Leading With Insight Personal Branding for Professional Growth
Discover how personal branding can help you unlock your full potential and take your career to the next level.
By Insight Editor / 5 Jun 2024 / Topics: Culture & careers
By Insight Editor / 5 Jun 2024 / Topics: Culture & careers
How can a strong personal brand positively influence your career path? In this episode, Z and Rich, as well as Insight special guest Kyle Killebrew, break down the importance of personal branding for professional growth. Discover the first steps in developing a personal brand strategy, the importance of self-discovery, tactics for networking and how to maintain consistency across social media platforms. Plus, you’ll learn how to handle setbacks and criticisms in ways that align to your authentic personal brand.
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below or scroll down to read a complete transcript. You can also subscribe to Leading With Insight on Apple Podcasts, Pandora and Spotify.
Audio transcript:
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Hey everybody, this is Zee Tenoko and I'm Richard Reeves. You're listening to Leading with Insight. Join us as we explore the latest trends, insights and strategies for people who love leadership. Get ready to unlock your full potential and take your career to the next level.
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Welcome back everyone and today we have a very crucial topic for any professional out there. Personal branding for professional growth. Zee, have you ever thought about how your personal branding has influenced your career? You know what's a good question. I would say now yes, but earlier in my career, no idea. I grew up where it was like work hard, go to school and things will happen. Hard work will pay off, which is still true today. Definitely nothing against hard work. But now with my career and where I've evolved, there is a thing that you have to do and there are things that I could do. It's funny, you tell yourself, what would I do if I can go back in time and tell my younger self? There is a lot I would tell myself. One of those things would be, hey, think about your professional brand. What is it that you want to do, which is difficult when you start your career, especially as a young leader, because you're still trying to find your way. You're figuring out what that is. But that doesn't mean that you can't start thinking about this. What are you asking yourself these questions, discovering who you are, what you're good at and there's a lot that we're going to discuss today. But we have a special guest that will dive into some of these topics with us and then share his stories as well.
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As you mentioned, we have a lot to unpack today and we do have a very special guest, marketing manager and personal brand guru, Kyle Kilibrew. I'll go ahead and toss it back to you, Z, to do the honors. Yeah, and we're thinking about guests, who to invite. So I've had the opportunity to meet amazing leaders here at Inside and Kyle is one of those. Recently, the past few years, we've done a couple of things here and there, but the most recent was we were part of a career panel at Ch at Gilbert Community College.
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And the questions were being asked in the things that we learned from the next generation
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that will be coming to the workforce was pretty eye opening.
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And Kyle had some great insights. Of course, we all gave our examples, but I can't wait to unpack that with him. So Kyle, welcome to the show. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having guru. I might have to add that to my resume. I like that. That's good. People put Ninja. Ninja? I could go with that, too. I like both of those.
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So Kyle, for those who don't know what you do here at Inside or don't have the opportunity to work with you here at Insight,
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can you tell us a bit about what you do and how long you've been with us? Yeah, so I've just been with more three years with Insight now in April and I work in marketing. So go to Market Solutions Marketing. So I'm building campaigns, digital campaigns, ads,(...)
events for our partners to be able to showcase what our solutions are for Insight and our partners together and what we can bring to the market. Yeah, so I think the guru does go a long way. How long have you been in the marketing space overall?
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Overall, I would say eight, nine years now. Before this, I was working for nonprofits and then working here at Insight. So just different ways of looking at how to brand because it was small nonprofits, big Fortune 300, 400. So just different ways of looking at how to solve the problems of brand and marketing. Awesome. Cool. So that's a lot to unpack today. Let's go ahead and jump right in and how we can leverage our personal brand as a powerful tool for our career growth.
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The first topic today is going to be developing a brand strategy.(...)
