A leader’s image holds immense power. How you’re viewed has the potential to dictate what relationships you’re able to maintain, what opportunities you can pursue and even what your future career can look like.
With so much affected by your image, it’s crucial to take control of the narrative and intentionally build an image that can works for—not against—you and your leadership goals.
What Is a Leadership Legacy?
As a leader, the actions you take, the values you lead with, the decisions you make—all of who you are, what you do and how you make others feel—leave a lasting impact. That impression is what people are going to remember about you. That’s your leadership legacy.
With a strong leadership brand, you can build that legacy for yourself. You can consider the impact you want to have and deliberately create a leadership identity that delivers that impact. Moreover, this identity can generate continuous value for you long-term, becoming a beneficial tool to drive success and ensuring you’ll be remembered as a strong leader whose contributions were not only powerful but purposeful.
How Does a Leadership Brand Bring Lasting Value?
A strong leadership brand will create a positive identity that will drive long-lasting value for leaders and their organizations in a number of ways. When crafted with intention and consideration, your leadership brand:
1. Grows Alongside You
Your leadership brand creates a foundation that’s designed to be revised and expanded upon as you grow. As you continue to gain new strategies and develop your style, you can ensure that your brand will accurately reflect the changes to your leadership and remain steadily aligned with your identity, even as it evolves and adapts over time. That way, you can maintain an authentic brand at all times.
2. Keeps Your Leadership Effectiveness Sustainable
In crafting a professional identity that evolves as you do, you ensure that improvement is baked directly into your process. You can keep efficiency at the forefront, pursuing opportunities to enhance your skills, while still remaining rooted in your core values. With a leadership approach that’s both authentic and adaptable, you can continue to be an effective and influential leader long-term.
3. Cements Your Credibility
Whether it’s highlighting your expertise and growth mindset or demonstrating your consistency and commitment to living your values, your leadership brand works for you to establish your trustworthiness and foster confidence in your capabilities. In doing so, your brand constructs a pattern of credibility. That can solidify your status as an honorable and reliable leader for years to come.
4. Builds Strong, Long-Term Relationships
The authenticity and credibility your leadership brand creates open the door for powerful connections to be made. With your trustworthiness well-established and your values on full display, you’ll find it easier to forge meaningful, secure relationships with others. Built on mutual interest and respect, these relationships will be stronger, more natural, easier to maintain and more likely to last.
5. Expands Your Opportunities
People are naturally drawn to work for and with strong leaders. And nothing says “strong leader” quite like a well-crafted leadership brand. Through showcasing your strengths and achievements, your leadership brand positions you as a notable leadership figure worth following. This opens the door for you to generate valuable networking opportunities and recruit top-tier talent for your team.
6. Inspires Excellence
By modeling exemplary leadership behaviors and promoting ongoing development through your leadership brand, you set a certain standard that raises the bar not only for your competitors but your own organization as well. With your example to look to, your team will have a roadmap to excellence, improving their performance and empowering your entire organization to thrive due to your influence.
7. Strengthens Your Organization
A positive leadership brand has the power to drive business growth for your organization. It can shape company culture, which improves retention. It can promote effective leadership and high performance, which inspires confidence in stakeholders and drives profitability. And it can create strong relationships, which can continue to benefit the organization if and when a leader moves on.
Your Leadership Brand, Your Legacy: How Do You Want to Be Perceived?
Deliberately molding your leadership brand places the power to shape the future solely in your hands. You get to decide what you want the world to know—and remember—about you, your leadership and your company. You have the opportunity to create a legacy for yourself that not only positions you in a positive light but pays dividends for you well into the future.
Build Your Legacy With CLS
Ready to build your leadership legacy? Our new course, Your Leadership Brand, will give you everything you need to get started. You’ll learn more about what a strong leadership brand looks like and the steps you need to take to build one that will continue to drive success for you throughout your career.