The Reputation That Grows a Manager's Career | Andy Storch

You work hard. You care deeply. So why does your career growth still feel unclear?

If you're a manager doing everything right but waiting for recognition, promotion, or more trust, this episode shows you why.

Desiree sits down with Andy Storch, author of Own Your Brand, Own Your Career and host of Talent Development Hot Seat, for a no-fluff talk on personal brand.

Not influencer vibes or nonstop posting. This is reputation, trust, and ownership at work.

They break down:

• What personal brand really means inside organizations
• Why hard work alone won't cut it anymore
• How to build credibility by developing your people
• Why talent-growers become impossible to replace

Walk away knowing career growth is something you build, not wait for. Grow your career. Lead your team better. This shifts how you see visibility, reputation, and leadership.

 Resources

Own Your Brand, Own Your Career by Andy Storch

Free workbook + resources

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn

Taking Intentional Action: How to Choose the Life You Lead

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Transcript

Desiree (00:01.336)
All right, friends, we are back with my friend Andy. Andy and I met almost a year ago now and LinkedIn connection as always, but I'm really excited to introduce you to Andy because he has his second book that just came out. And Andy, why don't you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write this book and why it's important for the people listening today?

Andy Storch (00:20.512)
Absolutely. Well, thank you Desiree for having me on your show. And I think our relationship, this conversation is such a great example of building network and community on LinkedIn because we connected on there. We had a call. We realized we had some things in common. We live in very different places, but we're doing similar things and just following each other online. I learn things from you all the time. And then we get a chance to have this conversation and share with other people, which I always love. So.

My first book is called Own Your Career Own Your Life, which I published five years ago to teach and inspire people to take more ownership, be more intentional about building their career as well as setting themselves up for future success. And in that book, I talked about the three things you can always be doing to set yourself up for future success, no matter what type of job you do or what's going on in the world. And those three things were investing in continuous learning, building your network and building your personal brand.

And at the time, I think I called it building your professional brand because I was a little worried that the idea of personal brand might be off putting to some people. But the world has changed a lot in the last five years. And I had an opportunity to work with a good friend and mentor of mine named Mike Kim to put this new book together to expand on that idea of building your personal brand, particularly for people who work in larger organizations who are employees who are not necessarily trying to build their own business, but want to attract opportunities and achieve.

more success. And I saw a major opportunity there because I was also talking with a lot of people in the corporate space and hearing stories about how them being intentional with their brand was attracting more opportunities. And at the same time, recognizing and getting confirmation from a lot of people that the old idea that many of us were taught that if we just show up, put our heads down and work hard, we'll be rewarded for that. When in actuality, right, it's more about

who knows not just the work that you've done, but who knows about the work that you've done, who knows about your skills and your abilities and your accomplishments. And so we've got to find ways to make sure that people know about who we are and what we stand for and what we're capable of to attract more of those opportunities in the future.

Desiree (02:28.036)
I'm really curious, have you had a lot of excitement around this topic or have you had pushback from the people in a corporate setting, maybe who aren't currently looking for other opportunities? What's their initial reaction when you are having this conversation with them?

Andy Storch (02:41.634)
Yeah, it's a great question because what you're recognizing is that things have really evolved a lot. Five plus years ago, in fact, in my own personal experience, I worked years ago for a consulting firm and I started my first podcast while I was there and had an idea to start another podcast. And I went to the chief marketing officer at the time, this is back in 2017, and said, hey, I think we can start a podcast to attract more clients and attention and build our brand here. And of course,

I would do it so I would want to build my own brand. And his reaction at the time was, what's a podcast, right? This was 2017. They weren't quite as popular as they are today. And then my manager came to me and said, Hey, you need to just focus on your job and not waste time with things like this. I ended up going and starting the podcast on my own with support from another organization. And it turned into a conference in a community and a business and lots of other things that have come from it. And that firm I used to work for has since started their own podcast.

Um, I share that story to illustrate that there used to be a perspective that it's a waste of time or possibly even negative to let our people go out and, and build a personal brand. Cause that time people, know, one of the managers in the company actually questioned my activity online. Like, what are you doing out there posting? Where you should be focused on this certain thing. Right. And over the years, as I've been sharing lots of content on LinkedIn and building a brand, I've had people say to me things like, I see your stuff on LinkedIn, but I don't ever like or comment on it because.

