Welcome to The Branding Room Only Podcast where we share career stories, strategies, and lessons learned on how industry leaders and influencers have built their personal brands. Now, let's get started with the show.
Hi, all, and welcome to another episode of Branding Room Only. I am your host, Paula Edgar, and excited to be back with you to talk about something on my own. I haven't done a solo episode in a while so I thought I would talk to you about something that I encountered that I'm going to make into a three-part series, and I call it Petty Branding.
It is an offshoot of the series that I started, which is Brand Boosters and Brand Bruisers. Petty Branding is definitely on the bruising side. What is it? I decided to define petty for you in terms of what I mean by it by using Webster's Dictionary.
One of the definitions is petty is marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies or being small-minded. The Urban Dictionary says it's the state of being when one does something simply to annoy someone else.
Hopefully, you'll get the gist of why I'm bringing those two definitions into my conversation about Petty Branding, some of the small details that can make or break your brand.
All right, so as I've done before, I decided to create an acronym to run through petty for you. Let's get to it. PETTY, it's having Personal motives over strategic needs, that’s the P. The E is Ego-driven decisions. The T is Trivial changes with significant impact. The next T is Thought leadership challenge or tactical adjustments made. The Y has a double meaning too. It's Yearning for personal impact versus overall impact and progress and just You. How you have been impacting you and the perception of you?
Let's jump into that. I want to tell you a story. Many of you know that I work and consult with organizations, primarily a lot of lawyers, law firms, and legal organizations. In some of the work that I've done, I've had the chance to do some fantastic collaborations with organizations.
There's this one leader who I have to tell you I loved working with. This person was a visionary, someone who was thoughtful, kind, and collaborative. As such, it made working with them a pleasure.
We also got to see the impact of several initiatives that were research-based with impact or input from others, stakeholders, etc., and had the chance to implement lots of wonderful things.
Again, as I mentioned, I did this side by side with this leader. As things happened, this leader got another opportunity and left the organization and everyone was sad. But as what happens, someone has to come in and be their successor.
When that happened, many of us were ready to start collaboration and ready to really jump into continuing the work that we had already done under the previous leader.
Instead, what this leader did was to do a very brief, if at all, listening tour. From the feedback that this person received, they decided they were going to come in and make their impact in a very petty way, essentially by burning down everything that had been worked on before, dismantling all of the programs and initiatives and the ways that they were done and the people who were collaborated with in order to come in and make their own mark.
Hence, my PETTY acronym, which I'll remind you, Personal motives over strategic needs, Ego-driven decisions, Trivial changes with significant impact, Thought leadership challenge, tactical adjustments made, Yearning for personal impact versus overall impact in progress, and again, the Y is You, how it impacts you.
I know that many of you probably have had situations where you worked with a petty colleague or a petty leader who is only thinking about themselves and not the full impact on others and think about how their actions impact what you perceived about them and their brand, how they were able to continue to navigate with new stakeholders or go forward within the organization or beyond externally because of how they had navigated this.
As I mentioned, this is going to be a three-part because I want to talk to you about that, what happened, but then I want to talk to you in the next episode about how I actually responded, which is also a brand lesson. Then finally, how a colleague helped to navigate what had happened and how I responded in the third part of the Petty Branding series.
But I think about a lot of folks who have come to me and talked to me about people who have in meetings taken credit for things that they hadn't done, who will not support something because it's done by someone else, lots of those petty actions.
The challenge for me is that when you have a perception, particularly when someone is coming in new perception of who they are, you look at their pedigree, you look at their experience, and you expect that there's going to be collaboration and new initiatives, but not necessarily slashing down all of the old initiatives, and I can almost see the faces of everyone in the room, their hopes for that dashing, and what occurred subsequent to that meeting, where it was announced that those things were going to be taken off the plate and no longer connected with, is folks who did not have trust. They did not have enthusiasm. They did not want to engage.
The impact and cost of being petty in your branding and petty in your leadership is impacting employee satisfaction and retention. It is the potential loss of talent and opportunities. It is, ding, the bruise to your reputation and your opportunity for continued engagement.
I thought it would be great for me to come in and talk about this a little bit as a part one and hear what your thoughts are. Have you ever navigated with a petty brander? Have you been a petty brander yourself?
What have been some of your thoughts when you encountered a witness, petty branding, and how it made you think about the person's impact and their brand, and how it made you either want to continue to engage or not?
That being said, the goal here is always on Branding Room Only to recognize and harness all of the skills that you need to build a stronger, more cohesive, and more and more impactful brand.
I'd love to hear from you. Remember, as we close today's session, please like, download, and of course, share and rate this podcast with friends, families, colleagues, and of course, those who need to hear it. We're going to talk in part two about how I showed up when it came to this branding situation, which will be interesting. Bye, y'all.
