Six Strategies to Build Your CEO Brand

This tipsheet highlights key factors for CEO success: strategy, execution, talent management, and personal branding. Emphasizing the importance of a CEO’s leadership brand, it offers practical strategies for aligning personal and organizational brands to drive positive results. Success for CEOs is divided into 70% related to strategy, execution, and talent management, while the remaining 30% is influenced by factors such as leadership brand, physical appearance, physiology, and emotional intelligence.

Definitions

• Company Brand is what the firm is known for.
• Leadership brand (what leaders are known for) is critical to success because it turns customer expectations into employee behaviours and accelerates results.

Some Examples

• WalMart Brand: Everyday Low Prices; Leadership Brand: managing costs efficiently
• Apple Brand: Innovation and Design; Leadership Brand: creating new products outside industry norms
• P&G: Managing Brands; Leadership Brand: Defining and growing brands in the marketplace

Premise

Your CEO personal brand is critical to helping you achieve your goals because it determines your ability to motivate and inspire people to take positive action. CEOs have a personal brand that should align with the organization’s leadership brand, representing their identity and reputation as a leader, similar to figures like Steve Jobs or Jack Welch.

Six strategies will help you build your CEO Brand

1. Define major results that you want to achieve in the next 12 months in your professional life.
2. Define major results that you want to achieve in the next 12 months in your personal life.
3. What are six words that characterize what you would want to be known for as a leader?
4. Develop a CEO brand statement: I want to be known for…, so that I can deliver… at work and… outside work.
5. Be transparent and share your CEO brand statement with key internal and external stakeholders and ask for feedback.
6. Focus your time, behaviours and communication (internal and external) aligned with your CEO brand.

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