In this article:

• Why leadership brand work rarely stays with one person
• How a GM’s individual clarity became a team capability, then an organisation-wide investment
• What a VP noticed as he watched this unfold
• The misconception that can keep this work confined to one or two leaders

A General Manager sits down with me to do some deeply personal work on his own leadership identity. Nobody else is in the room. Six months later, members of Business Development, Legal, People & Culture and Corporate Affairs are doing versions of the same work.

Rather than a hypothetical, this is what happened recently with a client in the resources sector, and it’s worth understanding why, because it changes how you should think about the return on investment on this kind of work.

Does getting clarity on your own leadership identity change anything beyond how you personally come across?

The GM’s brief was typical of the usual individual-level leadership branding engagement: distil a career’s worth of experience into a clear, confident account of who he was as a leader and what he brought to the table. That work is personal. It looks at values, leadership style, career story… the whole person, not just a polished CV.

What happened after that is the part worth paying attention to! He didn’t keep it to himself. He brought his senior team, working in new green energy markets, through a similar process. Team members who had never had a structured way to talk about their own contribution suddenly had one, and the effect on how they operated as a team, not just individually, was immediate.

As the Vice President overseeing the business described it:

“Today’s corporate market has no shortage of competition and a well-built, relevant and authentic identity is a foundation of a strong business strategy. A failure to manage this vital part of the business can result in reduced productivity, loss of market confidence and ceding market share to competitors. The stakeholder socio-commercial interface in today’s market is a pressing influence to manage to establish a brand that meets social and community expectations of governance, performance and inclusiveness.

With this in mind – As a Vice President leading a nationally significant new energy business, I required a comprehensive professional brand make-over and my rapidly growing management team also required the same support.”

Why this expanded past the new markets team

The work didn’t stop with the ‘mission-critical team’ leading the business’s strategic growth. Senior leaders saw the opportunity for the business in moving leadership brand development into the corporate functions that work alongside technical and growth teams: Legal, People & Culture, Corporate Affairs. These are teams whose value to the organisation is real but often harder to articulate than a growth team’s, because their contribution doesn’t show up in a sales figure.

The VP’s own account of what changed points to why this matters at scale, not just for the individuals involved:

“The structured approach engages leaders to not only build their profiles; it is a learning experience teaching the client about careful and effective brand development, delivery and maintenance… aligned with business growth objectives, target market and key stakeholder base.”

The leadership branding program, from start to finish, was not about creating a one-off deliverable such as a refreshed LinkedIn profile. It was about building lasting capability that keeps generating value not just for the participants directly involved, but for the business and the culture.

A misconception worth correcting

Some leaders that consider this kind of work default to thinking of it solely as an individual personal leadership challenge: the new CEO’s bio, the board director’s public profile, perhaps a handful of high-potential executives preparing for increased exposure. Useful, but narrow.

What this engagement demonstrates is different. Leadership brand clarity, approached strategically with one intentional leader who cares about creating a culture of confidence, tends not to stay contained. It moves sideways into their leadership team, and from there into other parts of the business that support and enable growth, often the functions least likely to have been offered this kind of development in the first place. Legal and People & Culture professionals are just as likely to be underselling their value, and just as worthwhile investing in to provide them with the framework to articulate that value.

The business case for organisation-wide leadership brand development also extends beyond the designated participants and the program you paid for… just watch what happens when you give a few passionate leaders the clarity to articulate their own value properly, and how others start to notice.

Further reading

When your people need clarity… sharpen your leadership lens

Why Comms and Marketing Teams need a Leadership Brand

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

Everyone talks about AI in terms of efficiency, and sometimes productivity – but what does that really mean in terms of client value? To me, that’s about knowing the value you were already creating for clients before AI entered the picture – and how AI is able to amplify that now. What’s changed for me is how much more of my hard-won expertise, unique thinking and approach I can now bring to each client relationship, because AI has freed up time to apply more of what I already do well, and to keep improving on it. Here’s what that has looked like over the past year.

More time in my network, and using it with intent

I love to meet people, and I love to connect people – it brings me real joy.