Kyle, can you tell us a little bit about maybe some of the first steps in order to be able to create that brand strategy for yourself? Yeah, I think as I was reflecting on kind of that question and then trying to figure out as Z was saying, when we're talking to these young people that have no clue, it's really first and foremost, who are you? What are your values? What do you stand for? What are your strengths and opportunities? I think another thing Z and I worked on is doing a disk assessment for our team a couple years ago and doing something like that early in your career or at a time where you're pivoting and trying to figure out I'm changing roles or I'm doing something different. What does my disk look like now or what are my strengths and opportunities now? Knowing those things so that you can set yourself up to highlight those strengths and values(...)
so that you're best seen in those ways all the time. Yeah, it always starts with ourselves from the inside out. Who am I? What do I believe in? What are my strengths? Which another thing that we could talk about is just discovering those and just looking back right out of college, going into the workforce, those are things we really don't think about. I'm speaking for myself, but did you think about that at college? Who am I? What am I good at? What's my personal brand? I didn't. That never came across, but I probably should have. I think it's good that we're informing our listeners now because I think a lot of those folks in that demographic and that age demographic are still trying to find out who they are and what they want to do with their careers and what direction they want to go to. Yeah. I mean, well, it's going to fall into some key elements. I agree with you, right? Is that self-discovery, taking that time? This is why leadership development is important as well.(...)
Start with what is your values, your purpose, your mission statement, your leadership philosophy. I mean, the list goes on, but these are things that will really describe who you are and then don't keep it to yourself. Right. Start sharing it and acting on it and doing stuff. But with those elements, there is a lot of miscommunication and a lot of things that are kind of swaying away. And we talked about this earlier before we started social media. There's different platforms of branding. And right now, influencers are a big thing.(...)
They're giving advice of how you should do this. How does that play along in today's business environment compared to what we're seeing in social media, Kyle? I mean, social media is so much, right? And we were at Chandler Gilbert. One of the kids raised their hand. They just said, "Is this what work's really like?" Because we only know what professional looks like from being online and seeing the social media. So social media is a great place for us to connect to network and do those things. But also, it's a matter of making sure, again, once you know who you are from doing that self-interspection, being consistent and staying grounded in that, and then maybe re-evaluating every few years as you're making a change in your career, as you're getting older. My brand now, 47 and 25, are probably totally different brands, I would assume.
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But it's hard because somebody that doesn't have those tools or know the things you see there on social media sometimes are just elevated and kind of lofty and not necessarily real. So it can be challenging to figure that out. Yeah, that's a good point that you mentioned. Some of the things that you see on social media may not be the most authentic or might be at heightened to some capacity, right? But how do we make sure we stay consistent across all social media platforms with our personal brand that we've developed? Yeah, I think the consistency, again, for everything you're doing is really important. So if you're on a bunch of social media channels, having a specific way you go to market, or speaking in marketing terms, the way that you're representing yourself on each of those channels is authentic and the same.
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You don't want to go on one platform and be some different personality. You want to make sure that whatever you decide are the values and things that you want to be known for, they come across in each of the channels you're on. So consistency and uniformity is important. Well, that brings another topic, right? Because there are some things that can happen where there's so many platforms out there, and there's more probably coming that we know of, right?
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But they all kind of have their purpose, too, right? And the type of audience they have, right? I mean, one that we know, we're in a professional setting, right? LinkedIn is what we know in our setting. But as we've probably seen that it's been used the right way, you know, and a lot of it's informing, letting people know, hey, this is what we add, this is the value we bring, these are the things, highlight stories.
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You know, there's so many things you can do in that platform, but there's other things that when you see things, you're just like, this doesn't fit in this platform. You don't-- there's certain things you do not talk about. Maybe another one is fine.(...)
But even then, you got to be careful as well, because as we know, everything you put out there is out there, right? So I guess with that, what are some pitfalls that you've seen when it comes to the misusing social media for the wrong-- it's not the right platform for certain things. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah.(...)
I mean, LinkedIn is such a professional. I don't know how they keep it as professional as they do, but it stays very business-like. Yeah, it's rare. It's rare. I don't know how it doesn't get infiltrated. It's kind of unwritten rule. You want to stay professional on there. And I think the pitfalls it could come into is going on, again, saying something that's uncharacteristic of yourself, not being true to yourself on another platform potentially. I mean, even LinkedIn, but there are so many platforms where there's the back and forth. And if you get engaged with the back and forth and say something that you didn't mean to say or wasn't part of your brand,(...)
like you said, it's out there. It's never going back into the box anymore once you say it. It's in the ether. So you've got to be sure that you're saying the right things. Yeah. So let's take a step back again and talk about our values. So here's some exercises that I've done that help us uncover who we are. So you talked about this. That's the first one. Yeah, there's tons of assessment. We had that in our last episode.
