The Leadership Brand You Already Have (You Just Haven't Named It Yet)
- David Hajdu
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Last week, our founder and CAIO Dave Hajdu did something he hadn’t planned to do: he built his own leadership brandbook. Not because it sounded interesting, but because it had become unavoidable.
Coming off a challenging period at Edge8 AI, the signals were hard to ignore. Revenue pressure. Internal friction. Too many priorities pulling in different directions. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Dave recognized that his leadership had grown erratic. He saw it. His team felt it. The only real decision left was whether he was ready to confront it head-on.
He chose to do the work.
And what surfaced surprised him.
What This Program Is Really About
The "Building Your Leadership Identity & Brand" program, developed by Dr. Brooks Holtom, David Nilssen, and myself, is built on one uncomfortable premise:
Your leadership brand is not what you say you value. It is what people can predict about you under pressure.
That distinction changes everything.
Most leadership development focuses on skills. This program focuses on patterns. Not what you intend to do, but what you actually repeat. Not how you see yourself, but how others experience you. Not your philosophy, but your behavior-reaction loop.
The course walks you through a deliberate progression:
Part One forces you to accept that at your level, competence is assumed. What is being evaluated is consistency. You learn about the "experience gap," the distance between how you believe you show up and how others actually experience you.
Part Two helps you uncover your patterns. You map your genius zone, the place where you are consistently effective without forcing it. You examine real leadership moments, both wins and misses, to spot what you repeat. And you confront the paradox that sits underneath most leadership challenges: your strengths are often the same things that create friction when overused.
Part Three flips the lens. You stop looking inside-out and start seeing yourself from the outside in. You write an "award introduction" that describes how people actually experience working with you. Then you test it against reality.
Part Four is where you build infrastructure. You use AI as a mirror to compress your patterns into clear language. Then you create a personal leadership brandbook, a user manual that answers one question: "What is it like to work with you?"
What He Discovered About Himself
When Dave fed his reflections into AI, what came back was clarifying and confronting.
His leadership brand statement emerged as:
“I lead by making decisive calls and coaching through complexity, trusting my team to own outcomes even when I am uncertain they will.”
That was the aspirational version.
The more honest version included an important addition:
“…until pressure causes me to over-function and signal distrust, at which point I need others to push back rather than withdraw.”
It wasn’t comfortable to read. But it was accurate.
His Three Brand Pillars
From that reflection, three leadership brand pillars became clear, each with an intentional tradeoff.
Clarity Through Decisiveness. Dave tends to make calls quickly when teams are stuck, breaking complex problems down into actionable language. This helps teams move forward without endless spinning. At the same time, it can create friction for people who need more processing time or prefer to co-create solutions.
Transparency Under Pressure. He names the real issue rather than the polite version and shares financial and operational realities openly with his team. This makes it easier for people to understand the full picture. It also comes with risk, when pressure is high, his delivery can carry emotion, and transparency can be perceived as anxiety rather than candor.
Development Through Challenge. Dave coaches through questions instead of answers and actively invites team members to challenge his decisions. This creates space for high-agency individuals who want to grow. But under pressure, he has seen how stepping in to finish the work himself can undercut that very development.
What stands out is that each pillar includes both what it makes easier and what it makes harder. That’s intentional. Leadership brands aren’t about eliminating tradeoffs, they’re about making them visible.
The Aha Moments
Several insights crystallized for Dave during this process, each uncomfortable, and each clarifying.
1. His strengths and his liabilities are the same thing. The program describes this as when strengths become liabilities. Decisiveness turns into impatience. High standards harden into inflexibility. Empathy slips into avoidance. Dave had encountered this idea before, but this was the first time he mapped it clearly onto his own leadership patterns.
The decisiveness his team relied on became directive under pressure. Coaching gave way to completing. Questions were replaced by long messages packed with too many issues at once.
2. Under pressure, he doesn’t rise to his values, he defaults to his habits. An insight from Chapter 5 reshaped how Dave thought about development. When stressed, tired, or threatened, the brain shifts into faster, more automatic processing. Leaders reach for what is familiar, not what is aspirational.
That’s why self-awareness alone isn’t enough. Even when tendencies are well understood, they still surface when the heat is on.
