When I first encountered a Staples Baddie video on TikTok, I was flummoxed. I haven’t set foot in a Staples in years, so why should I watch Kaden Rowland, the Staples Baddie in question, showcase how to use Staples’s equipment to print a “glorp cat”—a neon green feline with snail feelers stuck on its head—on mugs, mousepads and coasters? Doesn’t everyone know the internet is full of more interesting things, like gyrating musicians, penguins waddling on elevators, and flying spaghetti monsters?
After my third Staples video, I wondered why I never realized Staples has such a large cornucopia of services. By my fifth one, I had an uncomfortably persistent hankering for my own “glorp cat” merch.
To date, Rowland’s videos have generated tens of millions of views and inspired thousands of customer posts. Staples declined to share financial information about the impact of Rowland’s content, but Bob Sherwin, Staples’s CMO, says, “There was a measurable impact.”
This kind of marketing is worth millions and Staples got it for free.
But the first time one of Rowland’s Staples videos went viral, she worried she’d be fired. Technically, posting was against company policy. There’s also an ignominious history of businesses firing employees who have gone viral, including Sherwin-Williams and Chick-fil-A.
Staples, though, did not fire Rowland. Sherwin and Dina Mortada, director of social media and PR, amplified Rowland’s fame and got on a call to recognize her and learn more.
Ultimately, Staples rehauled its social media policy, embracing the reality that every person, from the CEO to front-line employees, is now a personal brand and companies must adapt.
The rest of the corporate world? You’re up next.
Personal brands have become omnipresent, beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Employees know it’s the best insurance against unemployment, as my colleague Grace Snelling explores in her “Personal Brand Special Report.”
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But the vast majority of leaders see this as a threat. Forget about employees who have gone viral. Many companies still struggle with how to handle employees who have side gigs, get media attention, or even post on LinkedIn. Even companies that understand the value of an employee with a large personal brand are grappling with how to manage them.
“Most policies are built for confidentiality and formal conflicts of interest,” says Amy C. Benner Anand, a senior agentic solutions sales advisor at Microsoft, who has a Substack about what people need in order to adapt to AI. They’re not, she adds, “for someone who writes independently, develops original ideas, and becomes known for thinking in her own field.”
Over the past five months, I engaged 84 people who manage or work with someone with a large personal brand, or have a large personal brand themselves, to find answers to these knotty questions. (I also relied on reporting from Grace as well as Sage Swaby.) Amid the horror stories, there are glimmers of hope. Personal brands and corporate brands can coexist, and even thrive, if managers are willing to give up their most cherished asset: control.
In this special report, you’ll learn:
- How managing brands starts during the interview process
- 31 critical questions to ask to set up your organization to lead personal brands like the most forward-thinking companies
- What companies that deploy teams of creators have learned that you can apply
- Why you need to build a personal brand’s efforts on behalf of the company into goal setting, performance reviews, and compensation processes
- The compounding effect of turning one star into a constellation
Your biggest asset, their biggest asset
People with strong personal brands reap several rewards, and this compounds for their employers. The research is clear: 47% of Americans say a personal brand has more influence on their purchasing decisions than a corporate one, according to a 2021 survey from the Brand Builders Group. Fully 55% of Americans are more likely to do business with someone who has a strong personal brand, and 63% are more likely to buy from them. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 63% of respondents trust employees to provide information about a brand, more than journalists or the brand’s CEO.
Sage Quiamno, who leads PR for Yoodli, an AI role-play platform, recalls urging her CEO, Varun Puri, to make a personal post about an award he’d won, even though he feared it would come off as too self-promotional. “I made the case, he posted it, and the post took off: ~35,000 impressions, ~20,000+ members reached, ~1,800+ engagements, and—the part our sales team cares about—100+ leads,” she tells me. “That one post did more for pipeline than three months of company page content.”
Yet managing someone with a strong personal brand raises manifold questions: How do you rein in employees as they dance all over social media during the workday, posting poetry, danger, freedom, goodness and sin, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley? Should you even try? How do you manage egos inflated by a high follower count? What does fairness look like when one employee’s post can have more sales impact than your entire marketing department? What is the employee’s? What is the company’s?
While most managers I spoke with had success stories about what worked well, tellingly, employees with large brands were full of tales of woe and mismanagement. Together, their stories offer a more complete picture of reality today—and why that has to change.
How to mismanage a star
Companies are often very good at hiring someone with a large personal brand. That’s the easy part! Once they’re aboard, though, they strangle their voice. This is exactly what happened to the marketing manager Anita (a pseudonym, of course). Anita spent years growing her personal brand by publishing articles on Medium and in trade publications. Then she got a job offer from her dream company. “They essentially serenaded me,” she says.
Then, the music stopped. Anita’s particular field is trendy, but she’s not allowed to post about it on social media or write articles about her company’s product. While she’s throttled, company leaders two levels up have been talking up the product on LinkedIn.
