There is a growing trend on the professional side of the internet that everyone should curate and maintain a personal brand. You define your expertise and your professional story, then live them out both digitally and in the office. It’s an effective career tool for building a public reputation and opening doors that may not have otherwise been available.
But what comes next? Once you’re in the room, on the team, doing the actual work, attempting to maintain a curated image can become a competing force against the necessity to perform.
Reputation and skillset are of dire importance to your success, but these are the organic fruit of labour, not something to consciously maintain. A brand is an ideal. It is a perfected, inanimate curated fiction with total control over every touchpoint with its audience. That’s what makes it effective as a marketing tool, but it’s also what makes it a poor model for how to actually behave at work. People are not brands, and the workplace has a way of exposing the difference.
An effective professional is a fluid, human collaborator. It might be possible to curate and maintain an image online, but the value you deliver in the workplace comes from the humility to put your ego aside and simply focus on the problem and finding a solution. Trying to maintain the image of an expert when you would be better off adopting a learners mindset will only work to erode the trust you are trying so hard to convey.
The Risk Calculation
Let me make this concrete with an over-simplified example. Imagine you are the finance lead on a cross-functional retails sales team, working on a project expected to produce huge sales growth. The team is discussing risks and opportunities, and like many corporate environments there is a lot of jargon and acronyms flying around. The team keeps referring to “ATS”. The sales lead thinks ATS will increase by at least 20%, but store leaders think its closer to 10%. You’re asked to model the scenarios and provide a recommendation.
The problem is that you don’t know what ATS means. You Google it, but the acronym could mean a dozen things. Now you face a trade-off. You can ask, but you have built a personal brand on expertise in the industry. How could you not know what ATS means? Your ego, image and earning capacity are wrapped up in your apparent expertise, so you stay quiet and reassure yourself that you’ll figure it out later. The meeting ends with a follow-up scheduled in a few days to discuss your findings.
In this situation there are only two options: Option A is to project competency in the moment, operate in the dark, and under-deliver by doing the wrong thing or wasting time asking the question a day late. Option B is to seem uncertain for a moment, clarify ambiguity, and deliver results on time.
There are only two ways to create value as a professional: do work well, and do it fast. Option A, which you have chosen by prioritizing your image over asking what ATS means, achieves neither outcome most effectively.
Now, imagine you pick Option B. You ask the question and someone says, “Oh, it’s Average Transaction Size.” Right, you know what that is. You respond, “Gotcha, I’ve always used Average Transaction Value, or ATV. I can have that to you in two days.” Someone else on the team chips in as well. They didn’t realize that’s what ATS was either, and now that they know, they suggest considering another parallel project in your analysis. In one moment, you have made the process faster and the output better.
Asking the “stupid” question is not a sign of weakness. It is a risk-mitigation strategy. Focusing on protecting the result is the most professional thing you can do, despite any perceived dent in your “brand”.
Driving the Bus
This may seem obvious, but I have seen it happen. I’ve made the mistake too. Sometimes people struggle to actually prioritize the problem over their own ego. But I have also improved at this over my professional career. And while its been a process, it clicked for me during my brief stint in the Restructuring department at PwC. I wasn’t on that team long, but I did absorb the team motto: “Drive the bus.”
In a restructuring engagement, and in any professional project, there are going to be a lot stakeholders. While each stakeholder has a role to play, driving the bus means accepting responsibility for getting the project across the finish line. Anyone can be on the bus, you need to be the driver.
The implication is that if something needs to get done, you need to be aware of it and make sure it happens. If something is unclear, you must take the time to understand it. It is a mindset that increases pressure. It will probably make you more stressed. But shifting from being a prestigious “expert” to being a “bus driver” profoundly changes your focus and perspective. It’s not about you anymore. It’s about getting everyone to the destination.
The irony is that ownership and responsibility will produce a strong personal brand. But the mindset of driving the bus and curating your brand are complete opposites. The first requires the humility to deprioritize your image, ask for help if needed, admit error early, and change direction. Those actions bring clarity to ambiguity. Brand maintenance, on the other hand, means protecting what you’ve done in the past and appearing knowledgable even when you aren’t. That is back-of-the-bus behaviour, and you will stay at the back of the bus by behaving that way.
Proponents of personal branding might argue that your brand could simply be someone who asks good questions or obsesses over accuracy. But that framing still misses the point. A brand is a static representation; a person is complex, fluid, and free-thinking. The value of a person in the workplace is not expertise on a subject that becomes outdated in a few years - it is the ability to maneuver, adapt, and learn.
People can’t create value by coasting on the prestige of a logo on the front of the bus. We have to take the steering wheel, survey the road, and reroute if needed. The only way to do that is to abandon the ego that comes with defining yourself as a brand and embrace the ruthless humility of a driver with eyes on only the destination.