3. His team’s silence was data he had been ignoring. Dave had been frustrated that his team wasn’t asking more questions, pushing back, or taking ownership. But when he examined the behavior-reaction loop more closely, a different story emerged.
Each time he stepped in to finish their work, he signaled that effort wasn’t worth it. Each time he sent an overwhelming message, he signaled that the safest move was to wait for the storm to pass. Their withdrawal reinforced his belief that they couldn’t handle it, which caused him to step in even more. A tight, destructive loop.
4. Guardrails matter more than aspirations. One of the most valuable sections of the brandbook focused on guardrails: specific behaviors Dave committed to never exhibiting, even under pressure. Writing these was harder than articulating strengths but far more useful.
One guardrail: People should never be surprised by my assessment of their performance. Concerns must be raised directly before they become critical.
Another: I will not send messages with more than one significant issue. If multiple concerns exist, they will be addressed separately.
These aren’t strengths to celebrate. They’re commitments, made deliberately, because Dave understands the cost when they’re broken.
What a Personal Leadership Brandbook Actually Looks Like
The final output is not a one-page summary. It is a full operating manual. His includes:
Brand Overview: My statement, what it means in practice, and the "user promise" of what people can reliably expect from me
Three Pillars: Each with values, observable behaviors, impact, and proof points from real situations
Operating Principles: Specific guidance for how I approach decisions, communication, and conflict
Strengths and Guardrails: When I am at my best, when I struggle, what I commit to never doing, and what I need from others
How to Work With Me: How to bring me a problem, how to give me feedback, how to disagree with me productively, and what to do if I am showing up poorly
Voice and Tone Guide: How I naturally communicate, what my communication looks like under stress versus at my best
Proof Points: Real examples that demonstrate my brand in action, including lessons learned
Bio Versions: 50-word, 150-word, and 300-word versions that reflect my leadership identity
Reusable AI Prompt: A prompt I can paste into future conversations so AI can help me communicate and decide consistently with my brand
The goal is not to impress anyone. The goal is to reduce ambiguity for the people who have to work with him.
Why He’s Sharing This
Dave could have kept this work private. Leadership development often happens behind closed doors: quiet reflection, private coaching, and the hope that others eventually notice the change.
But the program reframed that approach. A brandbook that lives in a drawer is just self-help theater. A brandbook that is shared, referenced before difficult conversations, and used to onboard new team members becomes leadership infrastructure.
By telling his team what he’s working on, Dave gives them the ability to help him. By naming his guardrails publicly, he creates accountability. And by acknowledging that his strengths can become liabilities under pressure, he makes it safer for others to examine their own patterns.
That’s why he’s sharing his brandbook with his team.
And why he’s inviting others in the AIO community to build theirs too.
The One Question That Matters
The program ends with a simple prompt:
"Complete this sentence clearly and specifically: One behavior I will practice this month that reinforces my leadership brand is..."
Not a mindset. Not an intention. A behavior someone else would notice.
Here is Dave's: "When I feel the urge to step in and do someone's work, I will instead schedule a 15-minute coaching conversation to help them solve it themselves."
That one behavior matters more than everything else he wrote. Because behavior is where leadership brands are built, or broken.
Take the Program
The "Building Your Leadership Identity & Brand" program is available online through the Leadership in the Era of AI curriculum.
You will:
Map your genius zone and identify where you create friction
Analyze real leadership moments to spot your patterns
See yourself from the outside in through the "award introduction" exercise
Use AI to synthesize your data into a clear, usable framework
Build a personal leadership brandbook you can share with your team
Commit to one behavior that reinforces your brand
The exercises take a few hours. But the value comes from honesty, not speed. Write the real answers. Let AI show you what you might not want to see.
Access the program: https://community.ai-officer.com/
Share Your Brand Book
When you finish, do something uncomfortable: share it.
Post it on LinkedIn. Send it to your team. Use it in your next onboarding conversation. Reference it when you catch yourself slipping.
Your leadership brand exists whether you define it or not. People are already experiencing you.
The only question is whether that experience is intentional.
Dave Hajdu is Chief AI Officer at Edge8 AI and founder of the AI Officer Institute. He developed the "Building Your Leadership Identity & Brand" curriculum with Dr. Brooks Holtom and David Nilssen as part of the Leadership in the Era of AI program.
Connect with him on LinkedIn or learn more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehajdu/
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