The case against personal branding (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Debbie Millman: I was in the conference room waiting to meet with a client, and I saw the magazine on the coffee table in the reception area. 

Adam Grant: In the late nineties, Debbie Millman was advising companies on branding. She picked up an issue of Fast Company, and the cover stopped her in her tracks. It was unlike anything she'd seen before.

Debbie Millman: It was this very dramatically designed cover, oranges and very powerful colors. 

Adam Grant: The cover looked like an ad for Tide laundry detergent with its big blue lettering, but... 

Debbie Millman: ...instead of saying Tide laundry detergent, it said "a brand called you." 

Adam Grant: A brand called you. 

Voiceover: As of this moment, you are going to think of yourself differently.

You are not an employee of General Motors. You're not a staffer at General Mills. You don't belong to any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn't to any particular function. You are not defined by your job title and you're not confined to your job description. Starting today, you are a brand.

Debbie Millman: The cover story talked about this new construction of our corporate selves that was required in the modern marketplace, and I was struck by this sort of brand thinking. It seemed really sexy. It seemed a way to leverage who you were in a bigger, more significant, more statuesque kind of way. 

Adam Grant: Since then, it's become a mantra. If you wanna succeed in your career, you need to build your personal brand. LinkedIn is littered with personal branding advice. And you can hire consultants, coaches, and influencers to help you build your Instagram brand. The idea of a personal brand might sound harmless, maybe even useful. After all, in a competitive world, it's good to be known for something. But trying to build a brand is the wrong way to do it.

Debbie Millman: People can own brands. They can create brands. They can manage brands. They could design brands. But once you start to construct yourself as a brand, I believe that you forfeit everything that is the best part of being human. 

Adam Grant: You're not a product. You don't need to market yourself in a shiny package. What you want to build is a reputation.

I'm Adam Grant and this is Work Life, my podcast with TED. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces. Today, the case against personal branding.

When you hear the word brand, what comes to mind? Apple? Nike? Amazon? These companies spend billions carefully crafting an image. They want you to associate them with particular values. Apple's brand is anchored on design and innovation. Nike's revolves around sport and excellence. Amazon's focuses on customer obsession.

When you build a personal brand, you apply the same logic to yourself. 

Voiceover: Developing a personal brand helps you stand out in a crowded market. Investing in your personal brand is investing in your future. In today's digital landscape, having a strong personal brand is no longer optional. It's essential. It's essential. It's essential. You need to. Do it! You have to. Do it! What are you waiting for? I was nothing before my personal brand. 

Adam Grant: You want people to associate you with particular values and virtues, so you identify your target audience and come up with a desired image. Maybe you wanna be known in the ad industry as a creative visionary, or in the manufacturing world as a quality control master.

You put your tagline all over your social media profiles. You post the awards you won all over your feed. Hashtag blessed. You ask people to like your post to boost their popularity. You're executing a strategy to project your image to your audience, and therein lies the problem. 

Debbie Millman: I am vehemently opposed to the notion of someone aspiring to be a brand.

Adam Grant: It's intentional, but it's also fake. 

Debbie Millman: I think a personal brand is an oxymoron. When someone tries to create a personal brand, they're manufacturing an impersonal perception. 

Adam Grant: Debbie Millman teaches a class at the School of Visual Arts. She named it ironically, A Brand Called You. 

Debbie Millman: When we position ourselves as a brand, we're essentially forcing ourselves to project an image of what we believe most people will approve of and admire and buy into. 

Adam Grant: Personal branding is fundamentally a performance. It's about appearing a certain way, not being a certain way, and that's where it starts to get weird. 

Debbie Millman: If somebody wants to risk presenting themselves as this manufactured entity, then they run the risk of creating a level of perception that is and always will be impossible to maintain, only because they're human. I mean, think about it. Manufactured brands have a hard enough time staying consistent, staying relevant, staying beloved, and we're expected to do that as a person that can't even show up the same way every day just because they have different moods or because they might get sick or because they might gain weight, or because they might marry the wrong person? I mean, come on. 

Adam Grant: Personal branding runs the risk of putting your image above your identity. Your attention centers on how you wanna be seen, instead of who you want to become. Your decisions are based on the impression you wanna project, rather than the character you wanna cultivate. Even if you think you can solve that problem, there's another reason to be wary of personal branding: few people can pull it off. In a recent study at a multinational firm. People filled out a survey about their personal branding. They rated how effective they'd been at creating a positive image in the eyes of others and making themselves known in their fields. People who thought they had created a strong personal brand rated themselves as more successful and more employable, but they didn't do better on objective metrics. They didn't get higher performance ratings, or get paid more than their peers. 

