Top managers’ personal branding in a corporate world: Strategizing and overcoming dualities along the career path

Personal branding is one of the numerous themes the managerial work and practices of top managers are attributed to. Despite the importance of personal branding as a catalyst for careers, there is still very little empirical evidence on how top managers’ personal brands actually emerge and what they themselves do to shape these brands. This paper opens the black box of personal brand development by deploying a process and practice perspective and argues that personal branding is a distinct key practice in itself underlying managerial work for managers at all career stages. Using multiple strategies to analyze process data within and across six top manager cases, we identified three distinct key practices—managing position, managing individuals, managing visibility—describing how they managed the development of their personal brands across their career stages. Central to this is managing dualities like “Fitting In vs. Standing Out” and overcoming the tensions accompanying these dualities. We highlight the practical implications for today’s managers and add to the literature on personal branding.