So often I hear people say, “I know I need to make more of my networks, but it’s hard to find the time!”…and I can certainly relate. Now, I use AI to help me quickly create a targeted networking plan as I jump on a plane for short work trip, going beyond ‘Who should I reconnect with?’ or ‘What events should I catch?’ to ‘What strategic connection points can I look for in this list of coffee meetings?’

Even better, AI helps me make more of my network in service of clients, by intentionally connecting people. While AI is helping me with repeatable project management tasks, I now spend real time looking across my networks for the connections that will genuinely help a client with the problem they’re working on – a simple but meaningful way of creating extra value. That kind of matchmaking used to happen by accident, relying on my already overloaded brain to remember just the right referral at just the right time. Now I can build value-adding like this into projects on purpose.

Space to think, and the time to actually build what I think of

Creative ideas are constantly popping into my head, competing for attention with everything else in the week. Some of these are great ideas to help clients achieve even more of what they want and to gain a genuine competitive edge (for example, right now it’s helping them understand how to structure guidelines and processes for their teams to use AI in communications in a way that protects and builds their brand, rather than the brand drift and reputational faux pas we are seeing everywhere).

What’s changed is that there’s now room for me to sit with a business or client problem longer, work through something genuinely different and high-impact, and build it quickly enough to reach clients and audiences in a short amount of time, rather than leaving a great idea on a shelf for a year because the calendar never opened up.

Capturing the words, so I can focus on what’s between the lines

I often use AI to capture the fine detail of a client conversation, in a way both of us are comfortable with, so I’m not half listening while I try to take notes. That frees me to do the part clients actually pay me for, which is thinking properly about who they are, their specific context, and what they need next. I use it to interrogate my own thinking too: what haven’t I considered here, and what else should I be asking? It’s the same judgement I’ve always relied on, just tested from more angles – which provides the client with the advantage of fewer stones left unturned – fewer gaps and blind spots, more opportunities.

More time with the people who need it

There’s more time on the phone when someone needs it, an extra meeting booked in without a fight with my diary, and check-ins beyond the normal program allocation – a closer eye kept on clients, and a closer connection. I get to listen a little longer, pick up more detail in their journey, and provide extra resources and guidance.

New ways to help more people

I’ve conceived, built and launched new tools this year for measuring and planning professional confidence in the age of AI and organisational maturity levels in leadership brand development, the kind of idea that would have stayed in a notebook a few years ago. I’ve also launched and filled new public workshops on professional confidence, leadership branding and AI in communications for leadership audiences around the country, reaching and supporting far more people in a few months than I expected to.

AI has freed up time to apply more of what I already do well, and to keep improving on it.

Every one of these examples comes back to the same thing: what clients get from me is bigger and more useful than it was a year ago. The extra attention and thinking time that AI frees me to do is what make that possible. It’s also given me room to keep sharpening my own thinking on positioning in the AI era, so what I bring clients on that front keeps getting better too.

Want to know how we use AI in our work with clients? It’s in our FAQs.

Further reading

Confidence, Trust and Stronger Human Identity in an AI World

How’s your Professional Confidence in the Age of AI?

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

In this article:

• Why a leader’s reputation is being shaped externally, whether they participate in that process or not
• The specific forces doing the writing: media coverage, LinkedIn’s algorithm, AI-generated summaries, search results, speculation around senior role and board movement
• Why “I don’t really do social media” is no longer a neutral position
• How to move from a passive subject of your reputation to an active author of it, without becoming consumed by managing it

I’ve written before about the difficulty of reading your own label from inside the jar, and about the fact that most senior leaders are managing more than one label at once, for different audiences who each need something different from the same underlying identity. Both of those pieces assume the leader has some hand in the writing. This one is about what happens when they don’t.

A label gets written whether a leader participates or not. Board searches run candidates through search results before a single conversation happens. Journalists compile a leader’s public footprint before an interview. Increasingly, AI tools summarise a person’s professional standing from whatever is publicly available, and that summary carries weight with people who will never meet the leader it describes.

“I keep a low profile, so this doesn’t really apply to me”

I hear a version of this often, usually from leaders who see visibility as unnecessary or even a little indulgent. It’s a reasonable instinct. Good work should speak for itself, and there’s something admirable about not needing to perform relevance.