The rules aren’t the same for everyone, as Anita notes. That’s a common problem with personal brands (often, the trouble is that they’re given special treatment, creating tension with everyone else, as we’ll see). But the real problem here is that there’s a rigid hierarchy, the kind that personal brands routinely subvert. This became clear when a year into the job, an industry publication recognized Anita’s work but misstated her title. Anita’s boss called her into their office; she also had to answer to several other leaders at the company.
The next day, the article was gone. “The overall message was clear,” she says. “This kind of visibility, even positive visibility . . . wasn’t something the company was comfortable with, specifically its senior leaders.”
The company’s chastening “worked” in that Anita no longer felt safe posting online. “I essentially muted myself for the next two or three years,” she tells me. “I’m only now just beginning to realize, wait a minute! All my experience, brain power, and education—they don’t own that.” She’s slowly beginning to post again, but when she wanted to use her personal channels to promote a national campaign she’d launched, she had to speak to six people and was finally told no. Later, she watched agog as senior leaders publicly posted about the same campaign.
Anita was wooed to her company because of her burgeoning personal brand. Tyler Wentworth became one because of his job. But his employer also wasn’t equipped to deal with it.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wentworth worked as director of social media for Manscaped, yes, the purveyor of head-to-toe men’s grooming supplies. He made TikTok videos leaning into the inherent humor of his company’s product. In one, captioned: “POV: you’re asked to come on stage at the local library’s talent show . . .” a ventriloquist asks: “What’s your talent?” Wentworth replies: “I shave my balls.”
The account exploded, growing from 8,000 to 500,000 followers. “I started to get recognized, not only in my industry, but started getting recruited on LinkedIn by big brands that wanted someone to take over their TikToks,” Wentworth tells me. “I also got recognized in public. . . . It was all really exciting.”
His managers? Less excited. “I became so synonymous with the brand, especially on TikTok,” Wentworth says. “People thought I was the CEO.” Although he never spoke directly to Manscaped’s senior leadership, he sensed that his success chafed. Over time, he believed they were “putting the brakes on all the momentum and personal brand growth.”
Wentworth was asked to promote other people on the channel and given guardrails. He had to undergo media training. He had to run all speaking and media requests by his manager. It’s worth noting that in 2021, Manscaped was considering going public in a deal that ultimately fell apart. (Manscaped did not respond to a request for comment.)
After being recruited by a social marketing agency, Wentworth left and now has his own social media marketing firm, Headline, where he works with other stars on a contract basis. “Now that I own my own business, I might consider similar guardrails,” he says, “but at the time it felt discouraging because you’re like, ‘I’m doing such a great job and I’m bringing you guys so much more visibility and you squander it.’ It felt not only like a missed opportunity, but a slap on the wrist.”
Anita, wrists also slapped, has now been with her company for more than five years. After all, they were her dream job, operating at the forefront of her specialty. But if the price of having job stability is giving up her ability to build her brand, she’s realizing it may no longer be worth it.
Flipping the control switch
When Sarah (a pseudonym) first joined a tech startup as head of communications and branding, her new colleagues often couched their welcome wishes with a whispered message: Oh, you’re going to have a fun time with Francisco.
Francisco (also a pseudonym) was a company exec and a social media star with a large following. “I thought, how bad could it be?” Sarah recalls.
On the one hand: bad. Francisco, Sarah reports, “had the mouth of a sailor.” Corporate decorum aside, they occasionally previewed product information before the company was ready to launch. Sometimes, they shared screenshots of internal Slack messages, giving Sarah “a slight heart attack.”
On the other hand: wonderful. People loved Francisco. They trusted their voice, expletives and all. They flocked to industry events so they could meet them. They became customers because they trusted Francisco. “We have inbound leads come in all the time that say, I’m here because I follow Francisco on social media,” Sarah says.
Sarah’s first instinct was to ask how could she and Francisco work more closely together. Then she had an epiphany. “Francisco is who they are and because they’re authentically themselves, people connect with them. They’ll know immediately when it’s Francisco versus if they’re copying and pasting something someone else wrote for them.” Sarah’s been working with Francisco to figure out how to package their content for other platforms, broadening its reach.
Then Sarah had another epiphany: What if the company cultivated more Franciscos?
Today, Sarah’s working across the company to cultivate more personal brands. “We have so much deep expertise here,” she says. “I want more people doing this.” When a young employee on a different team, who is also a successful influencer on the side, reached out with ideas for a TikTok strategy, Sarah thought, why not? As she says, “People aren’t spending their time on company blogs; those days are over. They’re scrolling their social media feeds . . . or asking ChatGPT for help. Our job is to meet people in those places.”
How to manage a team of stars successfully
Once you’re leading a team of stars, you must strike a balance between fostering them and having just enough in the way of ground rules so things don’t devolve into chaos. A company that finds creators for tech companies like Anthropic and Notion and helps them build marketing campaigns featuring those personal brands is a great place to start to figure out how the heck you do this. Even better, AJ Eckstein’s Creator Match hires people with their own followings and wants to develop them further. Eckstein, the company founder, employs about 40 people—a mixture of contractors and full-time employees—who have more than 200,000 LinkedIn followers combined. Thirteen of them have more than 10,000 followers.
