of the organisation where you work and add value. If you have to sacrifice your values and beliefs in order to add value to the organisation then you will suffer and be less valuable than you could be elsewhere.
Your brand is a statement of who you are, how you speak, what you do. It is the perception of what other people see, rather than what you would like them to see. Your brand is what is spoken about you behind your back rather than to your face. Your brand is your actions. Although words count, people will judge you for what you do. Hence the value in feedback and self-awareness.
What do you want to be known for?
What will people invite you into meetings for? What strengths do you have? How do you add value? Your Value Proposition will be dependent on:
- recognising your strengths;
- making sure you can play to your strengths in the role as a business relationship manager, and making sure you add value to the business and your business partners;
- ensuring that people know your strengths; and finally
- stakeholders acknowledging you for those strengths.
You have the most influence on what stakeholders acknowledge you for.
To help identify your strengths, recommended reading is “Strengths Finder 2.0” by Tom Rath.
A BRM value proposition example: “I help business partners and provider function understand what we need to do differently as an organisation to achieve the business goals. I do this through relationship, strategy, portfolio and value management to provide a clear plan for stakeholders, maximise investment opportunities, reduce business risk and increase satisfaction with the provider function. I did this at XYZ company where the projects actually delivered the benefits aligned to strategy, allowing £5m project spend to be reallocated.”
Recommended reading: “Impact and Presence Pocketbook” by Pam Jones and Janie van Hool.
How Baxter Thompson Associates can help
We help IT understand the opportunity with business partners through our Reconnaissance for IT framework and can help implement a business relationship management capability to ensure that the Value in IT is delivered. We also provide training - the BRMP(R) and soon the CBRM(R) courses in addition to coaching and Interim Management.
