Want a Better Brand? Look at Your Communication Skills

Hello, hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. How are you today? I cannot believe that we are in October. I keep hearing that everywhere I go. But this is one of my favorite times of the year. And I’ve been really excited lately because my first ever in-person event is coming together. It has been a dream of mine to someday bring my clients together in person. And I wanted to have this casual, intimate space for us to just meet each other in person. And it’s really ballooned into a brunch and wine tasting and a photographer and a workshop and some coaching. And it’s just been amazing to offer this gift for my clients. Over the last four years, I’ve just worked with so many incredible women in this industry from all over the country and even globally, and some I’ve met in person, but most I have not. And as you know, if you’ve been listening for a while, community is such an important part of my business. It is partly why I have group programs now. When you all get together, it just creates magic. You grow faster, you make new friends, you have a support network that stays with you.

So I’m so happy I have finally done it. I was able to find the right venue and format to bring my clients together as a celebration, a gift to have a girl day with all of the things to set them up for a successful 2025. So I am just bopping around the house every time I get a notification that someone else is coming. It’s just such an honor, really, to have these amazing women that I get to work with and support them in their careers, taking time out of their life and their responsibilities to travel and come to this event. It’s just going to be incredible, and I don’t take that decision lately. So that is my big update today. It has been filling my cup the last couple of days as these registrations have been coming through for my first ever client day. And I hope that This is something that can grow and be the first of many client days that I hold in the future. Now, let’s dig into today’s topic. Today, we are going to talk about your branding and how it relates to how effective you are at communicating with others.

I have clients that ask me pretty regularly about their branding, their reputation, how they come off, especially in interviews when they’re not getting those job offers that they feel that should be a no-brainer to choose them. They’re thinking, there’s something wrong with the way that I’m talking about my experience. It’s not aligned with what I can do and my contribution I can make is aligned with the way that I’m talking and presenting myself. And internally, this can be because they’re worrying about maybe what they can do or what they’re capable of instead of what they really want to do. And it can really just negatively impact the way that you position yourself, whether it be in interviews with stakeholders, with other leaders, and it just can leave potential on the table, so to speak. And sometimes my clients will ask me if I can help them create their brand. And I actually have a great exercise on this. So if you’re thinking, I really want to work on my personal brand or my branding in the workplace, I have another episode called Your Personal Brand. But guess what? I’m going to give you a little bit of a spoiler.

There’s a great exercise in that episode to help you, but you already have a brand. It’s not how to create your brand. That’s the wrong question. But instead, discovering what your brand is and then deciding if your brand as it is, what you’re known for, the way people see you if that aligns with how you want to be seen in the career that you want to have. So that episode on Personal Brand is where I give you an exercise to figure out what your current brand is. So consider that you already have a brand. What is your brand made up of? What do people think of when they think of you? Your brand is how people experience you. It’s what you’re known for. And that includes your good days, your bad days, the projects that you hit out of the park, how you deal with challenging colleagues, how you talk to your boss, how you resolve conflict. All of this is your brand. And a big contributor to your brand is the topic of today, communication skills. So the good news about this is that communication skills are a skill. In what I just said, it’s a skill.

You can learn to be an effective communicator with any person and in any environment. Your brand, from this perspective, when you think about it this way, is in your control. So today I want to talk about some communication practices that contribute to your brand more specifically. Now, these are some areas that you can audit yourself against and and think about and reflect on how you communicate and how that impacts your brand. And of course, your takeaway from today is what are those improvements or changes that you can make to better align your brand with how you want to be seen. So the first thing I’m going to talk about is consistency and reliability. Your personal brand is built through consistent messaging. Whether you’re presenting to a leadership team or managing cross-functional teams in a clinical trial or on a project team, how you communicate should align with your values, your expertise, and your vision. And consistency with that is what is going to build trust. Now, I help my clients create a leadership philosophy that becomes their compass to how they want to behave and the type of leader that they want to be and be seen as.

If people interact with you and they find you to be reliable and consistent in how you communicate, how you handle conflict, how you run your meetings, then that builds trust. Whether or not you’re seen as trustworthy, reliable, and consistent is all part of your brand. So think about when you go into meetings, do people always know what to expect from you? Are you sometimes pleasant, asking about their weekend and other times getting straight down to business? Think about how you’re interacting with people and what is that consistent messaging? Is your consistent messaging inconsistent? Is your consistent messaging that you are not consistent and that is what is consistent? Or are there things that you always do when it comes to communicating meetings, meeting with your stakeholders that are part of your brand? And then you can think about, is that how you want to be seen? Are there any intentional changes that you want to make? Now, number two is emotional intelligence. Effective communication isn’t just about data. It’s also about empathy and emotional intelligence, which you might think of as EQ. Now, pharma and biotech, you know, thrive on collaboration, matrix environment, and showing empathy and communication, whether you’re advocating for patients or leading a diverse team or sticking up for someone that is maybe newer on the team, enhances your brand as a thoughtful people-centered leader.