How committed is Creator Match to growing its team members’ brands? Everyone on the team receives their own personal brand guidelines, with a custom color palette and font. There’s also an in-house graphic designer with whom employees can work.
More crucially, Eckstein’s put together a clear “Do’s and Don’ts” document. Selections include:
- Do tell us when something pops. If a post takes off or sparks a good conversation, flag it. We want to celebrate it and learn what’s working.
- Do build your own audience. This is your account and your following. We’re here to help you grow it, and it stays yours.
- Don’t post anything controversial. This is your personal brand, not the company’s, but be mindful of optics since you’re affiliated with Creator Match. We steer clear of divisive topics like politics. When in doubt, leave it out.
- Don’t share client specifics without a green light. Unreleased campaigns, spend figures, and contract terms are off-limits until cleared. When unsure, ask.
- Don’t feel pressured to hit a quota. There’s no minimum post count. Show up when you have something real to say. Quality over volume, always.
- Don’t guess on the gray areas. If something feels borderline, that’s your signal to check. We’d always rather answer a quick question than untangle a problem later.
Eckstein has an open-door policy where he’s happy to review content and provide feedback, particularly to team members with smaller followings. “Whoever sends me a post first, I’ll review it,” he says. “Maybe I’ll even give some more feedback to someone who’s newer . . . because I know there’s been nothing in my life more valuable than my own personal brand.” Creator Match also has a Slack channel for everyone to post and exchange ideas with one another, and it hosts a monthly lunch and learn for employees to share best practices.
He believes in a 70/30 split, where 70% of posts should be personal and only 30% about the company. “The common objection is if I invest too much in my employees’ personal brands, they will outgrow me and run with their own personal brand, leading to them leaving to do their own thing or get poached by another company,” he tells me. “That is an outdated way to think about it, because they’re going to do it anyway. You might as well empower them.”
These days, there may always be a side hustle, so the challenge for employers, he says, is “how do you make the main hustle just the best . . . so that there’s really no other experience out there that is going to be better?”
Eckstein’s made this work for him, saying his approach has helped with employee retention as well as recruiting, and “it’s great marketing for our clients, and it’s great for lead generation.”
When it’s time to say goodbye
If only everyone could find this kind of symbiotic relationship. Too often, there is a battle for—there’s that word again—control.
Melissa Grabiner, a talent acquisition consultant, knew it was time to leave a job after her boss called her into his office and asked for more say over her brand on the company’s behalf.
In the meeting, Grabiner’s boss told her that the company wanted her to use her profile to advertise the company rather than herself. The changes he requested included using the company logo as her LinkedIn banner, making her headline feature the company, and posting positions the company was recruiting for.
Grabiner had spent eight years building up her brand on LinkedIn. Her follower count was exploding. At one point, a single post produced approximately 1,000 new followers. She had also been building a business on the side where she helped job seekers write their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Although she had not advertised on LinkedIn, her boss had found out about her side hustle. You can’t do both, he told her during the meeting, saying it was a conflict of interest although Grabiner’s job did not involve these tasks.
She disagreed, replying, “If my work isn’t suffering and I’m putting in a full eight, nine hours a day in my job, what I do after hours is my business.” Within two months, she left.
Today, Grabiner has built three businesses and calls it the best move she’s ever made. But she credits her former employer for how they parted. “One thing they did well was respect my decision once it was clear that our views weren’t going to align,” she tells me. “There wasn’t an attempt to create unnecessary conflict or make the departure difficult.” She maintains a good relationship with both the company and her former boss.
The wake-up call for managers is realizing that full-time employment may not be a good fit for someone with a large brand, and they need to find alternative ways of working together.
“You cannot hire a small business owner,” says Dima Beseda, who’s the cofounder of Spiry, an AI-automated workflow platform for influencers, and has two bloggers with large followings on his staff. “They are contractors. You can collaborate with them, but you cannot hire an influencer . . . If [someone] says he’ll go full-time working with you, I think that’s not realistic. He will not have enough time for you.”
Extrapolating this model further into the future, Ramin Beheshti, founder and CEO of Caliber, a social media news startup, envisions a future where we get rid of the employee-employer relationship altogether. Instead of employees, everyone will function as a mini-company, federated under corporate umbrellas. “My ambition is actually to allow people to build companies inside our company,” he says, “and for us to take equity by providing them services like sales, marketing, tech, data and other exciting and new ways to grow their businesses.”
While some people fear that Beheshti’s vision of the future would lead to a Hunger Games-like situation where the people with the biggest brands take all and the loyal company workhorses go without, Beheshti’s larger point is what leaders have to reckon with. In this new brand world, to quote Tom Peters, not only do companies need to rethink how they’re working with employees, they also need to rethink the very concept of an employee.