I don't want my manager to know that I'm on LinkedIn because they'll think I'm looking for a job. And companies would tell people like, don't waste time on there unless you're sharing our company approved content, something like that. And I've seen things shift very far to the other side now where I'm getting hired by companies to come in and speak about the topic of building a personal brand because they want to encourage people to be more thoughtful about how they're showing up both internally and potentially sharing content.

online saying that, like, we want you to go post about this learning day that we're having. want you to go post about the things that we're doing in our company. And I see some companies doing this really well. For example, earlier this year, I worked with Tractor Supply Company and of course they're very known for their outdoor retail stores around the country. But their CEO Hal Lawton is very public on LinkedIn. I think he has 40, 50,000 followers. He's sharing content on a regular basis. The learning and development team posts every time.

Andy Storch (05:05.548)
They host or run a learning program and the CEO is posting when he's out visiting stores in the field. And every time I see that stuff, I just think, wow, this seems like an organization that's really invested in their people. This seems like it's probably a great place to work. And so when we do that, when we do enable, allow, even encourage our people to go out and share content about the things they're learning and the work that they're doing, that has the potential to attract better talent.

or more talent to the organization as well. But it involve a mindset shift from the way things used to be. And I want to caveat it and say one more thing, which is that the whole idea of building a personal brand is really just about being intentional with your reputation, how you're interacting with other people. It doesn't have to be all about posting content on LinkedIn or sharing on social media. More than half of it is about how you're showing up at work, how you're interacting with people, how you're collaborating.

you know, are you on time to that meeting? Are you supportive? Do you work hard? Are you reliable? Are you doing work that's providing value to other people on your team and the organization? Or is it something that's the opposite? Because every time you show up to a meeting, you work on a project, you have a zoom call, it's impacting your brand and your reputation with every sort of little thing you do and the way you interact with others.

Desiree (06:25.144)
Yeah, and I would even go as far as to say when I was managing a dementia facility, I didn't know what LinkedIn was. I wasn't posting on Facebook or Instagram. And like you said, those are great avenues for doing it a little bit more publicly. But I think the thing that ultimately helped me to grow my reputation was joining Rotary and every Thursday morning at 7 a.m., going in and having a conversation with people that were completely outside of the realm of who I would typically have a conversation with.

Andy Storch (06:31.278)
Hmm.

Andy Storch (06:44.11)
Hmm.

Desiree (06:51.556)
or going and teaching at the Y or going in and joining in a class at the YMCA and just building a reputation outside of the four walls that you're working in every day. Because at some point, even if you think you're a lifer, even if you think you will never leave the position that you're in, you might get promoted to a position within that company that requires you to have a network outside of that job. You may get laid off unexpectedly and need to have a network outside of that job. It's just nice to have people that are not within your

Andy Storch (06:56.227)
Yeah.

Andy Storch (07:00.088)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Storch (07:18.648)
Mm-hmm.

Desiree (07:21.22)
current company. So there are so many reasons why it's a good idea to build that network and to I think part of it for me too was I wanted to be known as a disciplined person and how do you do that outside of those four walls? You go exercise, you go show up at the same time every week. I wanted to be known as a person who had a lot of energy. So going to networking events, know, what are your values? I think that's a big piece of the personal branding aspect of it too.

Andy Storch (07:39.404)
Yes.

Desiree (07:48.824)
Can you give us a little bit more of the zoomed in detail of how to go about building that personal brand?

Andy Storch (07:55.512)
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you brought up the network because I think network and personal brand are so closely related because it's all about who knows you and what do they know or what do they think about you. So the more that you're out there meeting with people, providing value to others, the more positively that's going to impact your personal brand. As far as getting to the nitty gritty, I always like to start with self-reflection to build self-awareness. think reflection and awareness, self-awareness is the foundation.

to owning your career. It's the foundation to owning your brand. I think it's the foundation to great leadership as well, right? Spending time, getting to know yourself. And this might look like sitting down with a cup of coffee or tea and a journal and just writing down some of your reflections on your career, how you got to where you are today, what some of your strengths and weaknesses are, the energizers, the things that you really love doing, your values that you mentioned. I like doing an exercise where I simply write, I am, and put a space next to it and write down all the ways I identify.

