Can a CEO’s reputation have strong implication on organizational performance, talent acquisition, developing trust on the future strategy? 81% of gobal executives report CEO Reputation as one of the strategic tools in the engagement of building company reputation, according to https://www.webershandwick.com/news/81-percent-of-global-executives-report-external-ceo-engagement-is-a-mandate/
Analysts observe that turnaround CEOs and other successful CEOs have proven that their personal brand and leadership image has provided a strong chemistry, emotional and psychological bond to develop their organizations separating themselves from the fierce competition and staying ahead of competition consistently. CEOs leadership effectiveness on building relationships inside and outside the organization have become one of the critical competencies to shape the building of a great CEO brand property. This has created momentum among the C suite executives and some have been paying serious attention to reinvent their personal branding in an era of challenging business landscape
What is a personal brand?
As Jeff Beson of Amazon says “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”. This definition of personal branding reflects how one could develop, harness and leverage the image reality gap and work towards strategically crafting the values of building a strong personal CEO brand. The personal leadership brand has to be something that distinctively identifies you with strong inner awareness and represent you in your best profile-fit that is sustainable. Personal branding allows professionals to differentiate themselves reinforcing who you are and what you stand for in your career and life.
Organizations mobilizing extremely powerful CEO brands have also emerged as powerful employer brands and creating a culture of high performance and stability that continuously gain new businesses, clients and highly talented employees who have immensely contributed to business and organizational growth. The strong correlations between the two have lead to secure strategic alliances and robust growth due to leadership integrity and authenticity producing a win-win outcome. This leads to create great momentum that shapes unique organizational cultures that could mitigate all the VUCA factors successfully. Stock markets around the world have seen indexes grow when organizations announce on boarding of strong CEO brands with immense leadership reputation, integrity and credibility. Organizations have also seen adverse reactions, drop in share values, business shifts, loss of strategic partners, talent drain etc. when on boarding a mediocre CEO brand.
Branding yourself has become a very serious subject nowadays and a crucial professional goal for more than CEOs. Fortune 500 companies continuously hold personal branding seminars to train their senior executives in the art of developing a powerful personal branding. An example of how world renowned news anchors of CNN such as Anderson Cooper – ‘AC360’, Richard Quest – ‘Quest Means Business’, Christiane Amanpour – ‘World Affairs’, Fareed Zackariya ‘GPS – Global Public Square’ and ‘The Tonight Show’ by Jimmy Fallon who have all crafted strong personal signature programs reveal the power of personal branding that is eventually beneficial to the organization too in the long run
Here are some of the attributes that shapes and develope a great CEO brand
- Demonstration of true passion to lead the industry, these CEOs have strategically crafted personal branding to the extent of becoming thought leaders and powerful social brands pursuading a cause larger than self.
- Developing courageous leadership models and showcasing leadership authenticity going beyond their traditional routines of delivering good business performance and profitability migrating into contemporary styles where other stakeholders aspire to emulate their footprints
- The urge and strive to bring out the best in their people and continuously nurturing and engaging in recognizing great contributors in the organizations and inspiring shared vision across diverse cross functional teams
- Being selfless leaders disrupting their own models of creativity & innovation through mentoring and coaching their teams to explore new grounds for long term sustainability
- Passionate in developing the execution related skills of people sometimes surpassing the CEOs own achievements
- Always reinventing themselves and staying abreast and sometimes ahead of the current trends in the corporate environment unfolding blue oceans
- Showing authentic values in inculcating a diverse workforce towards contributing to organizational goals
- Being active listeners and engaged in the building of coaching cultures in their organizations