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Definitely a good place to start. But another one, there's tons of value exercises that you can do.
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One of them that's very common is like literally there's a list of I don't know, it seems like hundreds of values. And then you just kind of highlight or circle the ones that resonate with you that are true to you. And then after that, you start to kind of narrow them down. And what makes it challenging at first is you're like, dude, I circled like 50 out of the 100 and something, right? But then the next step is, OK, what do they have in common? You know, what are some themes? How would I bucket them? So I'm trying to describe it, kind of thinking about like, how do I filter these in the way? There's 50 that I picked. Great. You know, like 20 of these kind of have similarities. These 10 have similarities in these five. What do they have in common now? Then that's where you kind of come up with the theme, right? Well, these really talk about leading by example. These one talk about ethics and family, you know, family first. And this one talks about, I don't know, doing the right thing or whatever. You know, these buckets. And not from there, that kind of narrows it down to your three values. Is it ever changing? Can it evolve?
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100 percent. 100 percent. So that's just one of the exercises. Have you done anything similar with that? Yeah, I think we've done that with you even. I think we did something like that on one of our trainings as a group. And it's really important to look at those things and filter down and then kind of reevaluate at times. Like again, you said, like you said, you're changing. You're always changing. So looking at those buckets and saying, how do I want to be perceived in what I'm doing? So yeah, any type of activity where you can. It's hard because we get into our business and we start doing our job. And sometimes our job overtakes like who the brand person is and it kind of can be in the forefront. So as you're saying, it's really important to step back and just say, who am I and what am I going to be known for and what is my brand? Because if you're not doing that part right, the rest of the work may not come off as the right type of brand for you. Yeah. Did you did you picture like a compass when he said that? Like thinking like these are my values. And then if I ever have to make a choice or a decision, like let me look at it. Is that truly, you know, where I'm headed right away or it's like, no, it's off. Yeah, I need a pivot or you know what? I can do that. That goes against my values. Right. Exactly. So and I mean, that kind of leads us up to the next topic, right? You know, with just your personal brand and who you surround yourself, how do you build that professional network? Right? What sort of steps can you take or what what sort of tips or strategies have worked well for you in the networking space in order to continue your personal brand? For me, it's easy. I'm an extrovert. So I put my hand out and shake every person's hand that I see. I want to know more about what people are doing. And then also that's in person, but also on social media going out and just reaching out to people on social media and saying, your job looks interesting. Can I ask you about that? So there's ways you can do that. I know for somebody this introvert that might be a little bit harder, but I think setting some goals and just if that's if that's something that is a goal for you to do, it's it's trying to figure out how do you accomplish that? Setting some goals of maybe I introduce myself to one person this week or something smaller.(...)
For me, it's sometimes my wife's like, you talk to everybody at the grocery store. It's like, I know.(...)
So I got to scale it back a little bit. But it's important because you just never know in your network who's going to be that person that might be influential in your career. The reason I'm at Insight was because I knew somebody from 10 years previous that I that I worked with, kept in touch with on network, LinkedIn stayed in touch. And then they referred me to this job here.(...)
Yeah, it's going back to that event that we were at. There was a few. Again, what I love about this next generation is that you definitely I mean, for me, I'm inspired when I do have those those students come and saying, hey, I like to know more about what you do. Like, that's a that's a great question. Like, who doesn't like to share or talk about what they do? You know, I think all of us do. So just that question alone is a good icebreaker.
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But then I'm just asking questions and connecting with us on LinkedIn or finding ways to connect. That's just the first step. And the fact that a few of those did that, that's amazing. But to your point, it could be extroverts that comes natural to them. Those introverts, I love what you just said, you know, and this is where I like to, you know, we try to get more comments in our videos. You know, if you're somebody who's an introvert and you want to share your best practices like do that, we'd love to read those comments. And next time we come on next episode, we'll talk about them. But I think your point is just setting those small little goals. You don't have to talk to everybody at the grocery store. But you know, next event that we have or next next time I have a company outing, I'm going to introduce myself to one person, just one for the first time and then kind of build it up from there. And that's all it is, man. And again, that's how we met, too. Right. That's our story. That was the exact story. I don't know what you do, but can I know more about it? Everybody always asks me, what do you do?