Myself, both personal and professional. So we all start out as either a son or a daughter. You and I are both parents. We might be brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles. And then, you know, for myself, I also identify as an author, a speaker. think you do as well, right? I'm podcaster. I'm a cyclist. I'm a friend. I'm also someone who's an, you I consider myself an athlete. There's lots of different ways that we might look at ourselves. And then from the professional standpoint, I'm an expert on

software design or whatever you look at yourself. And then from there, can build on that and ask the next question, which is, what do I want to be known for? Right? If someone is, people are talking about me around the office or someone's introducing me in a meeting, what do I want my reputation to be? What do I want to be known for? So for me, I write down things like, I want to be known as humble, generous, helpful, kind, inspiring, motivational. Other people, clients have told me they want to be known as

hardworking, as reliable, as high integrity. You can go to nouns like, I want to be known as an expert in career development or learning and development or leadership or software development, whatever it is you want to be known for. And then you can start asking yourself on a regular basis, am I showing up in alignment with that brand? I said, I want to be known as someone who's helpful and kind. Did I show up that way this week or was I kind of selfish?

Andy Storch (10:16.424)
which we all do from time to time. said, I want to be known as someone who's reliable. And I kind of dropped the ball on something because I got a little lazy. Do I need to make some adjustments for next time that I show that I do show up more in alignment with that brand that I want to portray? could be aspirational, something that we're building towards. And I know you work a lot with managers, a lot with leaders. So you may want to be known as someone who is a great manager, someone who develops others, and you can let that guide you.

Because I know one of the biggest challenges for managers is getting bogged down in project work, the day to day, and sometimes micromanaging, we need to get this done and this done. But we kind of know implicitly that to be a great manager, we need to spend time developing and coaching others, right? And helping them succeed. So if you have that in the back of your mind, I want to be known as a great manager who develops others. Have you done things this week that would contribute to that reputation, which is going to be beneficial for you and the people who work for you long-term.

Desiree (11:13.782)
It's so interesting that you say reflection. One of the podcasts I listened to is the Liz Moody podcast, and she just had an episode around six reflection questions that you can ask yourself for the end of the year. And one of them was, if you were to say the three main values that you have in your life, and then you look back at your schedule, you look back at your last day, your last month, your last year, would you be able to match those values with the time that you spent?

Andy Storch (11:25.208)
Hmm.

Desiree (11:42.072)
And I was thinking to myself, yeah, I think so. I think I could internally make connections between them. But then the next question was, if someone else looked at your calendar and your day, would they be able to guess what your values were? And I thought that was a really interesting reflection question of even if we are reflecting in and of ourselves, are we making sure that's portrayed to the people that we're spending the most time with or maybe the people that we just met? So it was an opportunity to go even a little bit deeper than the original self-reflection of

Andy Storch (12:04.056)
Hmm.

Desiree (12:11.786)
Am I coming across in the way that I say I am and I'm trying to?

Andy Storch (12:16.077)
Yeah, so true. And another thing that has come out of this as I've been working with more people is I know you're big on team effectiveness as well, is that you can now do this exercise with your team and ask the question, what do we want to be known for as a team inside this organization? Let's say you're a team of five and you work in an organization of 50 or even 5,000. What do we want to be known for? Do we want to be known as strategic, as proactive, as

reliable as valuable, or do we want to just be known as experts in this certain area? It's a good exercise to go through because then you can start asking as a team, are we showing up in alignment with this brand? We said we want to be proactive. I work with a lot of people in talent development. One of the biggest goals or transitions people want to make is going from being that reactionary order taker to being more strategic in the organization. So if we said we want to be known as strategic and proactive,

We look back at the last few weeks, we've really just been taking incoming requests and responding to those rather than truly getting to know the strategy and proactively reaching out to other leaders and making suggestions for how we can add value. And so now you have this aspiration you're working towards and you can check in on a regular basis to see if you're heading in the right direction.

Desiree (13:35.396)
I just had a conversation with a leader wanting to do some work, long-term contract, trying to get their team to become a little bit more cohesive, try and get everyone on the same page of what they want their culture to look like. But her question at the end kind of made me chuckle. She said, how do I make sure that even after six months or a year, if we're exactly where we want to be and someone new comes in, how do we make sure it doesn't get broken down? How do we make sure that that person is a good fit? I think it's exactly what you just said.

Once you've defined what your values are, once you're actually living into those values, that's what longstanding culture is. A, you wouldn't bring someone in who didn't know about those values and that culture expectation, and you likely wouldn't keep someone who didn't follow through on that culture expectation. It takes a little bit of work or sometimes a lot of bit of work to get to the point where you can have those conversations. It's well known amongst everyone. It's a common language amongst the people on your team.

Andy Storch (14:03.15)
Mmm.

Andy Storch (14:23.779)
Yeah.