The trouble is that a low profile doesn’t mean no profile. It means an unmanaged one. Search results still surface, old media mentions still exist, a sparse or years-stale LinkedIn presence still leaves an impression, and AI-generated summaries still get produced from whatever fragments are available. Not participating doesn’t pause the process. It just means someone, or something, else has more influence over the outcome than the leader does.

What’s doing the writing

A handful of forces shape a senior leader’s external label with very little input required.

Media coverage, even brief or years old, tends to surface prominently and stays there indefinitely. A single quote from a difficult period can outweigh a decade of steady leadership if it’s the most substantial thing search engines can find.

A LinkedIn profile that hasn’t been touched in years reads as stale regardless of what the algorithm rewards this month, so a leader who was active three years ago and has gone quiet since can appear less current, or less senior, than their actual standing.

AI-generated summaries compress whatever is publicly available into a single confident-sounding paragraph, with no visible indication of how thin or dated the underlying sources might be.

Speculation fills gaps around senior movement. Whenever an executive changes roles, joins a new board, leaves a company or is simply due for a move, market commentary and assumption step in wherever there’s an absence of clear, current information. Those assumptions are rarely as accurate, or as flattering, as the leader would choose for themselves.

None of this is inherently hostile. Most of it is simply automated, incomplete, or built for someone else’s purposes entirely.

From subject to author

The shift that matters here isn’t from invisible to loud. It’s from passive to intentional. A leader who has done the foundational work of leadership brand development, getting genuinely clear on their identity, value and positioning, is in a far stronger position to shape how that gets represented externally, because they have accurate, current material to work with rather than leaving the record to fill itself in.

One client, a CEO stepping away from an operational role into a portfolio of Non-Executive Director positions, came to this work after realising that anyone searching his name found almost nothing from the past five years, despite it being the most consequential stretch of his career. The gap wasn’t a reputation problem so much as an information vacuum, and it was working against him at exactly the moment he needed his track record to be visible to new boards.

Another client came to me in a genuine panic. Years earlier, as part of a leadership coaching program, she had been filmed giving a testimonial she felt pressured into delivering, one that never reflected her real experience. The clip was then used repeatedly in the program’s marketing, and it had settled at the top of her search results just as she was stepping into a highly visible senior role. The version of her that a search engine served up first was not the leader she needed the market to see, and it took real work to change what that search told people about her.

“The version of her that a search engine served up first was not the leader she needed the market to see.”

This connects directly to the themes we explored in our National Leadership Study on professional confidence in the age of AI: leaders who have clarity on their own value are far better placed to maintain that value as more of the work traditionally done by humans is taken on by AI tools. The Leadership Brand Framework we use with clients treats this as one layer of a broader picture, not a standalone fix, because a well-managed LinkedIn profile built on a shaky foundation is still a shaky foundation, just a more visible one.

Writing the label doesn’t mean managing it constantly

This isn’t a case for leaders to spend their evenings monitoring search results or posting daily to stay algorithmically relevant. (That doesn’t sound to me like a productive use of a senior leader’s time!)

It’s a case for making sure the material that exists, a positioned bio, a current and accurate LinkedIn profile, a small number of substantive public statements about what a leader stands for, is accurate and recent enough that it can do the work on their behalf. Get that foundation right, and a leader doesn’t need to manage their reputation day to day. The record simply reflects them accurately when someone goes looking.

Someone is already writing your label. The only real choice is whether you’ve had a hand in it.

Further reading

Confidence, Trust and Stronger Human Identity in an AI World

Why a Leadership Brand Matters for the Chief People Officer and Their Team

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

In this article:

• Why leaders need to think about the different ‘labels for their jar’ – the different ways they need to show up and communicate in different contexts.
• Why it’s still the same jar – it’s not about being all things to all people, it’s about having a strong foundation in a well-developed leadership brand or identity, and gaining clarity on how to articulate value to different audiences.
• Typical examples of the different brand ‘labels’ senior leaders think about – for the board, the executive team, as an industry or market representative, in leading their teams.
• The difference between your Comms/PR plans and scripts, and developing a foundational leadership brand.

