Is AI friend or foe for crafting your leadership brand?
When to fire up the machine and when to power down
Leadership coach Amy Au invited me to talk about how AI can help craft your leadership brand in the digital world. It was a fast and fun chat about the different ways leaders, particularly women, can use generative AI to help us shine. We also talked about when it's a good idea to switch it off. Watch our chat.
This got me thinking about when to AI and when not to AI.
When can it help?
And can it sometimes hinder?
To become an expert, get your hands dirty
Expertise isn't something we're gifted. We have to make it with our hands. Getting smarter about how to overlay AI onto your specialism is now becoming pretty important.
Unless you're super lucky or have a brilliant boss, no one's offering 20+ paid hours a week to play and explore AI. This is one reason women are falling behind in AI adoption. The "experiment and play" corporate whimsy doesn't work for busy caregivers, who are usually women.
I've always worked with the latest marketing tech, but as an arts graduate, I didn't ask for permission.
Nathan Barley, the parody TV character who epitomised the first internet wave in Shoreditch, London, claimed to be a "self-fulfilling media node." At the start of this century, I observed many Nathans as a starstruck graduate working in digital marketing in the music biz, learning to code websites in HTML and Dreamweaver. If you can dream it in 2D, we would build it.
When social media dawned with the first tweet in 2006, I got on the bus. I led self-organised unconferences and blogger communities, like Creative Nottingham. We were learning from each other’s disciplines – education, marketing, tech and business – teasing out what worked before social media managers existed. We learnt by doing, and I paid it forward by training others on topics like personal branding.
As social opened the digital door for individuals, we became more conscious about how we positioned ourselves in the digital world. Self-proclaimed 'social media gurus' gave us the juice on how to use corporate social channels like Facebook and Twitter: the right profile picture (headshot, looking up to the left), posting cadence and what we’d now call a content strategy.
With AI, we’re again in wildly creative times. I see similar discussions about how to use AI to craft your voice. And the same mad tricks, like how to coax the algorithm with a selfie. ChatGPT will happily craft you a 'hook' while LinkedIn nags you to fart out ideas using AI like a demented Clippy. How sad and limiting. AI can advance your skills in far more meaningful ways.
If you want to be a leader in anything, strike your own bat. Let podcasts lull you to sleep. Read on your phone on the train to work. Grab crumbs however you can to deepen your expertise.
I'm not saying anyone can be an expert. Kudos to the clever folks who've sweated their 10,000 hours with PhDs in topics like AI ethics. Complex organisations need this expertise. But in emerging disciplines, and for startups and scaleups, there's space to test AI to shape your practice. You only need to be one page further ahead to bring others along.
GenAI and the 50 shades of beige
Today, LinkedIn feels like a busy hotel swimming pool. Perfectly pleasant but homogenised. I miss swimming with weird fish in the ocean. But it's a sandpit for crafting and testing ideas. I shape my thinking by writing and speaking. This newsletter is my work in progress. As Amy Keen, Founder of Good Shout, which helps women find their voice, says, we’re all experiments.
AI skills can be honed from the mundane. That complex family calendar could become a project to test vibe-coding, giving you back time or delighting someone special.
I ask my chatbot, Claude, to help me prune rambling first drafts. But I continually have to 'insert human' to remove the weird thorny edges that characterise ‘AI speak’.
Many things are on fire right now, so I don't have the will to delve into the "if you're using an em dash—you're signalling AI wrote it" debate. But here's where things get icky.
Bung your ideas through the AI sausage machine, even with careful prompts, and the output is usually 50 shades of beige.
The kicker? Weird syntax that humans never use. Like this one.
Words are the base currency of the AI machine and it feels easy to do, but writing may not be the best medium for you. Funny cartoons, podcasting or video may serve you better if you're not naturally inclined to write.
You have to stick with it, so choose a format you enjoy. The first thing you put out will feel icky. Get over yourself. Few people will see it. The next will be better. And on it goes.
Simple exercise to start:
When you stop scrolling, note why. What drew you in – the topic, image, colours, hook? Did the words or delivery speak to you?
