BRAND AS BARRIER 🚧 

March 11, 2026 • Issue No. 32

I don’t blame Sheryl Sandberg (at least not entirely) for constructing the corporate girlie, you can have it all, girl boss mind trap that shackled a wide swath of working women in the 2010s, but I can see why someone would.

Her 2013 best-seller Lean In was a handbook for stripping yourself of all authenticity to climb the corporate ladder. (To be fair, Sandberg thinks of the corporate ladder as a jungle gym.) Sheryl presented herself as the perfect corner office mentor, with typical C-suite advice, “Get there early, raise your hand to take on projects, don’t let anyone talk over you and you’ll see the promotions rolling in.”

Thirteen years ago this advice earned Sheryl a top spot on the NYT Bestseller list. Now, Lean In tops the subreddit for If Books Could Kill, a podcast about “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” Even Sheryl has distanced herself from some of her 2013 ideas. After her second husband’s tragic passing in 2015, Sheryl wrote Option B about dealing with grief. (She has since remarried. A key part of her recipe for success is to avoid becoming the “designated parent” like so many working mothers. It is nearly impossible to ‘lean in’ as a single parent, a widow, or a sole-earner.)

Even as society has shifted away from the lure of lean-in feminism and girl-bossification, a few pesky hangers-on, endure: side hustles, grindset, and the “Personal Brand.” As defined by Catherine Cote for Harvard Business Review, personal branding is “the intentional, strategic practice of defining and expressing your value.” 

I have beef with this practice…

• 🐮 Beef 1: You are inherently valuable whether you can express it strategically or not. Your value is not defined by your career.

• 🐮 Beef 2: You are a person, not a company. A product has a brand. A person has an ethos. (While I’m on the subject, a corporation is NOT a person.)

…yet it persists. Beyond my personal beef, a brand can be a tricky thing for a person to maintain. Once you’ve done a bang-up job of strategically and intentionally expressing your value, people will expect you to deliver. When I think of Lays, I expect potato chips. When I think of Stanley Steemer, I think of pristine carpets. When I think of IKEA, I think about meatballs! apartment-sized furniture.

It’s hard to replicate this consistency as an individual experiencing the metamorphoses of life. Even Sheryl’s Lean In brand has come back to bite her with pundits questioning why Sheryl didn’t lean in during the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal at Facebook along with her participation in and permissiveness toward sexual misconduct on the California campus. These missteps didn’t jive with our view of Sheryl as a good-natured person and champion for women in the workplace.

Embracing a personal brand can set the stage for letdowns later on. Recently, a friend told me about a confusing exchange she’d had with a school leader. The leader had branded herself as fully transparent, relatable, and non-traditional. However, when it was time to discuss an HR issue she handled it with the same tight-lipped professional distance you’d expect (and is legally required) from a school admin. This switch-up left my friend feeling not only confused, but victimized.

Brands are inflexible by design, they rely on reflexive association with their product. (Whatever brand is the first to come to mind when I say soda has likely won you over as a customer!) People, on the other hand, are remarkably adaptive. And this is where you need something bigger and more expansive than a brand.

What you do + How you do it + Why you do it = ETHOS

I think Sheryl told us her How and we graciously filled in her What and Why.

When I read Lean In to get a leg up during grad school, this is how I would’ve described Sheryl’s ethos.

Present day, I’d describe Sheryl’s ethos differently.

To be clear, I don’t think Sheryl’s ethos has changed from 2013 to now. But I think having a wider lens on her motivations helps me to understand whether she’s the kind of person I’d work well with. And that is the goal of the personal brand: communicating value to attract opportunity. But when you stop at the brand, you leave space for others to fill in the blanks — incorrectly or correctly — about you.

If your brand is ‘approachable accountant for solopreneurs’, you might get some nibbles around tax season. But if your ethos is about ‘helping people make sense of their money, taxes, and finances through workshops and 1:1 client service to promote financial freedom’ you’ve cast a wider net, constructed a frame that people can step inside of, and let people know what matters to you.

This Women’s History Month, I challenge you to go bigger than a brand. Rather than strategizing about your value, see what happens when you communicate your vision. An ethos can transform as you’re growing, shifting, or as Michelle Obama would say, becoming. During her book tour stop in Brooklyn, Mrs. Obama shared a candid take on Sandberg’s tips for career women, “that sh*t doesn’t work.” 💎

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