The Future of Leadership is Branding

Hello my Friends & Happy Friday!

My friend Natasha Tous recently invited me to contribute to an article she’s writing as part of her Masters in Marketing program called “The Future of Leadership is Branding: Why Tomorrow’s CEOs Will Be Chief Storytellers” and I figured I’d share that here. Her questions & my answers below.

Why is personal branding essential for leaders in today’s digital-first world?

The shortest & most perhaps most convincing reason is that leaders with strong online personal brands positively impact their company’s recruiting & sales pipelines by attracting aligned people and serendipitous opportunities without having to chase them down.

Irina Novoselsky, CEO of Hootsuite, posted recently that in Q1 of 2025, 40% of the sales conversations her team had with prospects directly referenced her personal brand.

40%!!!

This isn’t a surprise to me because there’s a mystique surrounding C-Levels and people are generally curious to learn more about leaders at the helm of their favorite companies.

But the benefits are not just external. There are internal benefits as well.

Pretty much every CEO I’ve worked with tends to be the most charismatic and inspiring person at the company, but the majority of employees only hear from the CEO at all-hands meetings and rarely, if ever, get to speak to them 1:1 or in smaller group settings.

That’s a really big missed opportunity for companies to inspire their existing employee base and keep them engaged & excited about the vision set by leadership, which in turn encourages them to refer others into the company, and we all know how valuable internal referrals are!

The bottom line is that attention is currency, and trust is what converts. If leaders are not showing up intentionally and consistently online, they’re leaving opportunity on the table—clients, talent, partnerships, media, you name it.

In a world where digital reputation is reputation, your personal brand is no longer optional. It’s leadership leverage.

What do you think most executives misunderstand about building a brand on LinkedIn?

That’s an easy one: how much time it takes.

Executives are the busiest people at a company—back-to-back meetings all day, overflowing inboxes, strategic planning, conferences, etc. so the idea of having to make time to craft a personal brand strategy and post online is daunting.

It’s also difficult to quantify the impact of an executives’s personal brand in the short-term, and most CEOs don’t like to spend time doing things that don’t have an immediate positive impact on the company’s bottom line.

That’s a valid concern, but it isn’t as hard as they might think for two reasons:

1. Executives have no shortage of material that would make great personal branding content. Like every human, executives have tens of thousands of thoughts per day, but unlike most humans, people pay closer attention to what executives have to say. This means that single thought an exec has while sipping their coffee could translate to viral content when published online.
2. Executives can, and should, delegate the creation & execution of their personal brand content just as they would delegate execution of any other strategic initiative internally. Just because it’s a personal brand doesn’t mean the executives themselves have to spend time writing their own social media posts—that’s what communications & marketing teams are for!

One of my favorite thought leaders in this area is Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, and author of Founder Brand: Turn your Story into Competitive Advantage. In it, he chronicles his experience managing the personal brand of his CEO while serving as VP of Marketing at Drift.

Dave would schedule 30-minute weekly interviews with David Cancel. He’d record these sessions, then ghostwrite LinkedIn posts, articles, and repurpose insights for newsletters and blogs—all in the founder’s voice. This not only saved the CEO’s time but ensured authentic, ongoing content directly tied to the founder’s perspective.

And this was before AI notetakers existed.

Nowadays, a CEO using an AI notetaker could simply share call transcripts with a member of their team to sift through & find nuggets that would make great personal brand content.

CEOs are already thinking & talking so much about topics that many would find interesting, they just don’t have a system for operationalizing it, so they don’t bother.

Big mistake.

What advice would you give leaders who want to strengthen their storytelling and visibility?

My advice is to:

1. Treat storytelling & visibility as a strategic priority much the same way they treat any other go-to-market initiative.
2. Avoid thinking of “personal brand” as “more work for me.”

Find the best storyteller in your organization and have them interview you for 30-60 minutes one time, record the entire conversation, and see what they come back with.

This is a service that I offer my clients and they love it because a single 60-minute conversation easily yields a dozen written & video clips that make for great content.

Even as a one-person business, I record myself in conversation throughout the day using Loom Camera Only view, and then pop my entire conversation into Opus Clip, which usually generates ~30 edited, captioned clips within minutes.

With tools like this anyone can create content at scale now.

So the question is: why wouldn’t you?

The internet is a big place with tons of opportunity just waiting to be discovered. But people can’t discover you if you’re not showing up!

That’s all for this week. Thanks again for reading & supporting my work. I appreciate it more than you know!