So Who Are You? Identify Yourself Exercise
Personal Branding and Identity Exercise For You and Your Employees
How do you brand yourself, if you don't even know yourself?
OVERVIEW This is an exercise that I conduct with all of my direct reports, and myself. It is meant to be a reflective exercise and nothing more. Use it as a tool to help your direct reports understand themselves better, how they identify, how they want to be perceived. For you, this will serve to help you manage them better, understand how they're motivated and where they want to be.
INSTRUCTIONS
First write your name as how you want to be addressed, this is the name that you identify with and will want to market and brand.
Write your title, as in write how you want to identify. This should also answer the question when people ask you "so what do you do" (for a living).
Sameness - acknowledge the skills you have in your profession that are not unique. Likely every person with this title does this same thing. In order to understand how you're different, you have to understand how you're the same. This is an exercise of humility.
Uniqueness - here is where you want to differentiate yourself. You are acknowleding here that you are better than the next person because of your 1) speed, 2) outcome 3) process 4) relatability etc. Feel free to include certifications here or other levels of education that make you stand out.
THE EXERCISE Use this tool to foster conversation. Push the boundaries of how your employees are currently thinking about themselves, and that may go in both directions. They may have bigger egos than they realize on what they do that is actually samness, and conversely, they might not have confidence or perspective to know what makes them special. Help them shine a light and show them the mirror when needed. The goal of this exercise is to enrich both of your understandings of your employee, re-establish trust, and equip yourself with new motivations that you can tie to actions and deliverables when you are delegating work or driving towards a work mission.
Download The Free Blank Template Here
Let me know how it goes, I would love to hear feedback on if this was helpful or if you have any room for improvement. To work with me more, book a free coaching call.