Increasing your visibility is one of the best ways to be recognized, gain influence and get ahead in the workplace. But for many, especially new employees who are swallowed up by large organizations, this can be a daunting task.
One way to stand above the crowd is to create your own brand.
That’s what’s made companies like 3M, Disney, Michelin, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Nordstrom, Boeing, Starbucks and Volvo leaders in their industries. These firms typically hire expensive ad agencies to create and promote their brands. But you can accomplish the same thing — on a small scale — at no cost at all.
What is Your Unique Value You Bring to Work? This is Your Personal Brand
Management guru Tom Peters suggests you, “Start by identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors — or colleagues. What would your colleagues or customers say is your greatest and clearest strength?”
Michael Iacona, a resourceful advertising executive, surveyed his business associates. He asked them, “If I were a car, what would I be?”
“This isn’t about creating an image of who you want to be,” Iacona explains, “but identifying the unique value you bring.”
What value do you bring to your job? Answer that question and you’ve taken the first step to creating your own brand. I’ve listed a half-dozen other “brand building” tips below.
Whichever model you ultimately choose — an environmentally-friendly hybrid or luxurious European import — you and your career will soon be riding in the fast lane.
6 Proven Ways to Identify and Build Your Personal Brand
1 – Imagine you’re creating an ad for yourself.
Think in terms of your top talents and the value these can provide your company. Play around with your branding traits, experimenting with different ways to express them. Imagine you’re creating an ad or business card. How can you express your value in a single, brief statement? Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Nothing falls through the cracks, ever.
- Strong communicator, even stronger results.
- Strategic thinker who’s not afraid to get her hands dirty.
- Assign the job to me… consider it done.
- There’s no problem I can’t solve.
2 – Seek opportunities to demonstrate your value.
Once you create your brand statement, you can use it as a focal point when communicating your worth to others. Develop a personal marketing plan. Find opportunities to demonstrate your style through the type of projects you undertake and the accomplishments you promote.
3 – Your behavior should reinforce your brand.
This includes the way you conduct meetings, answer phone calls or respond to emails. Are you late for appointments? Do you forget to follow up? Oftentimes, it’s the “little things” that can make a difference.
4 – “Packaging” is important, too.
Does your personal appearance reflect positively on your brand and the attributes you want to promote?
5 – Constantly seek feedback.
Brand name corporations conduct market research to see if they’re living up to their customers’ expectations. So should you. Probe for feedback from clients and associates about the personal traits you want to emphasize and showcase. Work with your supervisor to include your brand attributes in your performance appraisal.
6 – Periodically evaluate your brand.
Brand name corporations constantly evolve. So do individuals. At least once a year (some experts recommend every six months) take the time to assess how you’re doing on living up to your personal brand and what, if anything, needs to change. You may have developed new skills, interests or capabilities. Does your brand reflect who you are today and how you want to be perceived and valued as your career progresses?
4-Step Plan to Developing Your Personal Brand
Janet Asks: I feel like my accomplishments go unnoticed at work, and I don’t feel comfortable bringing them up. I want others to see my strengths and achievements, but I don’t want to come across as bragging. What should I do?
Coach Joel Answers: No one wants to sound like they’re bragging about their own accomplishments. You want to be noticed, but not for being egotistical. However, there are plenty of ways to toot your own horn in a way that people admire and respect. It starts with building your personal brand, so you know what it is you want to become known for. You’ll then be able to shape how others perceive you, making sure it fits the image you want to create.
What does branding do for your career? Building a brand allows you to project yourself as the absolute best at what you do. This establishes you as an expert in your area of expertise, proving your worth to your organization.
Here’s how to take action to build your personal brand and then launch a self-promotion campaign centered around it, which will give you the visibility you deserve.
Jason has been with his company for more than five years. He’s tried every trick in the book to get ahead, from letting his boss know he’d like to move up the ladder to working overtime on his projects in the hopes that his efforts would be noticed and rewarded.