Mark Bolino: The idea that I'm going to be a brand myself, promoting yourself in that way, is unlikely to lead to extrinsic types of career success, like more money and promotions. 

Adam Grant: Mark Bolino is a management professor at the University of Oklahoma and a leading expert on impression management.

Mark Bolino: Impression management involves using behaviors to create a certain image in other people's eyes. You're trying to make people see you in a certain way, and so you engage in certain types of behaviors to facilitate that image. 

Adam Grant: To build a personal brand, the go-to behavior is self-promotion, advertising your talents and accomplishments. There's a time and a place for that. 

Mark Bolino: In a job interview, it's perfectly appropriate to self-promote. The research shows that in interview context, that's the one place that promoting your self works. 

Adam Grant: But it turns out that self-promotion is ineffective in most situations, and counterproductive in some.

Mark Bolino: Most of what I've read and researched myself on self-promotion really just points out a lot of the downsides. It works best when people don't know things about you. In the workplace, people know a lot of things about you, and so how you act on a regular basis, that's what really matters. 

Adam Grant: When you try to promote your personal brand, you take three risks.

One, it can make you look self-absorbed. Self-promotion violates social norms of humility. Research shows that when people constantly advertise their own achievements, they're seen as arrogant, unfriendly, and self-centered. 

Mark Bolino: You wanna be seen as competent, but a lot of times you're seen as sort of conceited.

Adam Grant: And if you're a woman, the backlash is even stronger. Unfortunately, due to gender stereotypes that position women as modest and other-oriented, people react more negatively to self-promotion by women than men. 

Mark Bolino: Women can be seen as more competent when they use self-promotion, but they're seen as less warm. And so that's a, a real double-edged sword there. 

Adam Grant: Racial minorities often face similar challenges. 

Mark Bolino: There's a study about African American employees using self-promotion, and it completely backfires. And so the way people make judgments about those who self-promote and those who engage in impression management aren't necessarily fair.

Adam Grant: The second risk of promoting your personal brand is that it can make you look fake. A carefully curated, sparkling personal brand can actually damage your credibility. There's evidence that when everything seems too perfect, it can cast out on your authenticity. 

Mark Bolino: Authenticity is the key with impression management, and so anytime you seem inauthentic, this is when things are gonna backfire.

Adam Grant: We trust people who are real, vulnerable, and multidimensional, not those who seem like they're managing their own PR. An obvious exception is social media influencers, but they're professional performers. Their personal brand is literally their job. They know it and their audience knows it. 

The third risk of promoting your personal brand is that it can make you look insecure. Research shows that pervasive boasting is a sign of narcissism. People who are secure in their success and status don't need to incessantly broadcast how great they are. Psychologists have long found that this creates a paradox. 

Mark Bolino: The paradox is that the people who are the most confident don't need to self-promote, and the people who are least confident are the ones who engage in the most self-promotion.

Adam Grant: Of course, this doesn't mean you should ignore your image altogether. It's well documented that people who don't think about impression management at all end up limiting their own success. Instead of focusing on building a brand, I think it's more productive to focus on building a portfolio of work.

This is a major theme of Debbie Millman's class. 

Debbie Millman: Yeah. It's the difference between a sort of calculated construction of self and developing a body of work that reveals original ideas. I think that sharing who you are is a wonderful thing. If you are showing your character, if you are building a reputation, that's great. It's when you begin to position that behavior as a brand, that's when I think it becomes problematic. 

Adam Grant: Tell me what the difference is between thinking about building a reputation and building a personal brand. 

Debbie Millman: Building a reputation is done through the removal of self through your work. You're offering your ideas to the public. They're your ideas. They're your paintings, they're your essays, they're your music, they're your performance. They're not you. But you have created them, and that's what you're offering. That's what you're sharing. You're not really sharing yourself. When you've created a personal brand, you're sharing a projection of yourself. So there's a barrier between who you are and what you're projecting. When you're sharing your work, you're actually sharing something that you've made. When you share your personal brand, you're sharing something that you construct. There's a huge difference. 

Adam Grant: Instead of promoting yourself, you focus on promoting your ideas. Rather than obsessing over how you're perceived, you concentrate on how you can contribute.

Self-promotion says, look at me, I'm amazing! Idea promotion says, look at this. I have something worth sharing. This is something I've thought about from the day I started posting on social media. You might think I have a personal brand, but I never set out to build one. I made a conscious decision not to broadcast accomplishments or awards. In fact, my goal was to post as little about myself as possible. I took it as a good sign when people complained that I didn't tell enough personal stories. My focus has always been on sharing insights, sometimes mine, but far more often by shining a spotlight on other people's work. 