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I mean, to be fair, I was still relatively new with the company. So that's that might be why. We're at now, man. We'll be around forever.
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Yeah. So in regarding we're going back now, we're going back full circle to social media, right?
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You know, networking, we can do that in person. I love that good old face to face networking. But you can do that virtually as well. So do you have any best practices on how you network virtually?
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Yeah, I like I said, LinkedIn is probably the best place to be for professionals and people that are just coming into the business because everyone on there, like we were talking about, has the intent of trying to connect and doing the similar thing to what you're doing.
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I don't know if this is the right way to do it or not, but I accept every friend request. And I know 60 percent of them are just solicitors. But still, again, you just never know, though, it's still a person that's in a role right now, but could be in a different role. And you just never know what that person would be doing. So I just take a philosophy. I'm just going to friend everyone or connect with everyone because you just never know when you might need them. They may need you or something could intersect. It might seem like a really far reach, but you just never know.
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Yeah, I'm the opposite. Say no to all of them. No, no, I do say yes to a lot, but there are the ones, you know, here's a personal brand. There's a one right off the bat, right? If somebody says me a friend request and already they're selling me something like for me, that just sets the tone. It's going to be a transactional relationship or network. But if somebody literally is curious and wants to know more what I do and all that, and it's truly genuine and it's not like, hey, I'm from XYZ company and we can add value to your organization by X, Y, and it's like, huh, you're already pitching me.
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Not really feeling it right. So for me, it's that first initial thought. And even then, even just, I'm already giving it out. People are going to send me requests, knowing how I'm going to accept it, but just sending me a request and just me, I just accept it. But once I see that message and right away, I know what their intent is and it's more transactional that there just means I superficial, you want something from me, but it's not really, we're not going to be a give and take. And we talk about that in mentorship. We talk about that in other relationships. And that for me is really important. So good for you. I don't know. You're brave. So my first role with Insight was BDR. So I was reaching out one to one to clients and I took the approach of, I'm just going to connect with them. I'm not going to send them any message other than once we're connected, they're going to see what I'm posting, which is all about insight. So it was kind of a way of saying, I'm going to share with you just from the fact that we're connected, but I'm not going to push anything to you.
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And that seemed to be, I mean, nobody was saying no because of the fact that I was sending a message like I want to meet with you right now.(...)
So it is, again, that same person I'm connecting with a company.
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Will I need to be networked with that person eventually? I don't know. So it's good to have that open availability to do that. Yeah. No, and I have some some quick examples of success for me when it, you know, we're talking about leadership, right?
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I've used that many opportunities to set up calls with either X and that's a good opportunity to connect with old colleagues from previous organizations.
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But then also I've done trainings. I've done events or, you know, it was put on by another, I don't know, like a third party and then we connect with people. They were just like, I like what they said in that comment and I just reached out to them and connect and be like, hey, I was very curious, you know, in your response, I want to set up some time and get to know more about what you do. And I've had some great conversations. It's a great opportunity also from where to learn from other leaders in other industries, other departments.
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So that's another thing I would say for the next level of networking is not just connecting and, you know, commenting and liking, which is helpful, but literally taking the time to set up some calls and no hidden agenda. No like, hey, I want to I want you to buy something for me, but more, I just want to learn from you. I want to know. So, you know, hey, maybe I have something I can share with you as well. Those are solid and those for me have been very strong and really has helped my network and my LinkedIn, you know, my LinkedIn, you know, followers and network that I have. And in addition to guru and marketing manager, we can also add mind reader because my question to Kyle is going to be how do you make those interactions more genuine and less transactional and you really hit the nail on the head there, you know, how that strategy of connecting and then showing them the value without directly going after them, because I know you and I work in a similar space. We're both in marketing and being a paid media specialist, you know, you get a lot of vendors that, you know, want to reach out to, you know, maybe have you tried their platforms and things like that. And that's kind of the first step. And it's always, you know, as you mentioned, pitch, pitch, pitch. And it's like, you know, you get so many of those in the day. There's so many different various vendors. So making that genuine transaction or genuine connection first instead of just transactional is so important.