But nothing seems to be working. He still has the same job, same title, and (sadly) the same salary as when he started five years ago. What’s Jason doing wrong?
Jason excels at his job, but he has been neglecting his personal branding. He hasn’t realized that to get ahead, you need to act as your own personal publicist. If you want to boost your personal brand, forget about dropping hints or hoping someone will notice the long hours you’re putting in. Those tactics will get you nowhere fast.
Luckily, one of the books Jason read as part of his effort to advance his career was a how-to book called Getting Ahead. He decided to use some of his acquired knowledge to solve his own problem. Here’s what he came up with:
Step 1—Identify the brand you want to have.
Identify your strong qualities and the skills that come easily to you. You might have a knack for making presentations, or perhaps your analytical skills far surpass those of your colleagues. Letting people know what you are good at is the first step in building a brand that will get you noticed by your superiors.
Instead of creating a laundry list, narrow your focus:
· Strive to establish yourself as the go-to person for a particular area of knowledge or talent. Instead of being a Jack or Jill of all trades and known for none, build your brand to reflect 2–3 things you do extremely well. The more focused your skill set, the more expert visibility you’ll gain.
· Make sure some of these areas pertain to leadership. As you advance in your career, interpersonal skills like the ability to coach and motivate people become increasingly critical, whereas technical skills are seen as a given.
· Figure out what makes you interesting as a person. Do you have any hobbies most people don’t know about? Do you have an offbeat sense of humor that not everyone gets to see? Have you overcome any major challenges to get where you are? Figure out what aspects of your life make good stories—they will help enrich your personal brand.
Step 2—Brainstorm.
Come up with potential actions you could take to turn the situation around. Jason talked to a few trusted friends outside of his workplace, and they gave him a number of useful suggestions and opinions:
- Take on a project that nobody wants to do and finish it successfully.
- Offer to work on a project outside of your own department (with your boss’s approval, of course).
- Schedule a one-on-one with your boss and ask for her input on your current strengths and critical areas for growth to help improve your reputation.
- Find a mentor. This could be in your company or outside of it, but should be someone who’s ahead of you on the ladder (not your boss).
- Share your successes. Don’t brag, but don’t be modest either. Speak up about your accomplishments, either in meetings, by email, or one-on-one with others in the company.
- Share credit. Nobody does it alone, and you’ll get ahead more easily if you let others participate in your success.
Step 3—Choose your options.
You don’t have to do everything all at once. Pick two or three things you can do right away. Jason took the first two suggestions on his list and wrote up a plan. Then he scheduled the one-on-one with his boss to get her input and suggestions. After refining his plan, he immediately began putting it into action.
Jason had to tell his boss about the distinct skill set that made him right for this assignment. Like him, you may need to promote your unique talents to your boss or senior leaders to get that higher-profile assignment that garners more recognition, to join that cross-functional team, or to enlist someone as your mentor. If you know you can handle a product launch presentation with confidence, volunteer to lead the team. Proactively letting your boss know she can count on you is an important aspect of brand-building; that’s how you’ll get the go-ahead to take the types of action that will raise your profile. By making yourself known to senior execs through these efforts, you’ll grow your influence throughout your organization.
Step 4—Monitor your results and share them with others.
Jason first volunteered to revamp an inventory control project that nobody else would touch, because it looked boring and complicated. He cleaned up the mess it had devolved into and then made a presentation about how he’d implemented a new plan and achieved results. With his boss’s approval, he sent a summary of his presentation to several C-level executives.
Five months after Jason implemented his rebranding campaign, he was offered a management position in another department—and a nice increase in salary to go with it.
Like Jason, once you gain visibility, keep track of your successes and share them widely so you’ll get the credit you deserve. The strategies described in the next section will help!
If you’re stuck where you are right now, feeling unnoticed and unappreciated, (not to mention underpaid), how could you rebrand yourself? Look at Jason’s action items and see if you can adapt any of them to your situation, like building relationships with executives. And be sure you’re solving the problem, not covering up the symptoms.
