CLIC Sponsors Personal Branding Workshop for Women MBAs

The Center for Leadership, Innovation, and Change (CLIC) at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business hosted “The Business of You,” a personal branding workshop for women in the Smith alumni and MBA community on Nov. 12, 2015. The workshop featured speakers Carolyn Covey Morris, Founder and CEO of QMobius Inc., a brand marketing and public relations firm, and Halina Caravello, VP of environmental, health, and safety at Tyco International.

Covey Morris and Caravello tailored this workshop especially toward female executives and spoke to the importance of branding as a tool to give women a better chance for upward mobility and reaching top-level positions. The workshop engaged participants through Covey Morris’s and Caravello’s unique framework for developing a personal brand.

Covey Morris and Caravello stressed the importance developing a personal brand as a tool for enabling such things as, building relationships, developing thought leadership, promotion seeking, position hunting, and starting your own business.   When leaders develop authentic brands, their teams are more trusting of the leader and are more willing to follow that leader. Covey Morris and Caravello asked participants to explore multiple aspects of their brand including: brand vision, brand market, brand differentiation, brand positioning, brand attributes, brand benefits, brand personality, brand promise, key brand messages, and visual identity. All these aspects help leaders reinforce that others can trust them to deliver in a consistent way. The workshop leaders also explored what makes a personal brand effective. Personal brands should be authentic, inspire feelings, and engender trust.

Some key tips from Covey Morris and Caravello were that leaders should:

• Actively manage their brand vision
• Adjust their personal leadership styles to fit within the brand vision
• Look for cues about how others perceive their brand
• Understand that brands are not static
• Focus on strengths, not weaknesses when developing a brand vision
• Obtain feedback from others to make sure behaviors match the brand.

By the end of the workshop, the enthusiastic participants shared that they were able to look at their personal brands in a new more effective way thanks to the framework provided by Covey Morris and Caravello.

Here are Covey Morris’ and Caravello’s top 10 tips for personal branding:

1. Everything you do creates an image and winning people do everything they can to manage the images and perceptions being developed about them. This is branding.
2. Branding is not about where you are today but where you want to go…your strategic decisions should always be a stretch toward your vision.
3. People buy on emotion, not just facts. Your brand strategy decisions need to reinforce the emotional quotient.
4. Branding is a top strategic imperative, not just a marketing and communications issue. Your branding decisions should guide you every day.
5. Impediments must be identified and addressed to execute brand strategies fully.
6. Your goals should be clarity, consistency and comprehensiveness in your brand strategies and subsequent communications about your brand.
7. Your behavior is the most powerful influencer on branding success.
8. You are your best branding tool and “brand ambassador” – living and promoting your strategic brand values enables your brand to thrive.
9. Successful branding isn’t just about making decisions that feel right, it is about making decisions that people will perceive as believable, achievable and differentiating by you.
10. Branding is in the minds of others and their perceptions are real. If your brand concepts don’t ring true to you audiences, your efforts will fail. The most important thing you can do in branding is listen.

For more information about the Center for Leadership, Innovation, and Change (CLIC), visit: www.rhsmith.umd.edu/clic.

- Alison Scharman, MBA Candidate 2017