Let’s return to Staples and the good problem of discovering it had a Baddie in its midst. Sherwin, the CMO, and Mortada, the social media director, “modernized” their guidelines so not only Kaeden Rowland could keep posting but other employees would be encouraged to do so too. For example: Filming videos during a shift is fine so long as all the customers in the store have been helped.
More importantly, Rowland gets a commission for her posts about Staples through an affiliate link, and Staples briefs her on new products, but she retains creative control. Staples is also piloting an ambassador training program with Rowland where employees can learn from her. “One of the biggest takeaways for us has been that associates can be some of a brand’s most credible voices,” Sherwin noted. “Supporting those voices is becoming an increasingly important part of the modern marketing mix.”
When a store employee goes viral, it’s a great human-interest story. But something like it is happening in your company right now: Your employees are building their brands, and some may already be one. The choice is yours: Are you going to squelch them or support them?
7 Steps to better lead personal brands
Start during hiring / Set guidelines immediately / Look for win-wins / Balance everyone’s interests / Trust the star / Remember your other employees / Part ways well
“The old management contract was simple: Your output belongs to the company, and your reputation is a private matter. That contract has broken,” says Sy Yang, founder of Agentis Partners, a firm that helps thought leaders scale their brands. “The people worth keeping are building equity in their own name, whether or not you sanction it. A manager’s instinct is often to minimize it. . . . That’s the wrong move. If your best people are visible and credible, that accrues to you too. The risk isn’t that they build a brand; it’s that they build it somewhere you have no relationship to.” How do you reap that dividend? Read on. (If you want to jump ahead or choose your own adventure, click above to choose a section.)
Start during hiring
“During the interview process for new hires, ask them how they live and work by the values of your organization. Check that they buy into your purpose and ask them to demonstrate how. If they can’t do that, then that might be a sign that there is a lack of alignment and will likely cause issues down the road. That equally applies to existing team members during performance reviews.”—Sophie Randles, director, Livingston James
“Ensure that the star in question has a history of doing their part in being the type of corporate citizen that you’re looking for. How do they lead their teams? How have they navigated key stakeholder groups? Have they historically melded well with corporate culture? Do those around them feel the better for it?”—Pree Rao, head of global growth, marketing and sales, Egon Zehnder
“The brands managers worry about are the visible ones. The ones they should think harder about are invisible on purpose.”—Amy C. Benner Anand, senior agentic solutions sales advisor, Microsoft
“One of my managers called me before I even started and told me she wanted to protect my personal brand just as much as the company’s brand. Then she suggested I create a separate LinkedIn page for my work with the company so there would be a clear distinction between my personal content and anything company-related. . . . It immediately told me I was joining a company that understood the value of employees having a voice.
“I always tell people to ask during the interview process. Ask how they feel about employees speaking at conferences, creating content, or building thought leadership online. Green flags are leaders who get excited about employees sharing their expertise. Red flags are leaders who immediately start talking about control.”—Jalonni Weaver, talent acquisition consultant, National Life Group
“If you’re building a public presence while working somewhere, your leaders shouldn’t be surprised by it. Keeping them informed builds trust, and that trust has made it easy for me to continue pursuing those opportunities while staying focused on my role.”—Michael Kaye, director of global communications, Upstart
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Set guidelines immediately
“The [manager’s] job is not to manufacture the personal brand. It is to set guardrails and get out of the way.”—Sarah Schmidt, president, Interdependence
“I always advise companies to revisit their social media policies. . . . A lot of brands’ policies haven’t been refreshed since the early days of Facebook. The policy should give employees permission to share their own POVs separate from the company and explain what’s above board to share. For instance, it should be OK to talk about general trends and learnings from your role. But not to share specific customer stories without their permission.”—Heike Young, CEO, Heike Young Inc., formerly head of content, social and integrated marketing at Microsoft
“There need to be very clear guidelines:
- Is time off spent promoting something for a personal brand PTO?
- Should there be a PR misstep, who is handling the crisis comms?
- Does this person have to include in every engagement/profile that their views are their own and not the company’s?
- Does it matter should they say/do something that isn’t aligned with the company values?
- Are all personal brands in the company treated fairly and equally?
- Do people need to share their personal brands with their company comms/HR teams?
“The companies that get it right are the ones where HR, comms, marketing, and the individuals are all operating from the same question: What’s good for this person and what’s good for the company?
“The reality is that not every personal brand has the same impact or reach. No one is stressing out about the midlevel managers who are posting crochet tutorials or movie reviews to their 500k followers on TikTok until the day they go viral for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, you have executives whose personal brand is the value they bring to a job via reputation, speaking engagements, SEO, and the talent they attract to the company.