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Yeah. The other thing I was thinking about when you said that was that one thing I would do, and this is the issue of faster and faster and social media, sometimes we need to slow down and just work on relationships one to one is that if I found somebody I wanted to connect with and I would research what's going on with their company, whatever, I see that they just got CEO over the quarter or CEO of the year. Maybe that was the message instead of let's meet, congrats on winning CEO of the year. And then they're like, oh, thank you. How do you even know that you don't know who I am? So it's just slowing down, building relationships and that relationship leads to networking in a stronger way. Yeah. And even goes beyond going with our topic as well. Once you discover your values, discover what you're good at your strengths. And again, it's going to take time. You know, you're not going to start your career and know this off the bat. You also have to kind of explore, right? Try different careers and kind of get to know different departments until you finally find your true home, I guess, a career is, you know, start to start to find that community as well. I think that's even stronger. Right. Once you have that community, you know, even when you put your title of what that is, you know, what is personal brand guru, they're going to be like, oh, I'm curious about personal brand. We reach out to Kyle, man. Right. So even what you put in there has to be intentional of what is it? What's your opening statement? What's your subject line to let people know what you're passionate about? And even going back to Simon Sinek, what's your why? You know, why do you get up every day? Why do you do what you do? If you share that now, people can be, you know, can really start a good conversation with you. So, yeah, absolutely. So jumping into our next topic that I'm sure some people have some curiosity about is professional challenges around building, you know, your personal brand.(...)
Can you tell us maybe a little bit about some of the challenges that people may face when developing their personal brand? I think one of the things that would be a challenge would potentially be when you get feedback. And feedback is never easy, right? But how you receive that feedback and how you use that to build or change your brand would probably be a great way to think of that. Feedback is what's out there. So if somebody is seeing something and they're telling you that, that's a gift. You should be aware of like they're bringing that to you for a reason. So if your brand is being misrepresented, you don't know about it. Maybe it's just unintentional. You're like, you're not you're not aware of it.
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It's never never fun to hear hard feedback. But if you can receive it and turn it around, I mean, I think that's that's where you can really raise that to another level.
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Yeah. And it's interesting you mentioned that about the feedback. A lot of us, you know, as we hear about it, it always say it's a gift. It's good. It helps you grow. And we all hear this. It doesn't always make it easy, though, to your point. But that's the thing, right? It's like it it brings awareness. It opens blind spots.
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And I love when we had Joyce on, too. She said, hey, make sure that there's a pattern or a theme. If it's just a one off,
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I don't know, maybe they saw it different. Maybe they heard it. Who knows? But if it's not consistent, nobody else has said it. OK, just put it put it aside for now. And if you start to come back, let me explore it some more. But for now, it's just the ones that are really coming in like, OK, there's something here I need to look at.(...)
And one of the things that I want, you know,(...)
personal stories, right. So I received feedback once about a post that I put out on LinkedIn.
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And, you know, some people, you know, solid, solid, solid, you know, they interpret it in a certain way. And at first I took it very personal. I'm like, that's not what I meant. That's, you know, oh, my gosh, it was, you know, it was it was supposed inspirational, this and that.
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Regardless, that's why it was it was seen or felt. And when I received that feedback, it was hard. But for me, I just took up. I love that you said take a pause, kind of hear it out like, OK, what do they mean? OK, I can see their point. That makes total sense. I'll be mine. And that's the thing we have to also slow down before we post something. How is this going to be seen not only in this audience, but this audience and that audience is a timing. Another thing is a timing right, because it could be something going on that that is probably not the best timing. So just to give it wasn't nothing bad. It was just the timing.