Desiree (14:31.406)
but it takes this kind of work to get to that point so that you can actually keep that standing culture through all the transition, through all the turnover, et cetera.

Andy Storch (14:42.444)
Yeah, completely agree.

Desiree (14:44.854)
So give us a little bit more nitty gritty. You said self-reflection. What's another topic within your book that's really tangible for leaders that they can take right now and go and utilize within their workplace?

Andy Storch (14:57.272)
Well, on the internal side, there's that reflection piece, of course, and then you can do that with your team and ask them to do that on an individual level as well and ask them what they want to be known for. And of course, that really is the next level from asking them what do they want to achieve in their careers, right? I think it's an important question we need to be asking people on our teams who are reporting to us. Another chapter we wrote in the book, which I think is really important for, especially for individual contributors, but leaders as well.

is on this idea being what we call an entrepreneur, someone who is acting entrepreneurial, but within an organization. And you can encourage people on your team to be acting this way as well. It's really just saying, hey, I don't want you to be bound by the description of the role that you're in, but rather to be looking for opportunities to solve problems or problems to solve, to be looking for ways to achieve our goals.

to be making suggestions even if they're outside of your role. I'm never going to tell you to, hey, just get back to work on that one thing, which is something a manager told me one time when I tried to step outside the box and do something that leveraged more of my strengths. Another thing you can be doing as a manager, especially, is looking for and identifying the strengths of the people that you work for or that work for you. I had a leader once that did this for me.

And it was one of the most profound impactful things that has happened in my entire career was when she recognized strengths that I had and actually created an entire role for me based on that. And we don't always have the freedom to create a new role, but a lot of times people don't recognize their own strengths, right? Because we all assume if we're good at something, then probably everybody else can do it because we're mostly humble and we, no one ever thinks like, I'm amazing at this thing. But your colleagues might be looking at you and thinking, Wow, you're really amazing at disseminating information or

at critical thinking or at bringing the team together or speaking in front of the team or whatever it is, right? The more of the manager, the leader can recognize those things. You can not only try to create more work in the realm to take advantage of those strengths, but also help encourage those employees to build their personal brand around those strengths because we all have things that we love doing, we're passionate about, but the chance, we've got a good chance of building a strong personal brand.

Andy Storch (17:16.774)
We're going to have a lot of success building a strong personal brand around things that we're really good at, as well as things that we like. And hopefully those things come together. So as a manager, as a leader, I think you have an opportunity to recognize those things, encourage people to do more work around their strengths, and encourage them to let people know about the work that they're doing to build a personal brand in that realm as well.

Desiree (17:37.976)
What I feel like I heard you say was curiosity. Like, have you wrapped it all up nice with a bow? As the leader, it's our responsibility to be curious about the people that are working for us, not hold them to the job description that they were necessarily originally hired for. Yes, there's work that has to be done and yes, it's likely put onto someone's plate, but the way that that work needs to be done or adding above and beyond, assuming that person has the capacity.

Andy Storch (17:41.559)
Yeah.

Andy Storch (17:52.526)
Mm-hmm.

Desiree (18:04.95)
That is just allowing them to be curious. Then a job opens up in a different department and maybe you find out that person is perfect for it. You can then encourage them to apply and they don't feel pigeonholed in this one job with no area for growth. Because I feel like a lot of leaders that I talk to who have a desire to do more lead, you know, individuals, they're like, but I have no growth opportunities in this job. And that's not actually the case. It's just the perception because they've never been given

Andy Storch (18:28.43)
Hmm.

Andy Storch (18:32.76)
Mm-hmm.

Desiree (18:34.656)
any sort of inkling that there are opportunities elsewhere. So I love what you said. I'm going to wrap it up with a bow and say as a manager, it's your job to stay curious and help your employees to be curious about the things that they maybe wouldn't have thought about.

Andy Storch (18:49.474)
Which leads me into one other chapter we had in the book, which is about the seven human traits that are going to be more and more valuable as we go into this future time where technology is doing more and more. The human skills are going to stand out more and more. those who really embrace human skills and ability, these traits are going to be able to build a stronger brand as well. And that includes things like curiosity, empathy, communication, storytelling.

things that a lot of managers can embrace to achieve more. And I would also say too, to your point about helping people apply for and get new opportunities, it's always a hard thing to do for managers, but if you can be a champion or a sponsor or a supporter or other people, you can help build their personal brands, right? And talking about the great work that they're doing, which allows them to achieve more in their careers. And then as a result, you build your brand and reputation as a manager or developer of people, right?