In a previous post, I wrote about the trouble of reading your own label from inside the jar — the perspective problem that makes it hard for even the most accomplished leaders to see themselves the way others do.

Say a leader does that work, arriving at genuine clarity about who they are and what they bring.

Job done? Not quite. The jar has more than one label.

The board sees a strategist. The executive team sees a decision-maker. The market sees a name and a track record. The people you lead see someone else again.

Same jar. Same contents. Different label, depending on who’s reading it.

Isn’t that just being inauthentic?

I hear this worry often. Leaders assume the only honest position is showing up in the same way, to everyone, and that if the message shifts by audience, it’s over-manipulated.

In fact, it’s the opposite. Speaking with relevance to a specific audience is a mark of leadership maturity – a signal that you are concerned with what the particular people in front of you need. It’s not a compromise of identity if communication is shaped from this place.

A board wants governance judgement, risk appetite, strategic oversight.

An executive team wants to know how you make decisions under pressure, day to day.

The market wants a clear, credible account of value.

Your organisation’s people want to see vision, values and direction.

None of that is contradictory. It’s the same leadership identity, translated for what each audience actually needs to know.

The real work is holding one clear, well-defined foundation while communicating with precision across audiences who each need something different from it. That’s the balancing act for senior leaders: stay clear on who you are, and stay flexible on how you say it.

“That’s the real balancing act for leaders: stay clear on who you are, and stay flexible on how you say it.”

One identity, not several scripts

Sometimes I get asked: “Is leadership branding the same as having a leadership communication plan? Our Comms and PR people take care of the comms plan and scripts.”

This is not the same thing. Leadership brand development is about clarifying who you are, what you do, how you do things, and why it matters… and it’s often connected to the company purpose, values, vision and direction. While it touches on some of the same communication challenges, it is really the foundation – the leader getting clear on their identity within the context of their organisation and career.

It is not a script. It’s the internal confidence and external value positioning in how the leader shows up every day, guides and responds, creates opportunities for themselves and others, connects with others and brings them along. A powerful bedrock for effective leader communication is strong leadership brand development.

“Not the same as having a comms plan or script… Leadership Brand development is a powerful bedrock for effective leader communication.”

The internal layer, a leader’s purpose, values and leadership philosophy, stays constant. It doesn’t change depending on who’s in the room. The external layer is where the translation happens. Get it right, and a board bio, a town hall introduction and a LinkedIn profile all sound like the same person, addressing entirely different priorities. Get it wrong, and a leader either flattens into one generic message that satisfies no one, or fragments into several versions that fall apart the moment two audiences compare notes.

One of my clients, the CEO of an NFP who also holds Non-Executive Director roles elsewhere, came to this work because her LinkedIn profile and personal brand were reading as an extension of the organisation she runs, when what she needed was a leadership brand distinct enough to stand on its own, balancing her roles as a director and mentor in other rooms.

Leaders who manage this well have usually done the foundational work first: getting precise about what they stand for, before working out how to express it to each stakeholder group. Skip straight to the external messaging without that foundation, and the disconnect is what you get.

Knowing which label is showing

Part of this is practical. A leader walking into a board meeting straight after a difficult executive team conversation needs to know which version of themselves the room is expecting, and to show up as that leader without it feeling like a performance.

This isn’t about having a different persona for every room. (If it were, you’d need an acting coach, not a brand advisor.) It’s about understanding, precisely, what each audience needs from the same underlying leader, and being deliberate about which parts of that identity to bring forward.

Do this work, and you stop feeling pulled between conflicting identities. It starts to feel like one leadership brand, with several accurate expressions (and if you tackle this as a leadership group, it’s even more powerful!).

Your jar has more than one label. The work is making sure every one of them is telling the truth.

Further reading

Confidence, Trust and Stronger Human Identity in an AI World

Executive reputation management and AI searches

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

The senior leaders I work with are not short on substance. They have run divisions, sat on boards, built teams, navigated crises and delivered results that took real judgement under pressure. What’s harder for them is stepping outside that experience to see it the way someone else would.

