So, this super-bright exec from a SW dev company is on a Zoom with me. He stares right into his camera and thus straight in my eyes and declares:
“We need to be doing thought leadership.”
Me: “Yes, you do”.
Crickets. Silence.
Me again: “So, what’s stopping you?”
More crickets. He looks away from the screen and sheepishly reveals:
“I feel uneasy about this ‘personal-branding thing’”.
It dawned on me: especially engineer-types and introverts often think trying to step up and be an authority is egotistical. So they put it off.
This is the wrong perspective. The right perspective is: you are here to serve.
Think of it this way: your “stepping up and giving help” serves one purpose: to make your target audience’s job, life, mood better.
It’s about your market, not you. You need to show up to serve your market – and not to “look smart” and “build authority”… although that will naturally be a consequence of your efforts.
I explained this, then I shut up. You could almost hear through Zoom, the cogs in his head turning. He was going to have an “aha” moment about this…
In our next call, we started mapping out a strategy for serving the market and harnessing the resulting goodwill.
