I’ve always wondered why employees really need to be concerned with personal branding.  It’s certainly a hot topic on the web.  I’ve watched people write blogs that eventually became books and magazines.  Heck, some even grew into businesses.  So why does a regular employee in a company concern themselves with branding?  You would think that their performance against their goals should be sufficient to determine their value to the company, unless business has gotten more complicated.  I can’t see that as being the case.  However, I do think change has come.  Actually, it has diffused from the top echelon to the lowest levels of the organization.  Here’s my pitch.

Henry Mintzberg performed an amazing study in the early 1970’s for his PhD dissertation at MIT analyzing the actual work habits and time management of chief executive officers (CEOs).  He found that CEOs performed ten managerial roles.  I don’t want to go into much detail here on each role.  You can read his book by HarperCollins, entitled “The Nature of Managerial Work” if you want to know more.  The point is that of these roles, the CEOs spent most of their time looking outward.  This means they don’t spend a lot of time analyzing the internal workings of the company or developing the next level of leaders.  They are the face of the company and consider themselves challenged to grow the company by interacting with potential customers, partners, etc.

Since they are CEOs and just one individual in the company, their absence from the day-to-day work is tolerable.  Now, let’s look just below the CEOs.  In the 1980's, top managers and practitioners began to question middle managers' importance. At the same time, environmental changes such as the globalization of the economy and the development of information technology fostered variations in organizational structures. These changes, often associated with downsizing, probably resulted in a modification of middle managers' roles.  You think?

Pavett and Lau performed a study in the 80’s looking at the other level of managers and compared them with Mintzberg’s results on CEOs.  They found that the lower level managers emulated the higher levels of managers.  Why?  One startling conclusion was that managers that performed the duties we would normally think a manager should perform, such as training and development of employees, were promoted far less than managers that emulated the top brass.  This is a breakdown in design.  If managers can get promoted by avoiding the activities that were originally designed into their job, then they will undoubtedly abstain from doing that work.  You get what you reward, right?

So here’s my thinking on branding today.  The same trend that went from the CEOs down to the lowest levels of management has diffused further into the ranks of the salaried and even hourly workers.  Performance isn’t something we are graded on anymore.  Just look at your last performance review.  It’s all social or soft skills that we need to be good at.  But why?  That seems more like a skill for those outward facing, like a CEO, than it does for the lower ranks of the company.  Employees should be focused on their tasks and ensuring they perform effectively and efficiently.  However, if they aren’t graded on that performance, then you won’t get it.  Lower managers are focused on acting like a CEO.  It’s on their minds.  It’s how they grade themselves.  Have they passed this down to their own employees?  Could we now be faced with a system that’s totally based on social awareness?  Are we now in a society were social prowess trumps technical prowess at all levels?

Share your thoughts.