“The companies that handle this well are going to need to be brutally honest, early, about which bucket someone is in and continue to revisit it throughout the employee’s tenure. Most companies have social media and media policies written for the occasional tweet or LinkedIn post, but not for people actively growing their own online presence.”—Elizabeth Rosenberg, founder, The Good Advice Company
“I set the guardrails early: Here’s what’s great to talk about, here’s what’s sensitive, here’s what stays internal, here’s what needs a second set of eyes before it goes out.
“Guardrails start with strategy, not a rulebook. If the team knows where we’re going as a brand and why, most of this answers itself.
“[Things that are] great to talk about is anything where the person is the expert. What they’re learning, how they solved a problem, where they think the industry is heading, the customer question they hear on repeat.
“[What should stay] internal: revenue and pipeline numbers, deal specifics, road map we haven’t shipped, anything said on a customer call, anything about hiring or restructures. If it came out of a Slack channel and we haven’t spoken about it on the website, it probably should stay in the Slack channel.
“The heuristic I give people is: If you’d say it on stage at a conference, post it. If you’d only say it in a DM, don’t. . . . If a reasonable person would look at it and think, ‘That probably shouldn’t be public,’ it probably shouldn’t.
“A second set of eyes helps in the gray zone: a post naming a customer, anything that reads as an official company position rather than a personal opinion, anything with a number in it. That’s a sanity check that the Marketing/PR team can provide, and when I ask someone to change something, I tell them why. The goal is that they need me less over time, not more. Otherwise, I become the bottleneck!
“Once people know the guidelines, they actually post more freely, because they’re not second-guessing whether they’re about to land themselves or the company in trouble. Clear lines create confidence, not restriction.”—Axel Sukianto, vice president of marketing, Truescope
“The biggest challenges can include your employees delving into sensitive topics around politics and religion. . . . The main social media platform where this is critical is LinkedIn because that’s where a person’s information is directly tied to their company name and title. A line like this should show up in your company handbook: ‘If your post or content could be interpreted as a company position, please get guidance before posting.’ That keeps it less dictatorship and more ‘hey, let’s use common sense before we post potentially controversial content.’” —Joe Szynkowski, founder, The UpWrite Group
“When you speak externally, you represent the firm. Your perspective will be interpreted in that context, whether that’s your intent or not. Use your voice, be authentic, but make sure it reflects well on the firm.”—Dean Bell, US head of deal advisory & strategy and lead director of the KPMG US board of directors, KPMG
“Personal branding efforts need to be defined and made part of goals, performance plans—maybe even compensation (though this is tricky). Approach building the personal brand like building a business plan.
“If, for example, the person is trying to build a personal brand as the go-to thought leader in corporate turnarounds, you might work with them to commit to a yearlong campaign that includes authoring original commentary articles, building a weekly cadence of LinkedIn posts, securing a board seat at an industry association, and organizing/hosting one event on corporate turnaround trends per year.
“Determine what additional resources, beyond the professional’s time and energy, will be required. The worst thing is to throw resources at an idea and hope the payoff comes after the brand is built. Your job is to help make the effort make financial and business sense.
“Track their efforts, measure the outcomes, and revise as needed—but not too soon. This stuff takes time. But don’t resist the urge to tweak and revise it along the way to reach a better outcome.”—Sam Butler, founder and principal, 35thAvenuePartners
“When a branded employee produces something excellent, the question of who owns it is rarely clean if it was not agreed before the work started. [What I have seen is that] a branded employee’s ideas are more portable and more quotable, which makes them easier for someone else to lift and present as their own once the phrasing has been smoothed over. Nothing was agreed beforehand about ownership, so there is nothing to point back to.
“There is a second layer worth naming here too: moonlighting. Under formal employment, IP created within a role belongs to the employer. Full stop. But if you have agreed in advance that an employee may consult or build under their own name outside that scope, that work sits with the personal brand.
“Without [a prior agreement] you are trusting goodwill, not IP law, and goodwill is not a defensible position.”—Marilize Jacobs, founder, VocalCord PR & Reputation Management
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Look for win-wins
“Companies can be great launchpads for people’s brands. If you’re working at a company that is doing something novel or inventive, you can create a similar perception around yourself just by association, or piggyback off the attention it’s already getting.
“But it also goes both ways. As the head of comms at my last job, we had created this reputation of innovation and creative excellence through the stories we were telling that everyone at the company got to own, and you could see how that fed into their own brands as professionals, or helped them land new jobs later on. This was a really fulfilling part of the job.”—Cody Luongo, PR and content consultant, CL Media
“What it comes down to is up front you have shared goals, and you have individual goals that people relate positively to. This will only positively lift your brand. If you can get that in your brain, then the conflict and the tension goes away. Then you see it as ‘I want to invest in this person because their audience is something that I can tap into, and if they decide to leave, in future years, well, I still took advantage of it.’”—Becca Chambers, chief marketing officer, Scale Venture Partners
“We have quarterly check-ins for development at Zoom, and we’re asking not just what do you want to do in your job, but what does growth mean to you, what would the next step in your personal journey look like?”—Whitney Magnuson, head of brand and media, Zoom
“I currently work with a large global law firm, and one of the partners cohosts a well-followed podcast. This podcast sits outside the organization, and, other than guidelines and guardrails, the organization doesn’t ‘manage’ this partner’s efforts at all. The podcast, not coincidentally, aligns not only with the partner’s work and the firm’s priorities, but also its branding and positioning.”—Sam Butler, founder and principal, 35thAvenuePartners
“A branded employee holds you to a higher standard of management. They will not stay somewhere that diminishes them. That accountability is good for any organization willing to be stretched by it.” —Marilize Jacobs, founder, VocalCord PR & Reputation Management
“Good managers gave the brand explicit purpose rather than letting it exist passively. For example: [Externally], they’d put a brand person in a C-suite customer meeting to land the message with a thought leadership angle, because the trust is already earned when the CTO across the table has read their book or caught their keynote, allowing us to earn the right to be believed right away.
