Nothing baffles people full of tricks and duplicities more than simple straightforward integrity. What does integrity mean? It means sticking to your personal branding and business code of conduct. It means doing the right things, even if they might cost your business. When we live with integrity, our personal branding more likely to succeed.
There are five common sense of personal branding:
- Brand yourself through your professional presence.
- Brand yourself as a valued partner.
- Brand yourself with strong communication skills.
- Brand yourself by staying one step ahead.
- Brand yourself as being social savvy.
Now we all agree with all five above of these common-sense personal branding tips. However, I have one additional common-sense personal branding tip to add: Brand yourself as a person of integrity. Your personal brand should be unique to you but build on integrity. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking. Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles. Integrity and consistency are intertwined. People who are consistent in their actions are people with a high degree of integrity. Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody is going to know whether you did it or not.” This is true. If you practice situational ethics is doing the right thing only when you are in the public eye and you are not really a person of high integrity, you are just pretending to be one. You see people can “smell” you when you are faking it. Besides, it is quite hard to act one way in public, and another in private. John Maxwell is a well-known business author. One of his books sends the same message. It is called, There Is No Such Thing as Business Ethics: There is Only One Rule for Making Decisions. According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In other words, do the right thing. There is a practical side to this, too. Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you do not have to remember anything.” In other words, if you are always a person of high integrity, it is easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors like remembering what you did or said in each situation. If you want to brand yourself as a person of high integrity act as a person of high integrity all the time and not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice. Finally, Warren Buffet said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you do not have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it, it is true. If you hire somebody without integrity, you really want them to be dumb and lazy. There goes down your personal branding and company branding.