That is the ‘inside the jar’ problem we all have. From inside, you know the contents intimately, every ingredient, every reason it works. But you cannot read your own label, because you are looking at the world from the inside out, not the outside in.

This is not a confidence problem as much as it is a perspective problem. It is precisely why leadership brand work matters at this level, even for people who have spent decades being very good at their jobs.

Knowing and articulating are different skills

Expertise accumulates quietly. A leader’s value proposition does not arrive in a single moment of clarity; it builds across hundreds of decisions, conversations and outcomes, most of which were never written down or named. By the time someone reaches the C-suite or a board table, they are operating from a depth of judgement they rarely have to explain, because the people around them already understand the context.

That changes the moment they need to communicate that value to someone new: a board considering them for a director role, an introduction to staff as the new CEO, a market they are entering, a stakeholder group deciding whether to trust them. Suddenly the unspoken needs to become spoken – precisely, and with impact.

Reflection is the most undervalued leadership tool

The biggest roadblock to clearly communicated positioning is the leader’s lack of time and structure to access and apply their insights. Senior roles run at a fast pace, where there is rarely space for the kind of slow, deliberate reflection that produces real clarity about who you are and what you stand for.

This is where an outside perspective creates real value and efficiency for senior executives. Not to tell a leader who they are, but to ask the right questions in the right order, to notice patterns they cannot see because they are too close to them, and to hold up something like a mirror so they can read their own label from the outside for the first time.

The shift is more than language

The leaders who go through the leadership brand development process do not just end up with a better bio or a sharper LinkedIn profile, although those things follow. They end up standing differently in a room. Once someone has genuine clarity about the value of their work to specific audiences and can articulate it without hesitation, that clarity shows up in how they negotiate, how they present to a board, and how they introduce themselves at a conference where they do not know a single person in the room.

This is the real return on the work: it’s not just polish, but a leader who has the precise language and the authentic confidence that matches the substance they were already carrying.

In a market increasingly crowded with generic, AI-assisted content, that precision is also a point of genuine differentiation and a risk mitigator. The leaders who stand out are not the ones saying the most; they are the ones saying exactly what is true about them, in a way that resonates deeply with their intended audience.

Further reading

Confidence, Trust and Stronger Human Identity in an AI World

Why a Leadership Brand Matters for the Chief People Officer and Their Team

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

Professional Confidence in the Age of AI: Organisation Development practitioners around Australia weigh in

In May 2026, New Work Consulting facilitated an online roundtable for Organisation Development Australia, drawing on findings from the Australian Leadership Study, Professional Confidence in the Age of AI. Practitioners from across internal and external OD roles came together to examine what AI’s acceleration means for employee confidence, professional value, and organisational trust.

The discussion surfaced some of the most pressing questions facing OD professionals right now: where confidence is eroding, what clients will still need from humans when information is no longer a differentiator, and what it means to lead effectively in this environment.

The summary below captures the key themes from two structured discussions and is available to download as a PDF.

Further reading

Confidence, Trust and Stronger Human Identity in an AI World

Why a Leadership Brand Matters for the Chief People Officer and Their Team

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

Feb/March Leadership Roundtables Summary

In February and March, we have been busy conducting a range of discussions with senior leaders on the key insights from NWC’s Professional Confidence in the Age of AI national leadership study, partnering with hosting organisations in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.

Across our discussions over the last few weeks, a consistent picture emerged:

AI is already embedded in day-to-day work. Its impact is uneven, fast-moving, and not fully understood. And while the conversation often centres on capability and efficiency, what surfaced most strongly was something more human: confidence, judgement, trust and clarity.

The discussions did not land on a single answer, but they did point to a set of tensions that leaders are now navigating in real time.

Related material

Rate your team on the Team Brand Confidence Scale

What’s your organisation’s ‘special sauce’?

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

Why Corporate Affairs, Communications and Marketing Professionals Need a Leadership Brand

Over the past decade, the remit of Corporate Affairs, Communications and Marketing leaders has expanded dramatically.

Once focused primarily on messaging, campaigns and media relations, these functions now sit at the centre of an organisation’s most strategic questions: trust, reputation, narrative and stakeholder alignment.

