Championship Points

The trials and tribulations of athlete endorsers provide great insight into the personal branding process. Great athlete spokespeople, like great executives and line employees , appreciate the following points:

• Personal brands evolve whether they are managed or not. Managers can either choose to play an active role in shaping it or they can allow others to do it for them. Regardless, personal brands bring with them lasting impressions .

• Understand the environment and circumstances in which the personal brand name is established and reinforced. Just like athletes often seek to make themselves more marketable with the increased persuasiveness of the media, business people too must understand the settings in which they will be viewed most favorably.

• Stay on point by consistently communicating and reinforcing the same positive attributes. Lance Armstrong has stayed on his message so brilliantly that he continues to have people talk about him and his story. His reputation precedes him. If managers do it properly, when (potential) colleagues and employers introduce them, they'll say, "This is the guy who. . . "

• Be relevant. This does necessarily mean showing up for work 2,631 games in a row like Cal Ripken; it merely means that people should be true to themselves and others will admire it. There's nothing wrong with being a "milk" guy, provided you are indeed one.

• Make it easy for people to respect you. Do the little things that people don't necessarily see. Help out when you're not expected to. Do the little things like Andre Agassi always has.

• Contrary to the tagline Agassi has voiced, image is not everything -substance matters. Managers are ultimately judged on merit, not intangibles that fail to build shareholder value.

• Stay in the information flow. Being the Tiger Woods of your office can bring with it limitations. Managers compromise their brand by not going out on occasion to have a glass of wine with a few colleagues or by not playing on the company's softball team. Employees who don't participate in activities like these routinely find themselves a step behind in the corporate communications process.

• Encourage and establish lines of communication at all levels of the corporate totem pole. Michael Jordan communicates and speaks the languages of most consumers, and built his personal brand in the process.

• Help others establish, maintain, and extend their personal brands when appropriate. Think of this as personal branding's golden rule.

• Protect your reputation at all costs. It is the most important part of your business image, and once it has been damaged it is very difficult -if not impossible -to repair.

• If a company intends on using a corporate spokesperson, it should make sure he or she is familiar with the business' customers and relevant to the brand -attributes that apply to everyone in an organization.

Personal branding is critical in today's business environment because it contributes to success in virtually all areas of enterprise. A failure to live up to personal branding's golden rule of establishing, maintaining, and extending the personal brands of not only yourself, but also your colleagues, often limits success.

When strong personal brands are lacking it becomes increasingly difficult for executives to effectively communicate their positions on critical business issues, including employee relations.