Debbie Millman: If people wanna consider something a brand, let them. People can think however they wanna think. I think that it's more important to understand how you present yourself in the world, how you live and engage and contribute your ideas to the world. 

Adam Grant: Image shouldn't be your goal. It should be a byproduct of how you pursue your goals. But sometimes your contributions are invisible. Sometimes people don't know the value you create. So how do you make sure you're building your reputation? More on that after the break.

Let, lemme just say, you sent me this email with what I think is the greatest resume ever written. 

Chevy Cook: You're kidding me. 

Adam Grant: It's the gold standard for me. 

Chevy Cook is in the US Army. He says an interesting thing about the army is that you actually wear a lot of your resume right on your uniform. 

Chevy Cook: The medals, the badges, the tabs, they all tell a story.

Adam Grant: But those accolades don't tell the full story. So when Chevy was meeting his new boss, a Navy Admiral, for the first time, he did something bold. The resume he submitted didn't just include his accomplishments. It also featured this: 

Chevy Cook: Educational institutions I was rejected by: Harvard times two, graduate school of education and the business school. Stanford University, Cornell University. University of North Carolina, NYU. 

Adam Grant: Chevy had written a failure resume. Along with school rejections, it had awards he wasn't nominated for, professional opportunities he didn't get, and selected leadership failures. 

Chevy Cook: When I was a team leader for a small special operations team, I was removed from that position and the commander tried to actually give me a general officer memorandum of reprimand, which is a type of document that would actually end an officer's career. Kick me outta the army. Uh, Sears school. It's a survival school. I had to go to that school twice. 

Adam Grant: His resume even featured personal failures. 

Chevy Cook: I've shown my oldest daughter too much of my temper. I've been, uh, not emotionally supportive enough for my wife. I've not cultivated a better relationship with my birth parents.

Adam Grant: When Chevy had the idea to create a failure resume, people warned him not to do it. They said it would ruin his reputation, that he would lose the respect of his superiors. But he shared his failure resume anyway, and it prompted his new boss to share a moment he had with his own kids. They immediately formed a connection. 

Chevy Cook: Not because we were service members, not because I was going to work for him, but because I shared something with him that he couldn't find out unless I shared it with him. I think it helped me get standing and immediate trust in a job.

Adam Grant: I wondered if that was an isolated incident, but Chevy didn't stop there. He posted his failure resume on LinkedIn for the world to see.

Chevy Cook: I had people coming, uh, all out of the woodwork telling me like, Chevy, do you know what you just did to yourself? Do you know how you just ruined your career? 

Adam Grant: Instead of deleting the post, Chevy shared his failure resume with a class of cadets he was teaching at the military academy. 

Chevy Cook: The reaction was very positive.

A lot of 'em started talking about their own things that had happened in their life and being more open to not only coming to me, but then going to their peers. 

Adam Grant: I mean, there's information in here that you're definitely and clearly not proud of. 

Chevy Cook: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. 

Adam Grant: So how did you feel going into that? 

Chevy Cook: So, every time I feel the same way. I feel at the one instance, confident knowing who I am. You know, I, I got this idea about integrity. It goes back to the root word, integer. I want to be a whole, right? So I wanna show all, so I have this confidence of what I am going to show actually who I am. It can be nerve wracking, but that's also okay.

Adam Grant: Chevy is now a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, and he shares his failure resume with everyone he works with. 

Chevy Cook: I've had more people tell me to continue to do it than I have had people to tell me not to. I think it keeps me humble. It keeps me at least accountable to others, because they see that things are on there. 

Adam Grant: By sharing his failures, Chevy isn't trying to build a brand. He's aiming to reveal his character. That's a key difference between building a brand and building a reputation. A brand is a curated image of how you want to be seen. A reputation is a complete view of what you're like. You're not just trying to make a positive impression. You're trying to help people form an accurate impression of you. And the best way to do that is to be honest about yourself. You may not be ready to share your failure resume with the world, but building a strong reputation is about creating balance in what you share about yourself. It involves showing your limitations as well as your gifts, and concern for others as well as yourself. You're focused on adding value, not just vanity. There are lots of ways to get your work seen without getting braggy. In fact, if you don't share the interesting, useful stuff you've created, you're doing the world a disservice. But building a strong reputation is a matter of sharing thoughtfully. One of Mark Bolino's favorite techniques is called dual promotion.

Mark Bolino: Dual promotion is where I'm gonna promote myself, but I'm also gonna promote somebody else at the same time. So I might say something like, wow, I've worked on that paper with Adam. He is so great with data analytics and he helped me get that journal publication or that top publication, or he, he, he helped me get some sort of publicity that I was seeking.

