by John Hall
Every month, Pat posts his monthly income statements on his website. You can see exactly what he’s made (or lost) from his own online revenue streams, which is a powerful way to demonstrate the effectiveness of his business methodology. But Pat shares more than just numbers; he also writes about his challenges, failures, and successes as both a businessperson and a father. In the eyes of his followers, Pat’s honesty makes him human. (I know Pat personally, and he’s also probably one of the happiest people you’ll meet.) His audience knows he has nothing to hide, and they reward him with their trust.
In her TED Talk on the power of vulnerability, researcher-storyteller Brené Brown explains, “In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen—really seen.”1
What she’s saying makes complete sense. We have to be ourselves, and we have to give others a chance to see who we are.
If your business has solid products and great services that are as valuable as they are ethical, you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s only when you’re trying to hide something that transparency poses a threat.
When you’re transparent about what you do and why you do it, then there’s no worry about something going negatively. Your mind is free of worrying about someone seeing who you are. And that freedom is one of the best feelings in life.
I think we’ve all seen this at play, especially in our personal lives. For me, I know when I try to keep something from my wife, she’ll find out sooner or later. And that whole time between me deciding to keep something under wraps and her learning what it was is filled with anxiety. When I’m honest and transparent about why I did what I did (even if it’s a screwup) and what’s going on, I feel a sense of freedom.
The tricky thing about transparency is that as much as it benefits you, it can also hurt relationships when it goes untempered by common sense. Let’s say my mother-in-law visits and makes a meat loaf using a recipe that’s been in the family for generations. This meal looks and smells great, but when I take a bite, the texture is like shoe leather.
In what world would my telling her that benefit either of us? If I said, “Look, Donna, I’ve got to be transparent with you: this meat loaf is awful,” I would only hurt our relationship (and possibly wind up sleeping in my car after my wife heard about it). (Full disclosure: My mother-in-law’s meat loaf is perfectly fine.)
Aside from being rude, a statement like that is wrong for a couple of reasons: it was unsolicited, and it wasn’t delivered in a constructive way. Now, I understand that sometimes transparency can draw attention to unflattering truths, but that doesn’t give you license to broad-cast just anything to everyone and their mother (literally, in this case).
Transparency isn’t an all-or-nothing arrangement. Of course I try not to beat around the bush, and I strive to be as transparent as I can—but that doesn’t mean I’m 100 percent transparent every day about all parts of my life. Your rule of thumb should be to ask yourself, “Is this helpful?” Does it benefit your audience to know this? Does it add to the truth of your relationship with this audience?
In this chapter, we’ll discuss what it means to practice authentic transparency and how cultivating a sense of self that is both honest and likable can place you top of mind and lead to exceptional growth.
The Relationship Between Transparency and Trust
Edelman, a global PR and communications firm, releases results of studies on consumer trust in businesses. In one study, 83 percent of U.S. customers indicated that the number one determinant of a company’s trustworthiness is whether it has transparent, honest business practices in place.2 And this goes beyond straightforward service agreements and fair product return policies—consumers demand internal fairness, too.
Remember the uproar in 2015 after the New York Times ran an exposé on the “bruising” working conditions at Amazon?3 Not only were people horrified to read about Amazon employees allegedly weeping at their desks, the public also felt deceived; we had assumed that one of the most innovative tech firms in the world treated its staff more like Google does than Walmart. To hear anything that suggested otherwise dealt a blow to Jeff Bezos’s credibility (at least until he and other “Amazonians” shared content that painted a different picture entirely).4
The second most important factor in developing consumer trust is the quality of the products and services that a company provides. Again, transparency plays a vital role.
Consider, for instance, the story of Mast Brothers chocolate. The Masts are bearded Brooklyn-based chocolatiers who tout themselves as pioneers of the bean-to-bar artisanal chocolate movement. But in late 2015, allegations emerged that throughout the early days of the company, Mast was making bars by melting down commercially produced French chocolate and repackaging it as “original”—a pretty big detour on the path from bean to bar.
Quartz published a piece called “How the Mast Brothers Fooled the World into Paying $10 a Bar for Crappy Hipster Chocolate.”5 Vanity Fair, CNBC, and the Guardian covered the controversy, and Mast sales plunged. Regardless of what’s being misrepresented, whether it’s your process, your products, or anything else, the risks are always greater than any perceived reward. Transparency and authenticity matter.
Finally, the third and most important factor in determining a company’s trustworthiness is how it communicates with the outside world. Even if you’re running a great business, failing to engage your customer base in an ongoing conversation is the equivalent of withholding information.
