Build Your Leadership Brand With AI, Without Sounding Like a Robot

Your personal brand is far more powerful to recruiting than your company brand will ever be. When you think about recruiting in the simplest form, it's just showing people on the outside what it's like to be on the inside while they're still on the outside. How else can you do that beside your personal brand? You can't. The problem is time, and the shortcut most leaders grab is a chatbot that makes them sound like every other leader on the feed.

In 2018 I started a social media company that at its peak managed about 60 plus leaders' personal brands on four different platforms. In 2023, when I began to use AI, I was like, this is not going to last. For a $20 subscription people are going to be able to do this. And I shut that company down. Here's how to build your leadership brand with AI and keep it sounding like you.

1. Curate what you already do

As we live as leaders, the content exists. You just are simply trying to identify and document the opportunities for your life to be turned into content. The number one reason why people don't create content is they don't know what to talk about. They'll say that. I don't have the ideas. You have more ideas than you think, because you sit in the middle of them all day. You're in recruiting conversations, production conversations, P and L conversations, personnel conversations. That's your life. You would have an unlimited amount of content if you simply had a knowledge base.

2. Capture your conversations

I want to encourage you to start having an AI recording assistant at the table with you. You will become a way more effective leader doing that. Your content is going to sit in those recordings. You take a transcript, drop it in, pull out all the ideas for content, and write those as short-form LinkedIn pieces. One coaching call or sales meeting can fill a week of posts that way. Both my newsletters this week were created by AI that came from my coaching conversations.

3. Give AI your voice

Take five personality profiles, DISC, Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, Strengths Finder, and voices, and store the entire profile inside your AI. Don't just say I'm an ENFP, say I'm a 67 percent E, a 73 percent F. That's deeper context, so it writes like you. Once it has that, ask for a draft and fix anything you'd never say out loud.

4. Co-create with it

What I'm doing right here is I'm just co-creating with AI. I'm not giving AI a command and saying, go build me a post, I'm co-creating with it. It's a back and a forth. It's like I've got a brilliant brainstormer over here, but I also have a brilliant ghostwriter over here. Give it a real moment from your week and let it ask you questions. This morning walking my road, I took a simple photo of the road and dropped it into the content creator, and it created, like on the fly, it created this content piece. And I'm not kidding you, I did not change a thing.

5. Lead with stories

We looked at all the content that we had created at that time, which was north of 10,000 content pieces. We measured the top 25 pieces for best interaction, best engagement, best views. 24 of the 25 were stories. So when AI hands you a list of tips, ask it for the story underneath. I think the best lessons are the ones that we share out of our failures, not our successes.

What it does for your recruiting

If I'm a branch manager in Virginia Beach and you said, Richard, we would love to show you how our marketing has built a manufacturing line to help you create content, I'd be like, do what? That's different. Nobody's doing that. And if you help me with my personal brand, I now have golden handcuffs because nobody else is doing it. The same tools that build your brand can help your team build theirs, and that's a reason for good people to stay. Most people start out not that excited about content creation, but you've got personas here that should be very easy for you to capture.