Now Generation Leaders | Rosetta Thurman

Why Personal Branding is the Most Effective Career Tool for Young Professionals: A Bullet Point Manifesto

May 11, 2010 by rosettathurman · 8 Comments

A lot of people have been asking me questions about personal branding – what it is, what it isn’t, and why they should be worried about it. So I thought I’d lay out all of my ideas here to explain why I think it’s so important for young professionals to consider personal branding an essential part of their professional development. I was inspired to use this format by this post by Ian David Moss over at Createquity.

Let’s face it. Everyone has a personal brand, whether you like it or not. Sorry.
But wait. What the hell is a personal brand, you ask? Business management guru Tom Peters coined the term in 1997 with this bold statement: “Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand.” He wrote a fantastic manifesto titled “The Brand Called You” on Fast Company that you should absolutely go read. Like right now.
Another term for personal branding is “impression management,” which comes from the field of leadership studies. Leadership scholar Gary Yukl defines impression management as “the process of influencing how others perceive you.” Makes sense, right?
But here’s something even simpler. Your personal brand is essentially your professional reputation. It’s what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.
It’s what your references say about you when you apply for a job. So even when you ask someone to act as a reference for you, they do a quick gut check for how they feel about your personal brand. They decide whether they want to be aligned with your name and what you stand for, because their reputation is on the line, too.
So you can rail against the idea all you want, but the fact is that when people think of you, they have some kind of impression in their minds about who you are and what you stand for.
But as with any terminology, there are a few problems with the phrase ‘personal branding,’ namely that it can have negative connotations for people who view marketing themselves as a sleazy thing to do. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
The real question is, is your personal brand a good one or not? What do people in your professional circle think of you? Do people even know who you are?
Good personal brands have nothing to do with snake oil. They are completely authentic.
Example: Let’s look at one of the most well-known personal brands in America – Oprah. She wants to help you live your best life, all the while being totally open with hers. People put enough trust in her that they buy products and books she recommends. Grown men come on her TV show and cry. She’s a billionaire, a professional businesswoman. But she also makes us feel good about ourselves. Now that’s a damn good brand.
So how do you know if you have a bad personal brand? Well, if you’re having trouble getting jobs, promotions, leadership roles, consulting gigs or board opportunities, then you may need to invest some time in crafting or refining your personal brand.
True story: A year into my role as a development director at my previous nonprofit job, I still had people mistaking me for an intern. I was tasked with raising $1M a year for the organization, yet my youth prevented my older colleagues from fully respecting me as a peer.
Then I started blogging. Then I got on Twitter. And my entire career took off! People started inviting me to speak. Then teach. Then consult. I finally felt like my voice was being heard in a sector that I loved.
A lot of young professionals complain that they gets no respect. Why would we? We’re young. People think we don’t know anything. That we haven’t done anything. Now in some cases this is true, don’t get me wrong, but in many cases it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Young professionals often have advanced education; a rich portfolio of work, volunteer and internship experiences; and a fiery passion for the cause.
The only problem? We’re not visible to senior leaders. No one can “see” us because we’re not at the tables. Especially if we’re the assistants and the interns.
But that’s the great thing about having access to social media. You might be a lowly administrative assistant at your organization, but on Twitter, you can be a rockstar.
Social media makes it so that thousands of people can “see” you and follow your work and leadership. Social media can make you more visible to all the right people – if you use it right – if you market yourself with professionalism and authenticity.
Brian Clark of Copyblogger likes to say, “What people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.” What I would add to that sentiment is that it’s even more important if they say it online.
And what that means, my friends, is that you have to be online. It means you have to be using social media in a way that tells people who you are and invites them to connect with you. And what better way to do that than with your personal brand.
Yo, remember that saying: it’s all about who you know? Well it’s true. So if you want to advance your career, one of your jobs as a young professional is to stop complaining about how no one respects you. It’s time to stop whining about how no one ever “picks” you and take proactive steps to make sure people know who you are so you can reap the full benefits of being so fabulous.
Benefits of having a good personal brand:
- You may never have to “look” for a job again. The job will find you.
- True story: I’ve been offered several jobs (local and national) that I didn’t even apply for by organizations contacting me by email, Facebook, and Twitter because they connected in some way to my personal brand.
- It’s easier to get a raise. You know how that goes – if other people perceive you as valuable, your organization will too.
- If the right people know who you are, you won’t have to find them, they will find you. My friend was approached by the CEO of a very reputable youth organization for a communications job because of my friend’s professional presence on Twitter and Facebook.

Further reading: 7 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand Without Releasing a Sex Tape

Wanna learn more about personal branding? Purchase your copy of my popular 90-minute webinar training, Personal Branding 101: How to Use Social Media to Accelerate Your Career.

Leadership is a Verb, Not a Noun

April 9, 2010 by rosettathurman · Leave a Comment

All this week, Americans for the Arts and the Emerging Leaders Council have been hosting a blog salon to spark national dialogue on New Strategies to Support Next Generation Leadership on their ARTSblog. The blog salon seeks to leverage the voices of funders, Emerging Leader Network representatives, and leadership development advocates to discuss what is needed to sustain leadership growth, the skill sets that emerging leaders need to develop, and how funders are addressing the generational shift.