To generate trust, you need to create a relationship; for that to happen, you need to open up lines of communication that are honest, meaningful, and authentic. Remember, relationships emerge between people, not between people and a faceless brand. Therefore, it’s vital that you provide an opportunity for your customer base—as well as the rest of your network—to connect directly to the people who make up your brand.
And it starts with you.
The Evolution of Personal Branding to Thought Leadership and Company Branding
Debating whether to invest significant time and resources into your brand isn’t really an option anymore. Simply put, it is nearly impossible to survive—much less succeed—in this You Marketing landscape without a thriving personal brand. The most obvious motivation is for your own self-investment. Imagine a 401(k) plan investment: To live your dream, you have to consistently invest over time. But it’s valuable for more than what it can do for you alone. The evolution of personal branding has made it a necessary strategy for companies, too.
Before we go any further, I want to clarify some terms. In this chapter, I’ll be exploring the evolution from personal branding to thought leadership and why the intersection between personal branding and company branding led to this change.
Personal branding has been around forever. Experts such as William Arruda, Dorie Clark, and Dan Schawbel, among others, have been preaching about its importance for years. However, it wasn’t until recently that the term thought leadership grew into such a buzzword. That change was necessary because there needed to be a different term that connected the dots between personal branding and its benefits to a company as a whole.
“Personal” is a word that implies one individual and screams ego stroking—not the beginnings of a solid company strategy. But in reality, if personal branding is done right and leveraged across your company, it can be one of your most important company branding tactics.
Being strategic about your investments in key employees’ personal branding can pay off.
Encouraging your key employees to share unique experience and expertise with your target audience through digital content, social media, speaking engagements, and the like, can clearly have a big benefit for the company, and it’s not just about the individual anymore. If the strategy is put together well, it can benefit how your company shows up for search when people are looking for areas around your service, help you connect with potential recruits, or even train new employees with the content you are creating from these ke
y players.
That said, designating one or two leaders to represent the company’s brand doesn’t mean that the rest of the team fades into the background and goes unnoticed. The actions of all employees reflect on the business, so the stronger their various personal brands, the better. A team with multiple thought leaders quickly generates a reputation for being an innovative powerhouse.
Further, it doesn’t mean that only your senior-level executives can be thought leaders. If you’ve built a good company, you’ve got a lot of really smart people working together, and anyone can (and should) practice and build thought leadership within a company.
Honestly, of all the assets your company possesses, the knowledge of your employees is the biggest and most important differentiating factor. Those insights are unique to those individuals, and they work for your company—building thought leadership around that expertise sets you apart from competitors and offers your audience more opportunities to connect with your brand.
When we started Influence & Co., we worked almost exclusively with execs and entrepreneurs. Since then, the fire has caught on, and employees throughout companies are eager to communicate their expertise, too. From engineers who can explain the newest technological advances to the sales team that knows exactly what content its leads are asking for, the thought leadership trend has extended beyond the C-suite. Subject matter experts are now building their authority because they know exactly how it can help their teams accomplish goals while also amplifying their companies’ brands.
Let’s assume that of all the smart people in your organization, you (and your brand) are among those selected to represent the company. As a public representative of the business, you have a serious responsibility to make the language, messaging, and marketing goals of the company your own. But you also have a responsibility to your own voice—because if you’re not authentic, you’re a thinly veiled marketing gimmick. And gimmicks have a hard time forming lasting relationships.
How do you maintain individual personality while representing your company? How can a personal brand be both compelling and on-message to make sure it represents the business well?
Here are a few guiding principles for achieving just that:
Limit Obnoxious Self-Promotion
Yes, the concept of personal branding may sound inherently narcissistic, and the narcissism endemic to social media only makes things worse. But don’t let that fool you.
Remember, your goal is to build meaningful relationships. For that to happen, you need to open up to your audience, sharing your insight and experience in a way that is honest, transparent, and human. Only when you present yourself as a real person—flaws, failures, and all—will you build a real bond with your audience.
In a webinar for Inc. columnists, Jeff Haden was asked how he achieves such massive engagement numbers on his content. He said that he puts himself in his audience’s shoes, does his best to honestly think about what would engage them the most, and then marries his own knowledge and experiences with that information. Notice that at no point in this process does Jeff strategize on how to promote himself or put his needs above his audience’s. That’s the key.
As I mentioned earlier in this book, I’ve absolutely ridden the narcissistic roller coaster, and all it ever did was weaken my relationships and make me feel a little empty inside. I learned my lesson: I worked first on controlling my self-promotion (or my own bragging and exaggerating) among my friends, and soon that self-control became habitual and spilled into my professional life.
