Brindle Media

How do your peers, supervisors, employees, friends, and family members see you? What do they think are your strengths, weaknesses and most valuable skills? What is your personal brand? Does their assessment correlate with yours?

If you’re like me, it’s probably a lot easier for you to develop a strong sense about the value that other people bring to the table but your self-evaluation is a little fuzzy.

The folks at Reach Branding Consulting (www.reachcc.com) offer a FREE analysis tool named 360 Reach(tm) which allows people who know you to anonymously provide feedback and help provide focus. Over the past month, I took advantage of it and I thought you might find the results instructive.

I felt pretty good that the response rate for my personal 360 Reach assessment tool was 10% higher than the average response rate of all people who have used the tool so I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to participate and to share their opinions with me. Here’s a summary of the assessments of my personal brand by colleagues, peers, managers/supervisors, employees, friends: (71% of those who participated were colleagues & peers, 12% of those who participated were either former managers/supervisors or employees):

My Top 5 Brand Personas:

1. Expert
2. Rock (reliable; I do what I say I will)
3. Truth-Teller (honest, trustworthy)
4. Structurer (organized, methodical)
5. Visionary (I see the Big Picture)

My Top 5 Leadership Competencies:

1. Relating (meeting/connecting with colleagues, employees, customers; build trust & respect)
2. Expressing (clear & consistent 2-way communication)
3. Inspiring (nuturing, empowering, developing others)
4. Visioning (developing & executing strategy)
5. Developing (personal development, growing professionally; staying fresh, adopting new & relevant habits)

All the people who participated in this survey were also asked to describe my strengths and weaknesses in their own words. Here’s what the had to say:

My Strengths (verbatims):

-Ability to manage
-Ability to cover chaos with calm
-Being methodical
-Business knowledge
-Community-mindedness
-Forward thinking
-Intelligence (2 mentions)
-Seeing the big picture, managing any situation, always has a goal in mind
-Speaking
-Vast knowledge & experience
-Wisdom
-Analyzing (2 mentions)
-Caring professional and encouraging to others
-Experience (2 mentions)
-Market knowledge
-Imagining what needs to be done and getting the job done
-Knowledge
-Knowledge of industry
-Likeability
-Media smart
-Problem solving
-Strategic planning

My Weaknesses (verbatims):

-Being methodical
-Difficulty selling himself
-Occasionally opinionated
-Probably overqualified for a lot of available jobs in the area
-Talking over people who are already talking
-Too nice
-Delegating
-Irritating people
-Making quick decisions
-Not following through
-Organization
-People skills
-Speed of learning or change
-Stubborn
-Too fast to respond. Needs to listen more.
-Too formal.

Being human, I immediately focused on the weaknesses and felt a little hurt or dismayed by some of the comments but I’m still grateful for the honest evaluations. It’s also interesting to see how some people perceive me as having weaknesses in certain areas while others see me as having strengths in the same areas.

You might want to try this yourself. The initial analysis is free although you can get more granular by upgrading with paid options. Find the 360 Reach Personal Branding Analysis at www.reachcc.com