The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 12. Building Personal and Organizational Prestige

Most months I get at least one email from an Engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally constrained by their hiring velocity—if their Engineering organization’s brand was just a bit better, they believe they’d be hiring much faster.

Writing a great deal online, and working at companies during periods when they invested heavily in their external Engineering brand, I’ve seen both the opportunities and the limitations of personal and organizational brand building. From those experiences, I’ve come to believe that the value of brand building is overemphasized, but that the impact of enhancing prestige is underrated, and that there’s a relatively straightforward playbook to increase your personal and organizational prestige.

In this chapter, we’ll work through building prestige, covering:

• The distinctions between building prestige, building a brand, and building an audience

• Deciding whether it’s valuable to build your personal and Engineering prestige

• The playbook for manufacturing prestige with a small quantity of high-quality content

• The pitfalls of measuring prestige, and what to measure instead

After reading, you’ll be equipped to decide whether to invest in these areas for yourself or your Engineering ...