I'm getting credit for the one thing, but I'm giving credit to the person who, who helped me or, or I'm promoting somebody else at the same time. 

Adam Grant: When people know that you support others, they're less likely to feel threatened by your success. Insecurity often stops people from sharing credit, but that's a mistake.

Elevating others elevates you. 

Mark Bolino: The bottom line is trying to help other people. Uh, you're trying to inspire them, you're trying to raise them up. You may benefit at the same time, but the other goal is that you're helping other people. 

Adam Grant: So the perception of the primary motives matters a lot. 

Mark Bolino: For sure. Yeah.

If people just in their gut say, this person is just looking out for themself, then that's where I think you get all these sort of negative attributions and evaluations from other people. You know, you're not gonna be seen as likable and you're gonna be seen a little bit of, as a, as a braggart, you know, that sort of thing.

Adam Grant: So if you're in sales and you wanna announce that you closed a big deal, thank the person who gave you the referral. And if you're a writer, you can focus on sharing the critical insight from your latest story rather than the award it won. And shine a spotlight on the people who helped make it happen. 

There's one more way to share your accomplishments without sounding insufferable. Just ask Snoop Dogg. When he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he gave a speech that went viral. He thanked his fans, he thanked his mentors, and then he did something unexpected.

Snoop Dogg: And at least, I want to thank me. I want to thank me for believing in me. I want to thank...

Adam Grant: It's called humor bragging, and it's actually supported by research. Across six studies, job applicants and entrepreneurs were more successful in getting hired and funded when they joked about their capabilities. One example: "I have a proven track record of turning caffeine input into productivity output." It signals confidence and warmth and humility at the same time. But the best kind of promotion is the kind you don't have to do yourself. 

Mark Bolino: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. When we hear people promote themselves, we tend to discount it. 

Adam Grant: When other people talk you up, it's more credible. Maybe a manager references your skills in a leadership meeting, or a coworker casually praises your work in a conversation with another colleague.

Mark Bolino: There's even some studies that say even if the third party has some interest in you being promoted, that they still receive the self-promotion more favorably. So yeah, if you can avoid promoting yourself and have somebody else do it for you, that is gonna be more effective. 

Adam Grant: At the end of the day, whether people are willing to promote you depends on the reputation you've earned, and that rests less on the claims you make than the actions you take.

Mark Bolino: Our image is the cumulative effect of all of our behavior. This is one of these things where actions speak more loudly than words, right? I mean, people see what your behavior is, how you act on a regular basis. That's what really matters. 

Adam Grant: Throughout my career, one of my regular actions has been to be open about my failures. It's an expression of my commitment to learning and growth. From day one, I've been candid about embarrassing moments in my classes and bad decisions in my talks and books, but I've never put the major low lights all in one place until now.

I failed to make the middle school basketball team all three years and then was cut from the high school soccer team. I failed the basic writing test as a college freshman. I co-founded Harvard's first online social network, but failed to start Facebook. I failed to finish my four years as an NCAA diver. I was rejected by the University of Virginia for my first teaching job. I failed to invest in Warby Parker when one of the founders was in my class. I was rejected multiple times to give a TED Talk for three straight years, and I failed to look like a normal human my first time on TV and ended up getting roasted by Jimmy Kimmel. On a personal note, I've often failed to show sympathy to my kids when they're upset. I often jump right to solutions. I've consistently failed to show up on time for events with my family, and as discussed on this show a few months ago, I've regularly failed to wait for my wife, Allison, when we're walking places. Working on that one right now. 

Building a reputation is not about manufacturing an image, it's about leading with integrity. The best way to earn respect is to align your daily actions with your lasting values.

This episode was produced by Brittany Cronin. Our team includes Daphne Chen, Constanza Gallardo, Greta Cohn, Grace Rubenstein, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Sarah Bruguiere. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.

For their evidence, gratitude to the following researchers and their colleagues: Sergey Gorbatov on personal brand equity. Alison Fragale and Laurie Rudman on the risks of self-promotion. Anna Bruk on the beautiful mess effect. Timo Gnambs and Constantine Sedikides on narcissism. Susan Fisk on warmth and competence. David Day and Michael Wilmot on self-monitoring. Eric Van Epps on dual promotion. Dan Cable and Virginia Kay on self verification. Eugene Kim and Theresa Glomb on Get Smarty Pants. Adam Galinsky on status insecurity. Eileen Chou on humorbragging, and Christina Fong on having others sing your praises. Shout out to Stevie Lane, Gabriel Hunter Chang, and Izzy Carter for lending their voices.

And thanks to Tom Peters for putting personal branding on the map. For better or worse.