At the same time, expectations of leaders in these roles have shifted. Boards and CEOs increasingly look to them not simply as technical specialists, but as strategic advisors who can shape how an organisation’s value and intentions are understood by employees, customers, regulators and the broader public.

This is where the concept of a leadership brand becomes important.

A leadership brand is not about personal promotion. It is the consistent value that others experience from how a leader thinks, communicates and acts. As leadership researchers Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood describe it, a leadership brand exists when a leader’s strengths reliably deliver value to stakeholders.

For leaders responsible for corporate narrative and reputation, the absence of a clear leadership brand can create ambiguity about what the function stands for and where it is best positioned to lead in the organisation. When it is well defined, it becomes a powerful source of influence, credibility and organisational alignment.

Why a leadership brand matters for Comms and Marketing teams

1. An organisation’s reputation is shaped through leadership, not just messaging

Reputation used to be thought of primarily as an outcome of communications and marketing activity – but that view is increasingly outdated.

Research and advisory work from organisations such as McKinsey emphasises that organisational reputation is shaped by leadership behaviour, transparency and narrative, not simply communications outputs.

In other words, stakeholders no longer separate the organisation from the people leading it.

For Corporate Affairs, Communications and Marketing leaders and their teams, this creates both opportunity and responsibility. Their influence now sits as much in how they guide leaders to articulate and embody the organisation’s story as in the communications plans they design.

But to be able to guide leaders in leadership… you must be seen as a peer to those leaders… a leader yourself.

“…to be able to guide leaders in leadership… you must be seen as a leader yourself.”

2. Strategic influence depends on clarity of value

In many organisations, Communications and Marketing functions still face a persistent challenge: demonstrating strategic value beyond tactical delivery.

Without a clear leadership brand, the function can easily be perceived as reactive or service-based.

By contrast, when the leadership brand of the function is well positioned – not only as a source of strategic narrative, stakeholder insight or reputational judgement, but as a key player in governance and commercial strategy – it changes how senior executives and board engage with the team.

Research on personal and professional branding emphasises that leaders who intentionally define and communicate their value are more likely to influence organisational decisions and be recognised for their contribution.

For leaders in these roles, the question becomes: What do people experience when they work with me and my team?

Leadership branding is also a team capability

One of the most powerful applications of leadership branding is not individual but collective.

When a Comms team articulates a shared leadership brand, it creates alignment about:

• how team members communicate with stakeholders (as leaders in their field!)
• the standards they hold and the strategic outputs they prioritise
• how the organisation’s narrative and strategy is shaped and reinforced.

A well-developed team leadership brand can transform the function from a delivery capability into a strategic leadership capability. Instead of only producing communications, the team helps shape how leadership shows up.

Questions for leaders and teams

For leaders of Comms teams who are considering their leadership brand, a few questions can be a useful starting point.

For the leader

• What do people consistently experience when they work with me as a leader?
• What value do I want executive peers and boards to associate with my judgement?
• Where do I bring a distinctive perspective to leadership discussions?

For the team

• What do we want to be known for as a leadership group?
• How do we want stakeholders to experience our function?
• Where do we add the greatest strategic value to leadership conversations?

Some practical considerations for shifting how you are seen

In our experience, professionals in the communications space can encounter internal roadblocks and cultural challenges in being perceived as leaders. After gaining clarity on ‘who we are’ and ‘why us’ to strengthen the team’s leadership confidence and communication, it’s useful to check in on some of the specific ways our language and behaviour send messages about our leadership (or lack of).

These can include:

• How much we communicate from value, aligned with what our intended audience (such as the C-Suite) care about – such as strategy, risk and commercial outcomes.
• How we make connections between our work and current business challenges (such as AI adoption and risk, shareholder and stakeholder pressures etc.), in order to emphasise the value of our work and explain our priorities and decisions.
• How pro-actively we integrate our work with other departments and encourage cross-pollination of ideas, creating a sense of working towards shared goals.
• How well-informed we are on industry best practice, trends and opportunities for competitive advantage – and whether we reference these in our work.
• How we ‘show up’ to be taken seriously (through personal presentation, verbal and body language, conversational and presenting skills) – sometimes this means coming across less as ‘creatives’ or ‘journalists’ and more as business leaders.