Is it great to hear other people celebrate my success or the success of my company? Of course. And when you avoid blatant self-promotion and focus instead on the needs of your audience, you’ll build a loyal enough following that when something worth celebrating happens, your advocates will be singing your praises.
Always Deliver Value
Authenticity is the foundation of your relationship with your audience. But for the relationship to flourish, it’s not enough to simply be authentic; you also have to deliver tangible value. You have to make life better or easier for your audience, not just tell honest stories about yourself.
So how do you know what’s really valuable? It’s simple: ask. You are the best researcher you will ever have. Reach out to your audience and ask what would be valuable to them. Pay attention to what topics and formats of communication they’ve engaged with in the past; is your audience interested in revisiting those ideas? You won’t know until you ask.
I used to make the classic mistake my wife points out sometimes: I acted before listening or thinking all the way through something first. I used to write about what I thought was interesting or what I thought would be valuable to my audience. Now I ask. Over time, you’ll start to notice patterns of what your most important audiences find valuable, and that will make the process even easier.
The idea with thought leadership is that by sharing your knowledge and expertise, you’re adding value to your audience’s lives through education. This education could come in the form of an insightful conversation in a bar with one person or in a crowd of thousands listening to a keynote speaker share her expertise.
It could be delivered through a comprehensive white paper exploring industry trends and best practices, a simple blog post celebrating the unique contributions of a fellow leader, or an article about work-life balance. Whatever the format or topic, everything you communicate should enhance the lives of your audience in some way.
Does it have to be a topic in which you have expertise? Not quite. When my daughter was born, I struggled with taking paternity leave for the first time, even though we had just adopted a new paternity policy and I knew I needed to lead by example. But the most I’d ever taken off work was five days, and now I was expected to take off six weeks? I didn’t think I’d make it. (I didn’t. I made it for three and a half weeks.)
When I got back, though, many friends, partners, and clients asked how it was. Honestly, I enjoyed it, and when I shared that with other workaholics, they were interested. Some recommended I write an article about it. The first article I published when I returned to work was about my leave, and it did really well.
Am I an expert on paternity leave? Absolutely not. Am I an expert in anything related to time off? Nope. What qualified me to write this article was my real-world experience struggling with this decision that ended up being incredibly valuable for me—and of course my audience’s request. While I mostly share content about topics such as leadership, sales, content marketing, and PR, I understand that it’s OK to communicate insights outside of those areas of expertise if my audience finds it valuable and easier to connect with me on a human level, too.
Take a moment to think about the experiences you’ve had that could enhance the lives of your target audience. Write down your topic and start keeping a bank of these ideas. When you get a little more time on the side, start writing and see where it takes you.
Tackle Real Issues and Be Smart About It
Although there is certainly value in making your audience smile, one can take only so many memes. Pumping your audience full of fluff is a surefire way to lose their attention; if you don’t say anything meaningful, people will stop listening. Show your audience that you respect their intelligence, and make a habit of tackling real issues. Don’t shy away from controversy, and don’t be afraid to be honest. That said, be strategic: if you’re not well educated about a controversial topic, don’t weigh in. There is no point in simply adding to the noise.
And if you ever find yourself at the center of controversy, the way Apple did with the FBI in 2016, you’d do well to surround yourself with content that addresses it head-on. I use Apple as an example because the open letter that CEO Tim Cook published6 did a fantastic job of tackling real issues of personal privacy and security—and it was a smart approach.
The controversy began when the FBI asked Apple to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino terrorist. Apple refused because of the security risk it posed to use
rs of Apple products. When headlines accused Apple of siding with the terrorist, Apple took a strong public stance—which was risky.
On behalf of the company, Tim Cook wrote:
We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.
He continued by explaining explicitly why Apple refused to comply, ending with the following statement:
We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country. We believe it would be in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the implications. While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.
From a business perspective, that willingness to prioritize its consumers and stand by their security offered a competitive advantage: this is a company that’s going to bat for you and your privacy, and you can trust it completely. That’s huge.
Other controversial topics require thoughtful, constructive conversation, and when industry experts contribute to those conversations in a respectful way, they can position themselves as trusted leaders in those spaces.
Take my brother, for example. He’s a defense attorney who makes it a priority to educate his audience on changes to legislation that are complicated or controversial. His firm’s blog has a “need to know” section that explains these changes in a way that’s easy to digest, so the average person can understand how the new laws might affect him or her.