“[Internally], they’d put a brand person in front of product teams because ‘I ran a poll with my LinkedIn followers, here’s what developers actually said’ isn’t one person’s opinion, and a brand person can hand product the data and the credibility of where it came from.”—Priyanka Vergadia, founder and CEO, The Cloud Girl; former head of North America developer relations, Google, and former senior director, AI transformation, Microsoft
“I would never make an employee do something they don’t want to do, because they’re not going to do it well. If I encounter a lot of [someone] saying no to things or not wanting to take on a project, I’ll pivot to someone else.”—Tyler Wentworth, founder and CEO, Headline
“A person with a strong external brand is a resource and always has options. This impacts the dynamic of power in terms of compensation, flexibility, and assignment(s). Don’t ignore the facts; just stay focused on what the current role and environment genuinely offers that serve as a value add.”—Mordecai Holtz, director of marketing, SparkIL
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Balance everyone’s interests
“The most successful relationships are those where personal growth and company growth reinforce one another.”—Siobhan Lipnicki, director of PR and communications, Attensi
“If the business is giving someone significant time or support to build their profile, what does it expect back? That might be representing the company, bringing in opportunities or relationships, sharing what they’ve learned with the wider team, opening doors for other people, or simply making sure their actual job isn’t suffering as a result.
“That doesn’t mean everything someone does has to benefit their employer directly. People are allowed to build their own careers. But the more time and support the business is putting behind it, the more important it is to be clear about what comes back the other way.
“Have those conversations early. How much work time can be spent on external stuff? What is the business paying for? What still needs to get done? You don’t need a 20-page personal branding policy, but you do need clarity.”—Francesca O’Connor, cofounder, HappyHQ
“My approach is to be fairly liberal with requests employees own themselves—letting them book speaking engagements, take time off for personal projects, or publicly identify as part of the company. But I’m more conservative with efforts the company spearheads to build them up, like submitting them for awards, pitching media profiles, or managing their personal social media profiles. That distinction protects everyone.”—Jackie Sumsky, public relations consultant
“You get only one life. I really encourage people to remember that they’re more than just their single job, and there’s always going to be more work to come back to, but you may only get one chance to go launch a book.”—Whitney Magnuson, head of brand and media, Zoom
“How do you build a flexible organization that can accommodate the needs of personal brands, which can be quite different? For me, it’s transparency. We don’t try to hide who we’ve hired or what they do.”—Ramin Beheshti, founder and CEO, Caliber
“I managed a person who had a large personal brand. I never interfered with what she was doing, except for one time she promoted a product that was very close to being [a competitor]. I remember flagging it to her, just as an FYI: I want you to know this could become a conflict of interest, so if you’re going to do more stuff with them, let’s just talk about it. That was the only time I ever had to say anything.”—Becca Chambers, chief marketing officer, Scale Venture Partners
“Check in on [someone] if they’re getting a lot of views all of a sudden. See if they’re OK. Second, ask if they want to do something with that publicity. How will it affect their capacity and their work balance?”—Sarah Lee, senior talent manager, Grail Talent
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Trust the star
“[Start with] respect for why their brand works in the first place. Their audience trusts them because they’ve never been a mouthpiece for anyone. The first thing I tell them is that this isn’t going to change under me.
“Credibility is the asset. The minute you start managing someone’s personal brand from the inside, it stops working. You know you’ve got it right when the stories they most want to tell happen to be about what we’re building. Not because they have to but because it’s worth talking about.”—Leo Boulton, head of product, solutions, and industry marketing, Zoom
“When I work with employee influencers, the first thing I tell them is that we’re not here to take over their page. If an employee doesn’t feel comfortable posting something, we move on to the next option. . . . If an employee influencer feels pressured by their employer to make a post, they could end up leaving the company and even sharing their feelings with their followers.”—Megan Sweeney, public relations director, The American Staffing Association
“We give [creators] a creative brief, which includes who our audience is, key messaging and talking points, things that we feel like best represent HubSpot Media, the products that we think align best with our audience, a little bit of data, but we don’t approve what they say or give them strict guardrails. What I found is that when you give someone a forced script, it’s in one ear and out the other. It’s like the thing that you want to skip when you’re listening to the podcast.”—Jonathan Hunt, vice president of media and content, HubSpot
“What a lot of companies end up doing is feeling like they should get to have an approval cycle in personal brand building, and that’s when companies ruin personal brands. Obviously, if they start doing crazy, offensive things, it’s a different story, but if I’m out there talking about how I fainted on airplane the other day, my company shouldn’t have anything to say about that.”—Becca Chambers, chief marketing officer, Scale Venture Partners
“Our general managers [in minor league baseball] are very used to speaking to the press. We trust them to be on point on messaging. We don’t really tell anyone [specifically] what they can and cannot say. Having local voices is important. No one wants to hear from me in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They want to hear from our general manager in Albuquerque.