The opportunity ahead

As expectations of organisations continue to evolve, the role of Corporate Affairs, Communications and Marketing leaders will only become more central, where these professionals are truly leading.

Developing a leadership brand — individually and collectively — is one way these leaders can clarify their value and strengthen their strategic influence.

Related material

How personal brand development supports a culture of leadership

How CPOs can get their Board & Executive aligned

Work with Julissa

Individuals   /   Organisations, boards & teams

Your role as a Chief People Officer (CPO) – and the role of your team – is evolving rapidly. What was once largely about internal HR operations is now deeply integrated into business strategy, culture, risk, transformation and stakeholder trust.

In this context, cultivating a personal leadership brand is no longer optional – it’s now recognised as a core strategic asset. Here’s why.

1. As CPO, your mandate has expanded — and so has your need for influence

• Recent data shows that 85% of CPOs in Australia and New Zealand are seeking to upskill, emphasising strategic leadership, influencing decision-making, and embedding HR strategy into overall business planning. (Human Resources Director, March 2025)
• Your remit increasingly includes shaping culture, guiding transformation, and safeguarding reputation — placing People & Culture squarely at the executive table.
• In organisations where HR leaders are treated as business leaders, HR becomes a critical lever for growth, cost management, risk mitigation and long-term value creation.

The People & Culture leader can no longer afford to think of themselves as a “behind-the-scenes custodian.” As CPO, you are a key business leader. A personal leadership brand helps you show up accordingly — with credibility, clarity, and confidence.

2. A defined leadership brand amplifies your team’s impact on culture, trust and reputation – essential enablers of business success 

• As identified in a recent article, organisations are increasingly developing leaders’ personal brands as part of broader cultural and reputational strategy. This is not just an important consideration for senior leaders, client-facing or business development teams, but for internally-focused teams also. Organisations are now recognising a strong personal brand as a bedrock of influence and confidence for employees focused on all kinds of leadership and communication.
• A strong, consistent leadership voice across your team helps build stakeholder trust — internally (employees, management, board) and externally (partners, regulators, market). This starts with the CPO’s personal brand and continues with their leadership and mentoring of team members, as they develop their presence as a unified, authoritative team, and as individual professionals.

In essence: a leadership brand becomes a lever to translate strategy and values into lived reality across the organisation, and to be seen as a true peer at the decision-making table.

3. A trusted leadership brand helps navigate today’s People & Culture team challenges: complexity, uncertainty and stakeholder expectations

• In today’s world, organisations face heightened reputational risk, regulation, talent competition, digital disruption — all while managing culture, engagement and transformation. A clear leadership brand gives you a platform to lead with consistency and clarity.
• It also helps you build credibility when presenting to boards, executives, shareholders and other challenging stakeholders: by showing who you are, what you stand for, and why your people agenda matters to the business. A leadership brand is not self-promotion; it’s strategic alignment between people, culture and performance.

What forward-looking CPOs in Australia are doing — and what works

According to recent reporting, many CPOs are rethinking how they operate — and adapting accordingly. Common approaches now include:

• Upskilling internally — many are investing in strategic leadership, data literacy, influence and business acumen, acknowledging the broader remit of the role.
• Positioning HR as a brand function — in some organisations, People & Culture is partnering with Communications, Marketing or Employer Brand teams to ensure consistency between internal culture and external reputation.
• Leveraging personal visibility — senior HR leaders increasingly see value in building thought leadership, sharing insights publicly (e.g. LinkedIn, industry events) to shape how the business — and external stakeholders — view their function and priorities.
• Aligning personal brand with organisational purpose and values — this alignment ensures authenticity and reduces the risk that personal brand efforts are dismissed as superficial or self-serving.

What this means for you and your People & Culture team

If you lead People & Culture, embracing a leadership brand mindset can help you:

• Elevate the function of People & Culture from service provider to strategic enabler and influence how culture, talent and people strategy are perceived and led at board and executive level;
• Attract, retain and engage talent who buy into purpose, clarity and consistent leadership, while reinforcing culture levers such as values and behaviours;
• Reinforce trust and credibility for the organisation externally, especially important in regulated or high-risk environments.

