Session two of our Connection Catalyst Leadership Program focused on leadership and personal brand, and it was one of those sessions where the conversation in the room was as valuable as anything on the slides. Senior professionals who are very good at their work, trusted by their clients and respected by their firms, sat with the seemingly simple question: what are you known for, and is that by accident or by choice? The discussion was candid, occasionally uncomfortable (no-one likes self reflection), and genuinely useful. This is what came out of it.
When a client has an engagement and needs to call someone, they don’t work through a mental list of everyone they know, ranking them by technical competence. The person who comes to mind first is the one whose name they already associate with that kind of engagement, and it isn’t always the most technically capable person. That’s not luck. It’s brand: the feeling someone has when they think of you, and that feeling forms whether you’re paying attention to it or not.
Most professionals know this, but not many do much about it. When the work is there, investing in your own profile building feels like the least urgent thing on the list. There’s always a client engagement that takes precedence, always a deadline that matters more. What gets missed is that the two aren’t in competition. Your brand is what determines whether the opportunity arrives in the first place.
This is particularly true in professional services, where the distinction between you and your product doesn’t exist the way it does in other industries. A client retaining a lawyer, accountant or consultant isn’t buying an abstract service. They’re buying that person’s specific judgment, their relationships and their reputation, and when they make that call, they’re retaining the person as much as the expertise.
At junior levels, technical excellence is more than enough. Do great work, build your knowledge and you’ll progress. But something shifts as careers advance. Technical competence stops being a differentiator and becomes the baseline expectation. It’s what you need just to be in the conversation. What separates the people who attract the most interesting work, who get pulled into conversations early and are sought out rather than simply available, is reputation, and reputation is built long before someone walks into a meeting with you.
There’s a distinction worth making between personal brand (in the professional context) and leadership brand, because they’re not the same thing and whether you know it or not, you have both. Personal brand is visible, forming quickly from first impressions. It’s how you come across in interactions and what someone finds if they look you up or meet you at a networking event. It can be built by design, carefully and deliberately, or it can develop by default through the impression you happen to leave on your best and worst days. Leadership brand is slower to form, built through the experience of people working with you over time. It too can be shaped by design or left to default, built by your most distracted moments and your least considered interactions.
The reason the distinction matters is that you can be strong in one, but vastly different in the other. Someone can present well, be active and visible in their field and carry a strong external profile yet be exceptionally difficult to work with or ineffective at developing the people around them. Equally, someone can be deeply trusted and valued internally, the person everyone wants to work for, and yet be almost invisible to anyone outside the firm. Both are real brands, both are being built right now, and for both, senior leaders need to consider: are you doing it by default or by design?
Building brand deliberately doesn’t mean promoting yourself in ways that feel uncomfortable. It means being clear about what you want to be known for and then showing up that way consistently, in the conversations you have, the work you share and the opinions you offer, in the room and with the people you lead. A brand built on who you are is one you can sustain, and sustaining it is most of the work.