“We do a monthly business review [where] the marketing team goes through what the metrics are, what’s working, what’s not working, and our PR team goes: ‘This had real traction. This seems to be working. Hey, let’s stay away from this.’”—Peter Freund, CEO, Diamond Baseball Holdings
“When a course correction is needed, framing the conversation around protecting their own brand equity, not just the company’s, tends to land far more effectively than a top-down directive.”—Sam McKenna, founder, #samsales
“You don’t know their audience. The creator does. You have to respect that.”—Sarah Lee, senior talent manager, Grail Talent
“I trust my team. That’s why they’re here, [so I don’t track their brands]. What I do pay attention to is when something is working. When someone on the team hits a milestone, grows their audience, or does something really cool, we want to know about it and hype them up.”—Steven Schwartz, cofounder and CEO, Whop
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Managing personal brands and everyone else
“None of us had a college course on how to have a personal brand alongside your work brand. Companies are figuring it out alongside their employees. We look to our employees to help guide us in those conversations.”—Whitney Magnuson, head of brand and media, Zoom
“It’s critical your social media policy is enforced equally, no matter how many followers an employee has.”—Megan Sweeney, public relations director, The American Staffing Association
“Real estate, in my opinion, is one of the purest examples of managing different personal brands. The challenge is managing expectations, because you’re dealing with different personalities and different people who may not have the same social media followers and may not have the same sphere. Don’t try to make everyone’s brand the same. Just because it works for one doesn’t mean it is going to work for [someone else.]”—Kevelyn Guzman, regional vice president, Coldwell Banker Warburg
“I’d keep two scorecards. One for the value their profile creates and one for how they’re actually performing as an employee and colleague. A high score on one shouldn’t cancel out a low score on the other.
“A very simple test for managers is: Would I be okay with this if this person didn’t have the profile? Would I accept the missed deadline? Would I expect everybody else to pick up their work? Would I tolerate the behavior? If the answer is no, you’ve started creating two sets of rules.”—Francesca O’Connor, cofounder, HappyHQ
“Being a star isn’t just about delivering business results. It’s also about being a good corporate citizen, which often includes lifting up those around them. Some stars may understand that intuitively, whereas others may need to be coached. Either way, it’s important to set the expectation and, in many cases, also incentivize this behavior financially or otherwise.
“But perhaps more interestingly, it’s about tapping into intrinsic motivations. . . . When bringing a star on board, managers can set a vision that any star would want to get behind by painting a picture of the type of legacy they can leave if they not only deliver results, but also lift up those around them.”—Pree Rao, head of global growth, marketing and sales, Egon Zehnder
“When you have a highly visible employee, others want to learn and become interested in raising their own personal brand. It’s contagious.”—Mordecai Holtz, director of marketing, SparkIL
“When a company comes to me and wants me to train one executive on using LinkedIn more effectively to be the company megaphone, I usually say no. I run marketing programs. For that, a strategic group is infinitely more effective. You want a symphony, not individual instruments. One employee posting is just a sad violin.”—Heike Young, CEO, Heike Young Inc., formerly head of content, social and integrated marketing at Microsoft
“The main challenge is avoiding ego battles and power disputes over media space. This tends to surface when there is misalignment between the individual project and the collective project, and it shows up in three concrete ways: competition for the spotlight, resistance to collective decisions, and a tendency to prioritize personal visibility over shared strategy. What helps:
- Explicit decision criteria so disagreements don’t collapse into personality contests.
- Rotating protagonists so not every initiative is led or fronted by the same person.
- A genuine sense of equity of effort among peers because a strong personal brand is only sustainable inside a system that feels fair to everyone.”—Manuela Ponfick, CMO LatAm, Artefact
“Identifying growth opportunities for everyone on the team is important. It communicates fairness and caring. . . . Managers should set aside a budget for each employee to enrich their knowledge base. Giving employees opportunities internally can also help foster development.”—Leslie Diard, executive director of media + analytics, Duncan Channon
“[Good managers] coached the ‘star’ to actively spotlight teammates in public moments (talks, posts, launches), which built goodwill instead of resentment.