And then you tend to attract more great talent in the long run because people know that, Desiree is someone who really develops people, that she doesn't hoard talent. If I join her team, I'm going to get some development opportunities. So I want to go work for her. And that's reputation I would want to have as a manager.

Desiree (20:06.336)
That's one of my favorite conversations to have with leaders as we start to wrap up this conversation is you are not replaceable or you are replaceable as a leader. Like there's no such thing as being irreplaceable in a job. That's not how businesses work. However, what makes you really, really hard to replace is when you can build up the people underneath you. You're never scared to hire someone smarter than you because it's not about them doing a job.

Andy Storch (20:17.464)
Yeah. Right. Right.

Desiree (20:34.424)
better, it's about you helping them use their strengths exactly like you said, to grow into whatever area is currently available to them. They are probably not trying to take your job. And if they are, it's, you know, don't don't let them be really, really hard to replace by growing them into the best leader that they can be.

Andy Storch (20:37.368)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Storch (20:42.252)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Storch (20:50.638)
Yeah. It's such a, it's such a good point and a reminder that everybody is replaceable. Like you said, and I was just thinking as you said that someone like Steve Jobs, who is known as one of the greatest leaders in modern history. Um, and after he passed away, sadly, Tim Cook took over Apple and he's more than tripled the size of the company since then. And it doesn't mean he's necessarily a better leader than Steve Jobs was, but you would think at the time nobody could run this company like he could, but.

He had another leader waiting in the wings. groomed to, know, and Steve used to say that his greatest skill was finding and hiring the best talent. And he absolutely did that to continue the company and his legacy after he passed on.

Desiree (21:34.104)
That's the perfect example of that. And I really appreciate individuals who can lean into this topic of we're all replaceable in a sense, but that's why I'm going to put one more bowl on this and say, that's why it's so important to build your personal brand and to have that voice and to be uniquely you. So Andy, two questions to wrap this up. Is there anything that we've left unsaid that you want the listeners to hear?

Andy Storch (22:02.125)
Well...

Yeah, would say a couple of things. One is that we didn't really start by defining this, but this idea of a personal brand is essentially your reputation. It's what people think about you, what they say about you when you're not in the room. And everybody has a reputation. Everybody has a personal brand, whether you do anything about it or not. So I'm a big fan of being intentional with that building that personal brand. It doesn't mean being fake or trying to be anything that you're not, because I'm also a big fan of authenticity.

But I think if we already have a brand, people are already making judgments about us, building a perception that you have that reputation. We might as well be intentional about how you're showing up in the world, how you're interacting with other people, how you're collaborating with other people and be intentional with the brand you want to portray so that you have something to work towards. And that it's important to get feedback along the way as well, because I talked about self-reflection, but we don't always know how we're being perceived. So I would add in that element. If you're really serious about this.

you're willing to get feedback from others or see how other people are reacting to you. And then we talked mostly about internal brand, how you're interacting with others, but there's also the aspect of external brand and thought leadership. If you're willing to go out and share some content on LinkedIn, interact with other people, build your network there, you you and I met on LinkedIn and have built this friendship from afar. And now you're letting me, inviting me onto your platform to come on your podcast, which helps me build my personal brand. hope it helps you as well.

and we'll continue to find ways to help and support each other. So leaning into the network, the community, building relationships and finding ways to support other people, most likely they're gonna find ways to support you as well.

Desiree (23:40.782)
Amazing. Thank you, Andy. And if we want to read your book, where can we find it?

Andy Storch (23:44.93)
Well, the book is called Own Your Brand Own Your Career. It is available on Amazon. The paperback and the Kindle versions are up there. I am getting the audio book up very, very soon. And if you're the type of person that doesn't want to read a whole book, you just want to do answer some questions, do some exercises. We have a free digital workbook on our website at ownyourbrandbook.com. It's a PDF with several questions, exercises, and even templates you can use.

to go update your LinkedIn profile as well.

Desiree (24:16.228)
Amazing. All of that will be linked in the show notes for you. Andy, thank you so much. Your friendship has meant a lot and you continue to help me grow, whether it's from afar or the conversations that we've been lucky enough to have. So thank you so much for joining me and thank you everyone for taking the time to listen, to be intentional about your career growth, about your personal growth. And just remember that leadership is a privilege, but it is also a really big responsibility and you're the boss now. So what are you going to do with it?