At the team level, this requires shifting from seeing brand-building as marketing’s job to recognising it as an outcome of leadership behaviours — repeated, consistent, credible actions that reflect the organisation’s values and vision.

Practical steps: How CPOs can begin building their leadership brand today

1. Clarify your leadership positioning. Start with a tight, authentic articulation of what you stand for and what you focus on as a People Leader, and how that aligns with organisational purpose. Think beyond generic language to what’s distinctive about how you lead and why it matters.
2. Integrate brand thinking into HR strategy. Embed leadership brand considerations into talent management, culture programs, organisational development thinking, learning programs, internal communications and stakeholder engagement — not as a side project, but as part of how HR delivers value.
3. Use data + human insight to build credibility. Combine people data (engagement, attrition, performance indicators) with narrative about culture and human impact. This dual lens helps position People & Culture as rigorous, strategic and human-centred.
4. Be visible in the right places. Whether through internal forums, town halls, board updates — or external platforms (industry events, thought pieces) — consistent, values-aligned visibility builds recognition and trust.
5. Align your personal brand with team and organisational brand. Ensure what you stand for as a leader complements and amplifies the organisation’s purpose, values and culture, and actively bring your team into an exploration of brand expression through their own roles.

As the scope of the CPO role continues to expand, the importance of personal leadership branding — for you and your People & Culture team — becomes harder to ignore. When done well, it’s not self-promotion: it’s strategic influence, credibility and cultural leadership.

Pssst… We do this work all day long. Ask us for our checklist tailored for CPOs to help them define and build their leadership brand.

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By mid-career, most lawyers are technically excellent. Many are specialists. Some are moving towards partnership, leadership, or firm ownership.

And yet, a persistent challenge remains: clearly articulating value in a way that resonates with prospective clients and referrers – beyond other lawyers.

In a 2025 session for the Law Institute of Victoria, I shared common brand challenges I see in my work with law professionals:

1. Lawyers are time-poor and risk-aware – roadblocks to building a brand.

Brand building can feel like a “nice to have” rather than a core professional capability, particularly when client work, people leadership and billables dominate the week. Add confidentiality constraints and a justified fear of “over-sharing”, and visibility quickly drops down the priority list.

2.  Many lawyers are highly technical communicators in a non-technical world.

Expertise is often expressed through education — explaining the law, outlining risks, flagging what can’t be done. While essential, this can unintentionally position the lawyer as someone who “puts the brakes on”, rather than as a trusted commercial advisor who helps clients move forward with confidence.

This becomes particularly problematic at senior levels, where the role shifts to include client acquisition and development (read: ‘sales’!). Yet the ‘bridge’ between an educational or discovery conversation to a project commitment conversation can be a difficult one for trusted advisors to cross.

3. Finding ways to meaningfully differentiate is tough for a lawyer, whether one of many or one of few.

Many lawyers are specialists — but they are among many in their field. Some, conversely, are so niched that they struggle to know where and how to build a visible profile with a very specific audience, not all of whom are active online. Without a clear “go-to” position, even excellent practitioners risk blending into the background.

In the world of AI, clients and colleagues are no longer just buying legal answers; they are looking for judgement, context, foresight and leadership.

What a strong legal brand looks like

The legal landscape is shifting rapidly: regulatory change, new risk categories (cyber, mental health, AI), evolving client expectations and increasing competition from both national and global firms. In this environment, those who can clearly articulate what they are known for, who they help, and why their perspective matters are better positioned to stay relevant and top of mind.

Strong specialist brands are not about self-promotion. They are about leadership. They combine technical depth with clarity, commercial understanding and a consistent message — across introductions, conversations and online visibility — that builds trust rather than noise.

For experienced lawyers, the real question is no longer “Am I good at what I do?”
It’s “Can the right people clearly see the value I bring?”

And if not, what’s getting in the way?

Explore the Sharpen Your Leadership Lens Workshop for your board/LT

Explore individual Leadership Brand development

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