“Build a culture where the star is expected to tag the product and engineering folks in launch posts, social posts, name them from stage. Being tagged by someone with reach feels significant, so people who never get a public moment start coming to you asking if what they’re building would make a good post. That goodwill turned into more collaboration, instead of the resentment you get when it’s the same launch with only one person in the story.”—Priyanka Vergadia, founder and CEO, The Cloud Girl
“Early on, clients wanted me in every meeting, every creative review, every strategic discussion, even when the team was fully capable of leading. It created a perception that my involvement was the differentiator, which made it harder for the team to build their own credibility.
“The fix wasn’t to shrink my presence. It was to intentionally transfer trust. We started introducing team members as experts from day one, gave them visibility in client conversations, had them present work instead of me, and made sure their wins were celebrated publicly. Success internally got measured by impact, not proximity to me.”—Jimmy Crasto, founder & creative director, Olter
“A person with a big profile pulls focus, gets requests routed straight to them, and can make the rest of the team feel invisible. Two things help: First, I make the brand a team asset, so whoever’s out front shares the playbook and their reach lifts everyone, not just themselves. Second, I praise publicly and manage expectations privately. Credit is collective, accountability is individual.”—Axel Sukianto, VP of Marketing, Truescope
“Managing a roster of brands under one umbrella is harder, and it’s the situation more organizations are walking into. The moment someone is a public face, you’re in a brand partnership with them, whether you negotiated one or not. Their choices touch the organization’s reputation, and the organization’s choices touch theirs. That has to be managed deliberately, the way you’d treat any other asset: inventory it, govern it, invest in it, and measure it.
“First, you have to take stock of your assets. Map out who currently carries outsized external credibility: Which executives, experts, or client-facing people have audiences or reputational weight that meaningfully drives revenue and trust?
“Second, you have to be transparent about ownership and IP terms in writing: what content stays with the company, what data/relationships are company property, what the person keeps, etc.
“Third, actually fund and invest in it like a business line. . . . If someone’s platform is driving real pipeline, hiring, or valuation, budget for it instead of expecting it to happen for free on that person’s whim.”—Sy Yang, founder, Agentis Partners
“If someone in the org is jealous, I challenge them to be as interesting.”—Mike Stiles, founder, Brand Content Studios
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Part ways well
“[When someone’s brand is outgrowing the business . . .] Talk about it. Don’t pretend it isn’t happening or try to make the person less visible. Does the role need to change? Do you need a different agreement around their time or external work? I’d also look at how you can use their profile to create opportunities for other people. Who else can they bring into the room? Who could they put forward for the next opportunity?
“A strong personal brand is much more useful if it helps create more visible people rather than everything becoming about one person. Sometimes you have to accept that someone becoming more successful means they may eventually leave. Trying to retain talented people by keeping them smaller isn’t much of a retention strategy.”—Francesca O’Connor, cofounder, HappyHQ
“We need to be honest with ourselves as leaders that most people will eventually leave an organization, so that possibility should not drive management decisions. Companies become stronger when they embrace people who strive for growth and give them meaningful reasons to keep growing within the organization.”—Don F. McLean, author, The In Crowd for LinkedIn Mastery: Powering Your Path to Professional Success & Thought Leadership Through a PR Mindset
“One of the other main challenges of having people with strong brands in the team is that it usually means they are well known in the market; competitors will likely try to lure them away. From the employer’s side, that means you need to make sure they are happy within your organization and feel like they can genuinely be themselves. Check in with them regularly to minimize that risk.”—Sophie Randles, director, Livingston James
“The brand belongs to the person, not the company. When they leave, the audience goes with them. That’s exactly why we invest in a bench, founders plus go-to-market team members with genuine expertise, rather than betting everything on one star.”—Sage Quiamno, strategic communications and PR leader, Yoodli
“Where the person’s brand is starting to affect the internal culture and values, this is when it’s important to part ways.”—Elizabeth Rosenberg, founder, The Good Advice Company
“The biggest mistake companies make? Firing someone for gaining organic traction for work-related content. The moment an employee’s reach becomes a threat instead of an asset, you’ve lost the plot.”—Jackie Sumsky, public relations consultant
“If someone’s own brand conflicts with what’s best for the group, that’s a red line and action needs to be taken swiftly. The individual brand always needs to serve the group. . . . A conflict that’s allowed to persist hurts the group’s brand externally while killing morale internally—and risks losing A players in the process.”—Pree Rao, head of global growth, marketing and sales, Egon Zehnder
“When someone has a public audience, the exit becomes part of their story and part of yours. How people leave says more about a company than anything you’d put in a press release. So I treat it less as offboarding and more as a chapter we write together. What does the next thing look like? How do we set them up to land well publicly?
“Lead with gratitude and be generous with the narrative. Keep the logistics secondary to the relationship. People who leave well become some of your most credible external voices, saying with no obligation to do so that the work here was worth it. And plenty of them come back.”—Leo Boulton, head of product, solutions, and industry marketing, Zoom
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