Call it whatever you like: Personal brand, career brand, or professional reputation. Here’s how to build it
In a workplace increasingly defined by hybrid schedules, crowded digital channels, and shifting norms around visibility, being “good at your job” is no longer enough to ensure your work is recognized. Many professionals—particularly those who are thoughtful, collaborative, or less inclined toward self-promotion—find themselves doing high-quality work that goes largely unseen.
To better understand what it takes to build meaningful visibility and influence in this environment, I spoke with Lorraine K. Lee, an award-winning keynote speaker and the best-selling author of Unforgettable Presence: Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career. Lee also teaches popular courses at LinkedIn Learning and Stanford University, and her insights have been featured in numerous national outlets.
Executive presence used to be about how you showed up in the room. In today’s hybrid world, what most clearly signals credibility—and where do you still see high performers getting it wrong?
In this day and age, credibility comes down to trust. Workplaces are essentially webs of relationships built on trust, and that trust can now be formed across many different channels. While executive presence is one piece of your professional presence, the reason I define presence more broadly as both how and where you are seen is because presence shows up in the day-to-day moments and the smaller touchpoints that you don’t think matter but do.
Executive presence used to be about being in person, showing up in the boardroom in a high-stakes situation. But presence can really be about how credible you appear in a Slack channel, in an email, even answering a question from a senior leader in passing when they ask, “What have you been up to lately?”
There’s endless advice about personal branding, but many serious professionals recoil from the term. For someone who hates the whole premise, what is the lowest-friction way to become more visible?
The first thing you need to do is to change your mindset. Yes, personal branding can feel very slimy, and there might be negative connotations to it as someone who is self-promoting all the time. In my book, I call it a career brand for this very reason. It better describes what your brand is in service of. Your brand is in service of your career.
If we boil it down one more level, brand equals reputation. If that is what a personal brand or a career brand is, we all already have one; we all have a reputation. It can be good; it can be bad. Our reputation can be that no one even knows that we exist, so it’s about whether we want to take ownership of that narrative or leave it to chance.
One of the lowest-friction ways to become more visible is to talk about your work in your one-on-ones with your manager. It’s very easy to assume that your manager knows what you’re working on, but they are dealing with a lot of different moving pieces, different teammates, and their own career. It never hurts to reiterate and make it crystal clear what you’re doing and the impact it has.
I remember one of my managers asking me to write down every single thing I did for the week, no matter how small. It was surprising to see how many little things I was doing to help other people or that took up my time that I didn’t think were worthwhile to share. Creating some structure and visibility around those items can be really valuable.
Many capable professionals do strong work but feel less confident when they have to present it out loud. When it comes to executive presence, what actually matters most in high-stakes presentations—and what do people tend to overfocus on?
The first thing to remember is that public speaking is a learnable skill, and because it’s a skill, we do have to practice. Ideally, you’re not practicing in a silo, but you are getting feedback from your manager, from your peers, and any friendly stakeholders who will be in the room when you present.
The other thing I would say is that you really have to know your content. A lot of presentation nerves come from not being confident about the content you’re about to share. If you knew that the structure was amazing, that the content included was perfect for the audience, and that your design was on point, you would go in feeling a lot more confident.
My mentor Spencer Waldron told me once that in an ideal world, I would practice one hour for every one minute of presentation. A 20-minute presentation would require 20 hours of practice to really, really understand the material and be able to present it in such a way where you’re not worried about focusing on the content, but you can actually practice the public speaking and delivery part of it.
Where a lot of people get it wrong in high-stakes presentations is not preparing for Q&A and not preparing to be interrupted. Oftentimes, we also share what we think is important, but we don’t put ourselves in the shoes of the executive to understand what they value and the way that they like to consume information. We tend to deliver presentations like we would in a team meeting. But for executives, you have to be operating at a different altitude.
Leaders often say they value thoughtful contributors, yet the loudest voices still dominate many meetings. How can managers avoid mistaking airtime for actual influence?
The first thing is awareness. I am always so happy when I get questions from managers asking me, “How can I be more inclusive of the introverts and the quieter voices?” There’s an awareness that needs to be there that not all your teammates are the same and not all of them are going to feel comfortable muting and unmuting or speaking up whenever an idea comes to mind.
There has to be more structure around the way that we lead meetings. For example, instead of just evaluating ideas based on what is shared in the meeting, you might:
- Provide a document ahead of time that people can comment on.
- Provide it afterward.
- Ask people to share additional ideas through email before you make a final decision.
- Ask people to contribute in the chat.
This [last] one is so important because I often find that the best ideas come through in chat because people have had more time to think about what they want to say and they’re more organized and structured about it. You need to provide that psychological safety for your teammates for them to feel comfortable eventually speaking up in that meeting.
In your work, what most reliably separates people whose ideas gain traction from those whose equally strong ideas quietly stall?
Sometimes when this happens, it’s not an issue with the idea; it’s an issue with visibility and how the idea is conveyed. First and foremost, I mentioned earlier how important relationships are, especially now in the age of AI. The people who have built strong relationships—up and down, side to side, who are taking time to understand the goals of their colleagues, to get to know them on a human level to cheer them on—are naturally going to be someone who people are more excited to listen to because they know you and they like you.
The ideas that make it through are also ones that get shared not just once, but many times in many different formats. I think about that marketing adage: You have to see a message seven times in seven different ways for it to finally land. That is similar to our workplaces, where communication is disjointed over Slack, email, phone calls, texts, and in person. We have to meet people where they are. That’s why I often say that presence is about being seen by the right people at the right times in the right places. It requires strategy and intentionality when we share things that we want other people to see and internalize.
If a reader made just one behavior shift in the next 90 days to change how they’re perceived at work, what would you tell them to do first?
Pick someone whose perception of you matters, like a skip-level leader, a cross-functional peer, or someone in a room you’re never in. Invite them to a casual 30-minute coffee chat where your goal is to understand what matters to them and what their goals are. See if there are ways you can help or provide insight from the perspective of your team. Also use it as a time to get to know them better. And be prepared to show your impact if they ask you what you’ve been working on.
Do that once a month for 90 days and you’ve built three relationships that didn’t exist before who may be able to help you or advocate for you in the future.