Now, as humans, emotions are going to get the best of us sometimes, right? We can have bad days for sure. But think about what you have in place to proactively monitor and manage emotions. Do you allow yourself to take a break and step away when you’re heightened, or do you force yourself to push through? Knowing when to step away is another form of emotional intelligence. Another part of EQ that often gets overlooked is lack of emotion. We tend to think of EQ as not getting too emotional, but also as showing the appropriate level of emotion. If you struggle with or just don’t want to connect emotionally with others, for example, you could come off cold or dismissive which then becomes part of your brand. You may think, Well, I’m just getting down to business. I’m focusing on the facts. I’m focusing on the project. But as humans working together, we do need some emotional connection to increase productivity and effectiveness. Now, this isn’t about people-pleasing, so I just want to be clear on that. This isn’t about trying to mold yourself into a pretzel for other people. It’s about balance and effectively communicating for your audience in a variety of different situations.

Being able to handle sensitive topics, topics you need to be more assertive, and so on. Now, number three is being a curious listener. You’ve heard about active listening since you were a kid, I bet, right? I feel like I’ve heard of active listening since my whole life. Now, in the context of work and your brand, it’s about the impression that others have of you and whether or not you’re actually listening and interested and engaged in what your stakeholders have to say. Or are you someone that’s waiting for them to stop talking because you know the right answer and you want to either agree or disagree? Now, being a curious listener allows you to let your guard down and approach your stakeholders with curiosity and helps you understand the full picture. Whether that’s your team’s feedback or regulatory guidance, it shows that you’re not just reactive but proactive in driving solutions. And this is a fantastic leadership skill. So if you ever find yourself getting defensive or disagreeing with the direction of a project, try to listen with curiosity instead of judgment or instead of looking for what’s right and wrong and see what happens. If you’re curious about their perspective and don’t either give it too much credit or less credit than your own opinion, it’s going to help you be more effective in your stakeholder relationships.

Now, number four is tailored communication, and I’ve talked about this quite a bit on the podcast. Whether you’re presenting data to regulators or communicating new research to non-technical stakeholders, your ability to adapt your style to your audience is going to highlight you as a versatile and adaptive leader. In pharma and biotech where there’s constant change, that’s really important. Because some messages, they’re just not meant for everyone. Sometimes the message has to change for the audience. If you approach communication with the one size fits all, it’s likely holding you back and advancing your career, or at best, it’s just preventing you from being as productive and effective as you could be. Being able to communicate well and tailor your message, it defines your brand as someone who can navigate all levels of the organization. Think about when your boss sees you, act one way with your senior leaders and act another with your direct reports and act another with your peers. They’re going to see you adapting and using being appropriate, using the right context, the right level of communication, using empathy and connection with your different stakeholders. They’re going to see that and see how you can be trusted to be that advisor or that subject matter expert or that leader in any room with anyone.

So you want to think about how you can adjust your leadership dial. So if you listen to my episode on executive presence. I think it’s called the executive presence method. I talk about the leadership dial, which is a concept that I’ve created that I work with my clients on and how to adjust your dial based on your audience. You still feel authentic to you, but you’re able to be more effective with different groups and different people. Now, number five is that authenticity is your secret sauce. Authenticity can set your brand apart. People appreciate others who communicate in a genuine and human way, right? You’ve been in conversations where people are just saying what you think they need to say, or when people are trying to be someone they’re not, it’s not very effective. And people can see right through that. And when you’re authentic, people trust you more. That trust strengthens your brand as a credible, relatable leader. This can also be what contributes to your value proposition, which is the thing that you bring to the table that sets you apart from everyone else who has a similar job and degree. Being a skilled communicator, again, isn’t about changing who you are.

It’s about building the skill to be a reliable, trusted expert and leader. And that requires you to have a more comprehensive strategy than generic tips and tricks. Your authenticity: It’s who you really are. It’s an important part of your brand, and it’s going to come through in how you make decisions, how you solve problems, how you react and talk to others. So there are the five elements that we just talked about for communication that impact your brand. These play into how you talk about your experience and qualifications, how you tailor your resume, how you speak up and share your ideas in meetings, how well you lead others directly or indirectly on project teams. They contribute to your brand. And if there are any elements of your communication skills that you want to improve, use this as a roadmap. Take one small action today to incorporate something you learned here and be more intentional about how you communicate. And that will actually make you more intentional and effective with your brand. All right, have an amazing week and I will talk to you soon. 

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