When you hear the words “personal brand”, it’s easy to imagine someone standing in front of a ring light, posting motivational quotes on LinkedIn at 6:00am and telling you about their “journey”.
That is not what I mean by personal branding at work.
You don’t need 50,000 followers, a podcast, a carefully curated collection of headshots, or a habit of beginning every LinkedIn post with “I’ve been reflecting…”.
In the workplace, your personal brand is much simpler and, in my opinion, far more important.
It’s the professional reputation you build through the way you work, communicate, and interact with other people.
It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
Your personal brand is your professional reputation
Every person in an organisation has a personal brand, whether they deliberately create one or not.
You might be known as:
- The person who always gets things done.
- The person who stays calm when everything goes wrong.
- The person who understands difficult customers.
- The person who brings people together.
- The person who challenges ideas constructively.
- The person who is extremely reliable.
- The person who is brilliant technically but impossible to work with.
- Or, unfortunately, the person who somehow manages to make every meeting last an hour longer than necessary.
These reputations develop over time through hundreds of small interactions.
Your colleagues notice how you behave under pressure. Your manager notices whether you take responsibility when something goes wrong. People notice whether you listen to their ideas, whether you keep your promises, and whether you give credit to others.
That is your personal brand.
Personal branding isn’t about becoming an influencer
There is a particular version of “personal branding” that has become popular online. It involves building an audience, creating content, sharing your expertise, and making yourself visible.
But that is not the objective of personal branding at work. We are not trying to turn employees into influencers – isn’t there enough already? 😉
Your goal is not to become the person in the office who has the most LinkedIn followers. Your goal is to become the person people trust and remember for the right reasons.
A strong professional personal brand might be almost invisible outside your organisation. You may never post on LinkedIn and have no interest in creating content. You may actively dislike having your photograph taken while pointing thoughtfully at a wall.
It doesn’t matter. Because if your colleagues know that you are dependable, thoughtful, collaborative and particularly good at solving a certain type of problem, you already have a personal brand.
For example, you won’t find me on Instagram or Tik Tok and I do not have any followers. I am a particularly private person and have no desire at all to be adored by fans. I eat my lunch without taking a photo of it, I couldn’t care less about fashions, and my wife cuts my hair. I am most definitely not an influencer.
Nevertheless, having a personal brand is absolutely crucial to the success of my business. I’ve been operating under my own name since 2013. I like to think that it’s my professional reputation that keeps me in business all these years later.
So, what do I want to be known for? This is something I wrote for myself during a 2026 workshop on personal branding that I delivered in Bangkok to a financial services company. I asked the participants to write down what they each wanted to be known for and below is the example I used to represent myself:
“I want to be known for being super reliable, easy to work with, and for getting the job done to a high standard. Alongside this, I hope that my clients notice the personal touch to my work – an easygoing and frequently unconventional approach that demonstrates that we should never take ourselves too seriously.“
What do you want to be known for?
One useful question is:
“What do I want people to associate with me professionally?”
Perhaps you want to be known as someone who develops people. Perhaps you want a reputation for being the person who can bring different departments together.
Perhaps you want to become known for your creativity, your analytical thinking, your ability to communicate complicated ideas simply, or your ability to remain calm in difficult situations.
This is where personal branding becomes useful.
It encourages you to move from simply doing your job to thinking about how you are perceived while doing it.
But you cannot simply announce your personal brand. Saying “I am an excellent communicator” does not make you an excellent communicator. Neither does putting “strategic thinker, people leader, visionary, change maker” underneath your name on LinkedIn.
Your reputation is built by evidence. Your behaviour creates your reputation. Your reputation becomes your personal brand.
Your personal brand also affects your career
A strong professional reputation can influence opportunities in ways that are not always obvious.
When a new project needs someone who can handle difficult stakeholders, who gets considered? When management needs someone to lead an important initiative, whose name comes up? When a colleague needs help with a particular problem, who do they approach?
Often, it is not simply the person with the most experience.
It is the person who has developed a reputation for being good at that particular thing.
This is particularly important as you become more senior. At the beginning of your career, people may primarily judge you on what you can do. But as your career progresses, people increasingly judge you on the value you bring through your judgement, relationships, influence and ability to work with others.
Your reputation starts working for you. Or, if you have neglected it, against you.
Personal branding starts with self-awareness
Building a professional personal brand does not mean inventing a completely new version of yourself. In fact, that’s a bad idea. If your “personal brand” requires you to behave like somebody else every day, it is going to become exhausting very quickly.
It’s all about authenticity.
Start by understanding yourself. Ask:
- What am I good at?
- What do other people come to me for?
- What do I enjoy doing?
- What do I want to become better known for?
- What do I want colleagues to say about working with me?
- What might people currently say about me that I would rather they didn’t?
The answers can reveal a gap between the reputation you currently have and the reputation you would like to have.
Your personal brand is built in ordinary moments
Personal branding can sound like something grand and strategic but in reality, it is often built in very ordinary situations.
It is how you behave in a meeting when somebody disagrees with you. It is whether you admit when you have made a mistake. It is whether you listen before offering your opinion. It is whether you help a colleague who is struggling. It is whether you remain constructive when a project goes badly. And it is what you do when nobody important is watching.
Do you consistently deliver on your promises and meet the quality standards that are expected of you?
The goal isn’t to be famous. It’s to be trusted.
A useful way to think about personal branding at work is:
What do I want to be known for, and are my everyday behaviours creating that reputation?
You do not need to become an influencer and post every thought you have online. You do not need to manufacture a perfectly polished professional persona.
You need to develop a clear understanding of the value you bring, behave consistently with that reputation and make sure other people have enough experience of you to recognise it.
In other words, personal branding at work is not about promoting yourself. It is about being deliberate about your professional reputation.
And unlike an Instagram profile, it is much harder to edit once your colleagues have already made up their minds about you.
Get in touch to learn more about my half-day workshop on building your personal brand at work.