Your Personal Brand at Work Is What Survives the Reorg

Oct 29

7 min read

Updated: Nov 3

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

At least once a month a woman tells me she does not need a personal brand at work. She works for a company with a big one. The logo opens the door. The name on her badge does the talking.

Girl, that ain't your brand.

I said exactly that on this week's episode of Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors, sitting across from Robyn Young, founder of the brand strategy studio Young & Co. She has worked with Google, UCLA and a long list of founders and CEOs. She did not soften it either.

"If you're only ever depending on who you've worked with, you're putting all your stock into those businesses," she told me. "But anybody else who's also worked with big brands, it's like you're, competing with them, too, right?"

The episode is the whole conversation, and you should go listen to it. This post is the part that keeps me up at night: what a borrowed name costs you, why it costs women more than it costs the men sitting next to them, and the three questions that give you something of your own.

Your Employer Is a Four Year Address

Let's get real for a second and look at how long any of this lasts.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released fresh tenure numbers in September 2026. Median years with your current employer, as of January 2026: 4.1. For women, 4.0. For workers ages 25 to 34, 3.0 years.

Four years. That is the average life span of the thing a lot of us have been treating as an identity.

I know that math in my body. I spent more than 15 years in HR and climbed all the way to Chief People Officer. I had the title, the comp, the reserved parking spot in my own head. Then I walked away, and the title walked out with the job.

The work stayed. The relationships stayed. The point of view I had spent 15 years building stayed. What vanished was the part that had always belonged to somebody else.

In my own work I call this one of the sticky floors, the internal kind. Welding your worth to a title is one of the stickiest there is, and it is the one nobody warns you about until the reorg lands.

How do I build a personal brand at work when my job already has a brand?

This is the question I get most, and Robyn's answer surprised me.

Most of us build around a demographic. I am a woman in tech. I am a mid level marketing leader. I am a mom in corporate America. Robyn says that is the exact reason it feels like a cage.

"Anything that's demographically driven is gonna pigeonhole you," she said. Then she asked how many people are already trying to reach millennial women between 28 and 45.

Her alternative is to sort by what people value instead of what they are, and she runs it with one blunt exercise: who are you NOT for?

Then a second question, which I know all too well: What are you fighting for?

She is not talking about politics. She was clear that 99 percent of the brands she builds have nothing political in them. She means the convention in your field you would argue about at dinner. The thing you watch happen to people that you want to see end.

My $10,000 spiral

I told her my own version on the mic, because some weeks I am still in it.

My whole career has been built for women. My first book was Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors. My second is The AI Gap. And every couple of years I get this itch that says go bigger, talk to everybody, market to men.

I paid a keynote coach $10,000, and he spent our sessions asking me careful questions, trying to get me to hear myself say it. I would not let it go. I kept looking at speakers who talk about innovation to the entire world and telling myself I had pigeonholed my own career.

Here is the thing Robyn said that finally landed. Women is a demographic. A point of view is a different animal. When I name what I fight, I land on one specific belief: that if you do good work, somebody will come along and notice you.

That belief costs women money every single year. It has nothing to do with a box on a form.

Same audience, mostly the same women. Completely different thing to stand on.

Why This Costs Women More

You already know the reason. The research is blunt about it.

Woman leader presenting her work to a team

A study published in Nature Communications in July 2025 looked at 2.8 million research papers and more than 23 million tweets. Women were about 28 percent less likely than men to promote their own papers publicly. Among authors who were already active on the platform, the gap was still there. And it widened as the stakes went up: in the most prestigious journals, men were about 85 percent more likely to post about their own work.

That fact really made me think because the bigger the win, the wider the silence. (Girl! Why do we do that to ourselves???)

Now look at who is supposed to be noticing. Gallup reported in January 2026 that the average manager now carries 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 the year before and nearly 50 percent more than when Gallup first measured it in 2013.

Twelve people. Your manager is not ignoring you. She has twelve inboxes in her head and she knows what is in front of her.

Then the promotion conversation happens, and you are not in the room for it. The Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey, published in December 2025, found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women were. Only 31 percent of entry level women have a sponsor, compared with 45 percent of men at their level.

So your record has to travel without you. That is the entire job of a brand: to speak clearly in rooms you are not standing in.

If you are the manager on the other side of this, I wrote the companion piece for you over on HER Collective.

Where AI Fits, and Where It Does Not

I hit Robyn with the rapid fire version. AI for branding, yes or no?

"If you have strength and identity and you're using AI to just compound that, great," she said. Most people, she said, go to AI looking for it to provide that identity. "You will never have the conviction if you're asking a robot to give you your identity."

She is right, and I say that as the woman who wrote a book about AI and teaches it for a living. AI will write your bio. It will hand you nine LinkedIn headlines and make every one of them sound polished. What it will never do is decide what you are willing to argue with.

Answer the two questions yourself. Then hand AI your answers and let it do the typing.

Start Here This Week

Starting is the hard part, so keep it small. Open a note on your phone and answer three things. Fifteen minutes, one sitting, no research required.

1. Who am I not for? Name the kind of work, client, team or project you would turn down even in a lean year.

2. What am I fighting? One sentence. The practice in your field you want to see end.

3. What would someone say about me in a room I am not in? Write the sentence you want said. Then write the sentence you think gets said today.

The distance between those last two is your work for the next quarter. Close it and what you are standing on is authority, and authority is what puts you on the short list, on the stage, and inside the salary band you have been circling for two years.

Robyn said one more thing I wrote down on a sticky note. "There is no there. You're not ever gonna feel ready." It took her eight years and a hundred brands before she built her own. (Eight years. A hundred brands. Still not ready.)

You will not feel ready either. Build it anyway.

Listen to the full conversation here: How to Build an Ownable Brand, with Robyn Young. And if you want to work out who you are when the title is gone, next to a room of women doing the same thing, come see what we built at HER Collective. We saved you a seat.

I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a personal brand at work?

A personal brand at work is the point of view people associate with you, separate from your employer's name. It covers what you are known for, what you refuse to do, and what gets said about you when you are not in the room. Your company's logo and reputation belong to the company, so they stop working for you the day you leave.

How do I build a personal brand at work without posting every day?

Start with the thinking, not the posting. Answer three questions: who you are not for, what you are fighting, and what you want said about you in a room you are not in. Then pick one place to be consistent and let the rest be presence only. Brand strategist Robyn Young keeps two to three real channels and treats everything else as a placeholder.

Can AI build my personal brand?

AI can write the words once you know your stance, and it will save you hours doing it. It cannot give you the stance. As Robyn Young put it on the podcast, you will never have the conviction if you are asking a robot for your identity. Do the two questions first, then use AI to draft, edit and repurpose.