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And I learned. I learned from that. You know, taking a pause and even running it by going back to your social networks, maybe your leader, maybe somebody who's really, you know, really tuned to the to the climate or surroundings of what's going on in your organization and the economics and be like, hey, I'm about to post something. What are your thoughts on this? I'm kind of eerie about this. I'm like, yeah, don't hold off on it. I want to post it right now. Right. It's probably not the right time. Yeah, definitely good feedback. You know, definitely want to get that pulse check on whatever you're putting out there. Obviously, you want to make sure you have that in the forefront of your mind. Whenever you're posting, like it's not just one individual audience that's going to see this. It's multiple different audiences that will see this. So yeah, it has a thing, right. It was it was a lesson learned. It opened my eyes. But I think for many of us, like it's a slow down piece, you know, run it by somebody. So someone's giving you feedback. They probably care about you. Yeah, they're not giving you feedback. They don't care, right? They're they're willing to just pass it by and let it be what you are. So if they're giving you feedback, why are they giving you feedback? They want you to be a better version of you. So take it take it seriously. Yeah. Watching out for you. Yeah, that's a good call out, man. Yeah. So have you had any any any stories on feedback when it comes to your personal brand or something that maybe you've said or done that you're just like, oh, you know what? Thanks. Thanks for bringing that up. Or oh, my gosh, I'm glad you caught it or whatever. Anything like that. Yeah, several times I've had multiple jobs through my career of 30 years now. So I think the one that would probably be the the most relevant is when I worked in nonprofits and going from corporate to nonprofits, you've got to know the differences of what's happening. So it's it's learning those things as I would do them step in a step in a hole and do something incorrect. And they're like, oh, wait, that's not really how it's done in a nonprofit compared to corporate and then just reevaluate again coming from they're saying this to me because they care. They want me to do the right way. So and I'm I'm coming from corporate. I know how to do it the right way. It's not necessarily always the right way because you've done it before in the past. It's a good call out to different industries, different, yeah, profit, nonprofit. I mean, it's all it has it has this, you know, different, I would say different approaches, right, different ways of doing, you know, social media posts, whatever. Yeah.
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As a leader, let's bring this up as a leader. Right. What are some things that we want to be mindful of when posting stuff to? Is there anything that you've seen for me anyways is just be mindful of the hot topics, you know, whether you feel passionate about something we know what are things that are, you know, it could be very controversial or very polarizing. That's the word actually is polarizing. Right. Like understanding, like, yes, you have your beliefs, but be mindful of others have theirs and you've got to be respectful and can just start something, you know, can can really go to a pretty bad place. Right. So just be careful with those. Absolutely. So it sounds like consistency and engagement are some of the bigger keys to, you know, developing your personal brand. Any final tips you want to share with us, Kyle? I think really when you think of it all altogether is like at the end of your life, what do you want to be known for? So if you are looking forward to that and saying, I want to be known as X, Y and Z, then you need to start those things now, right? Or start them at the beginning of your career. If you can, if you're wise enough to do that at the beginning and figure out who you are and try to build those things and then kind of reevaluate as Z and I have done trainings where your career is going to do this the whole time. It's not it's not a linear line.(...)
So sometimes those reevaluations might need to be multiple times. But what is the end goal? What do you want to be remembered for from your family, from your kids, from your friends and then just try to bring that to your everyday presence? And I know we're coming to the end, but a big a big pivot question for our listeners is so far we've been talking a lot about like, hey, the one you know, a lot of this advice is helping the next generation coming in. Good advice, all that. But what about the ones that are out of us that are already in our middle of our careers or towards the, you know, tail end? It's never too late. You know, I think is one of those things that you can, you know, can reevaluate, kind of take that, you know, do the same exercises, nothing wrong with that. Seeing where you're at and start start now, it's never honestly, there's never too late. You know, for me, honestly, I think when it came to my career, I didn't really find my path, honestly, until I joined Insight.(...)
And it's been 10 years now. But even then, when I first joined, I still kind of didn't have a good, you know, idea where I was ended up until about six years ago.(...)
Yeah, if you can't tell, definitely have some grace. I'm not a I'm not a spring chicken, right? But it's never too late. Right. That's right. I like that. Well, thank you again, Kyle, for joining us today. Definitely great insight that you shared with us. And thank you to all of our listeners tuning in. Remember, if you liked our content, please subscribe and share, turn on your notifications so you'll be the first to get our episodes as soon as they release.(...)
And until next time, keep leading with insight.
Host
Z Tinoco is a diversity, leadership & organization development manager who believes in building teams, inspiring minds and creating authentic connections. He helps people reach their goals and find success through humor, leadership and a diverse mindset.
Co-host
Richard is an experienced paid media specialist with a proven track record of creating and executing successful campaigns across various platforms. Richard has a passion for tackling new challenges, connecting with people and loves all things tech.
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