Brands establish a tone of voice for consistency. For your personal brand, tone of voice is the same. It’s how you sound. It's not always about being bold and shouty. Being the first to share an idea, rough and ready, may be an intentional strategy. Or be the librarian, weaving the knowledge threads together.
I had an 'uncanny valley' exchange on LinkedIn with a student this week who'd heard me on a podcast and sought career advice. Due to AI LinkedIn spam, I'd misread her message as a sales pitch because she'd polished it using ChatGPT, complete with lashings of em-dashes. Fortunately, I checked and she was real.
We talked and laughed about it. She shared her writing, which was good. I encouraged her to use her voice. The next day, I got a ‘personalised’ AI sales bot claiming they'd "heard my podcast" and did I want to “jump on a call.” I sniffed that rat.🐀 If someone’s not sure if you’re human or AI, you’ve probably gone too far.
Will your audience care if it's synthetic?
As a mid-careerist, I've reluctantly concluded that different age groups do have slightly different communication preferences. We had "digital natives" (later "millennials") – people using digital and mobile tech since their teens.
Is the new generation "AI natives"?
Teens today will have a magical chatbot for everything. Sam Altman shared that younger people use ChatGPT as a confidant, whereas we older folks use it like a thirsty Google.
Uncertain Eric, a semi-sentient AI synthetic blogger fed by inputs from its human author, mostly writes silly hype, but this struck a chord about generative AI content:
Most people won't care. Because people won't be asking 'is this real?' They'll be asking, 'Do I like how this makes me feel?'
Relentless AI content exposure will dull our senses, and change expectations. Put yourself in your audience's shoes: how would you feel receiving that message? Maybe ‘hard AI’ is fine for your audience. Maybe not. Try it out. Find your uncomfortable edges.
Finding your voice
The only way to craft your voice is to speak it out loud. Or whisper if you're on the bus. Does this sound like me?
When I hosted the podcast Insight Story, I had a brilliant producer, Jayne Morgan, who guided me along. During my first voiceover, I said I sounded like a commercial radio DJ. She told me whatever I thought was too much, really wasn't. That's how putting your voice out there feels initially. Am I too cheesy? Serious? Boring? Whatever cringe you think you're channelling, you probably aren’t.
Use GenAI as a rehearsal conductor. It's watched all the talk shows and knows how to ask typical questions. Got a job interview? Add the job description, then switch to voice mode and ask it to interview you. First podcast as a guest? Same process. Practice. Practice. Then practice again.
Leadership isn't about 'likes'. Or even being liked.
Don't be a slave to the social algorithm.
Some of my top-performing posts yielded no contacts or leads. Some serious ones, with just a few likes, were from exactly the right people and led to conversations and opportunities. Most people in networks are lurkers. Less than 1% of LinkedIn users post anything. You only need one right connection.
Find your sweet spot, like a toxic fish
To craft your personal brand, understand what new value you bring. Sangeet Paul Choudary wrote about the paradox of the puffer fish. This Japanese delicacy requires great skill to prepare. At least in a way that won't poison you. (Best Columbo episode ever).
As seafood became more accessible due to cold storage, rather than dropping in value, the puffer fish's value rose. The constraint shifted from access to expertise.
What constraints exist in your work? What can’t AI do well? Find cold spots that mass-market AI solutions can't easily reach.
Fine-tune your values before leaning into your personal brand. The ikigai method helps you find the sweet spot between what you love, what the world needs and what pays. I revisit mine every year.
It's good to get offline with the 4Ps: Pen, paper, Post-its in a park.
Tangible things help you noodle and shape thoughts. My best ideas live on a double-sided Post-it note.
AI can help hone your voice. But it becomes your foe if you let it replace your perspective and rub away the rough edges that make you memorable.
I'm bad at endings. So, this one's from Claude:
“Your expertise is already there waiting to be shaped; the only question is whether you'll start crafting your voice today or wait for someone else to define your space tomorrow.”
Cheers, Claude. Cheesy, but it’ll do.
You do you. Everyone else is taken.👌