Today, I wrote a guest blog post as part of the salon.

Leadership is a Verb, Not a Noun

I’ve been writing about leadership and young nonprofit professionals for the past three years, and what I’ve finally come to is this: one of our biggest misconceptions about leadership is that it has something to do with a title.

The nonprofit sector often operates as if leadership were a noun. They look to “the leadership” to provide the answers, and blame “the leadership” when ideas fail or solution don’t come fast enough. I’ve heard many a young professional talk about leaving their organization because of disappointment in “the leadership.” The problem with this sentiment is that it assumes that leadership is a position at the top of the org chart and that it’s the responsibility of one person (or a select few) to lead the agency to success.

That’s why we use the term “emerging leaders.” Because we think that until you’ve reached the CEO position or ascend to a senior management role or reach the ripe age of 50, you have not yet “emerged.”

But what if we thought of leadership as a verb?

Read the rest of my post and add your comments here »

Be sure to check out the other bloggers who posted their thoughts this week on the ARTSblog!

Filed Under: Arts, Leadership · Tagged With: Americans for the Arts, artsblog, emerging leaders, emerging nonprofit leaders, Now Generation Leaders, Now Generation Leadership

The Normative Problem with the Term ‘Next Generation’ Leaders

March 5, 2010 by rosettathurman · 22 Comments

Earlier this year, I profiled four “now generation” leaders to watch because they are, and will be, doing amazing things for social change in the next year. But the main reason I wanted to coin the term ‘now generation’ is because I think the ‘next generation’ moniker gives young people (and everyone else) the sense that we have to wait for some undetermined time before we can lead. We have to wait until someone hands us the baton. We have to sit on the sidelines until someone passes us the ball. And until then, we’ve got to sit quietly with the other kids and try to catch the crumbs of wisdom and power that fall from the big kid’s table. We’ve got to wait until we get “next.”

If that’s what we mean by ‘next generation’ leaders, I sure don’t want to be one. To be clear, I don’t see anything wrong with the term in and of itself, but rather how it may be being used to reinforce the current distribution of power in the nonprofit sector.

The Normative Problem

In some ways, I see the term ‘next generation’ being used to further the normative problem we have in nonprofits. Harvard professor and scholar Ron Heifetz talks about how “normative issues” in leadership can make it difficult for new leaders to emerge. Basically, the term ‘normative’ means relating to an ideal model or standard for something, i.e. the “norm.” Heifetz says that we have a normative problem when a community believes collectively that leaders have certain characteristics like age, experience, pedigree, etc. And when a community believes that leaders come packaged in a particular way, they are more likely to wait for those types of leaders to come, instead of allowing different kinds of leaders to emerge. By saying ‘next generation’ leaders, I think we may be implying that young people are up “next” when we reach a certain age or level of experience, which is, in effect “the norm” for current leadership.

‘Next Generation’ Leaders are Not That Young

Most characterizations of the ‘next generation’ assume that these leaders are much younger than current leaders. Hence, the waiting “until we get old enough” connotation. But the reality is that young nonprofit leaders who are typically referenced as the ‘next generation’ are not as young as people think. We’re not all college kids anymore. This year, the oldest of Generation Y will be 30 years old. We’re no longer the “baby” in the workplace, we’re managers and directors and CEOs of great organizations. In short, the young professionals I’ve been talking about on this blog for three years have quickly become the ‘now generation.’ But I’m not sure the term ‘next generation’ takes that into account.

Who Decides When ‘Next Generation’ Leaders Become ‘Now Generation’ Leaders?

Having a cadre of bright young leaders in the nonprofit sector is great, but typecasting us as the ‘next generation’can also indicate that we need someone from up on high to deem us “ready” to lead when our time comes. Using the term can make it seem as if young people will lead after all the Baby Boomers are gone, however we all know that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Baby Boomers are staying in their jobs longer as a result of the economic downturn, and many are taking on “encore careers” as nonprofit leaders. So it’s up to us, the young nonprofit leaders, to redefine who gets to say when we’re ready to lead. It can’t be our bosses, our mentors, or some older and wiser colleague. It is we who must decide for ourselves whether and when we will lead. I’ve heard too many stories of young people who come into the nonprofit sector, do their jobs well, and wait to be promoted or included or at the very least, heard. What I’ve realized in hearing these stories is that if young people wait for approval from their organizations to lead, if we wait for someone to deem us worthy of leadership opportunities, it will never happen. We have to make our own opportunities. Malcolm X once said (my brackets), “Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man [or woman], you take it.” I want to see us take it.

So the new question I think we need to ask ourselves is not what we will do as ‘next generation’ nonprofit leaders, but what we are already doing to lead right now today. How do you answer that question for yourself? Do you consider yourself to be a ‘next generation’ leader?