Today we continue our series on the book Own Your Career Own Your Life: Stop Drifting and Take Control of Your Future.
If you’ve missed any articles in this series, there are two ways you can catch up. One is to start with the first post in the series, What It Means to Own Your Career, and click through to subsequent posts. The second is to go to my career category and scroll through to read the posts you missed.
I really like this book — it’s the best career-related book I’ve read in a long time — and despite many people’s tendencies to ignore working on their careers, I urge you to read along and apply what this book says. Doing so could earn you much more than you’d make otherwise and allow you to enjoy your job more.
I’ll be sharing key passages from the book as well as my thoughts on them.
Today we’ll cover several topics and chapters, so let’s get to it…
Build Your Professional Brand
The book’s next section talks about building your professional brand.
You may be wondering what the heck the author is talking about — what’s a professional brand?
The book summarizes it this way:
Your personal or professional brand is basically your reputation. It’s what people think about you or say about you when you’re not around. You want that reputation to be positive and helpful in your career.
Interestingly, you have a reputation or brand, whether you are intentional about creating it or not. Think about all of your colleagues, friends, and other people you know. If I asked you about each of them and forced you to describe them, you’d likely have some opinion. You might say, “John is nice, but he’s always late to meetings,” or “Madison is extremely generous and always goes out of her way to help people on projects,” or “Christine is a true expert in the area of employee development, and I want to learn from her.” All of those are products of the reputation or brands that those people have created, whether intentional or not.
So why do I bring this up in a book about taking ownership of your career? Because I strongly believe that in this era of work, to truly own your career, you also need to own your professional brand and be intentional with the reputation or brand you create. Like it or not, we all have a reputation and a brand; all you get to choose is whether you are intentional about creating it. I don’t mean tricking people or being fake. I would never recommend showing up as anything other than yourself. I’m very much in favor of authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency.
Start by thinking about how you are showing up at work and how others are perceiving you. Building your personal and professional brand means being more intentional with your actions to impact your reputation. It might be how much extra work you do, how friendly and helpful you are to others, posting and chatting on internal collaboration tools like Slack, Chatter, or Yammer, or the type of work you do. It can also include how you show up on social media and other places where people can form an impression of you. I’ll discuss each of these.
Let’s pause here for a moment with a few thoughts:
This is one area of managing and growing your career that is way below the radar for most people. In fact, I’d guess that most people don’t think about or even realize that they have a professional brand. They simply go with the flow and their brand is created as a result of being on auto-pilot. This can work out fine if you’re a great worker (though it could be better if you paid attention to it) or can be disastrous if you’re not so great (or even average). Either way, there are some big benefits to managing your brand and making it into what you want.
I know. It’s a new concept for many. I guess this sort of thinking comes natural to me as I’m a marketing guy and am used to seeing brands in everything. LOL. But let me walk you through some thoughts that might help with the concept.
Think about it this way…I’ll name a few brands and I guarantee the simple mention of their names will instantly put a thought or two into your mind:
- McDonald’s
- Walmart
- Nike
- Apple
- Starbucks
All of those have positive and/or negative meanings to you. Your professional brand is just like that. More on that in a moment.
Before we dig into your professional brand, let’s take the example above and translate it into the workplace. Think about your co-workers for a moment. For instance, consider your boss. What are three words you’d use to describe him or her? Or pick a peer you work with regularly. What are three descriptive words that best represent their work? Now try the same thing with a subordinate.
Those three words are that person’s professional brand (or at least part of it) for better or worse.
Of course that’s just your perception of these people. Others may think differently. But the collective opinion of a large group of people about a person’s work is that person’s professional brand.
As you might imagine, this is a very important part of managing and growing your career. That’s why I have “know how to manage yourself” as item #6 in my list of seven steps to grow your career. You have to manage yourself in a way that creates an awesome professional brand.
Now you probably know people who are better at creating their brand than they are at actually delivering on that brand. Hey, baby, it’s all marketing right? It’s like going to a timeshare presentation — the brand they offer is almost always better than the actual product. LOL.
But we’re not talking about those people. Eventually, most fakers get found out. We’re talking about how you can create a positive professional brand that’s also accurate.
So think about yourself and your work. What are three words you’d guess others would use to describe you?
Would they be “effective”, “productive”, and “team player” or “lazy”, “incompetent”, and “angry”?
It makes a difference as to which set is most common, right? One will help you in your work efforts and the other won’t.
So I’d suggest you make a plan to consider what you want those three words to be, then set out some tasks to help create that brand.
If you look at my seven tips for growing your career, some words that work particularly well with that list are:
- Results-oriented — Step #1
- Likable — Steps #2, #3, and (maybe) #4
- Knowledgeable/experienced — Step #5
But you need to create your own specific three words, then work to make them a reality. If you do, your brand will develop and become a powerful force in growing your career and your pay.
FYI, I was late to the game with this one. Having a professional brand at work wasn’t really a thing (at least as far as I can remember) until Fast Company wrote an article titled The Brand Called You. Even then the concept didn’t really catch on until a decade or so later, well into my career.
So my brand developed by accident mostly. Thankfully I was pretty decent at my job, so I had a good brand. But just think how much better it would have been if I had actively managed it.
Old and New Habits
We’ll get to some benefits of having a good professional brand in a moment, but for now here are some old and new habits the book shares on the subject as well as a summary of this chapter:
Old habit: Operating with no self-awareness and never considering your reputation or how you show up in the world. Avoiding feedback.
New habit: Thinking regularly about how to leverage your strengths, how to improve or delegate your weaknesses, how you show up in the workplace, and how that impacts your reputation.
Besides building a network and relationships, one of the best things you can do to prepare for future career changes and the future of work is to build a personal brand and get intentional about the reputation you are creating (and thus others’ perception of you).
That means how you show up at work, the types of projects you work on, how you leverage your strengths and improve or avoid your weaknesses. It’s also significantly impacted by how you show up on social media.
Self-awareness is essential here. The more you understand yourself, your strengths, weaknesses, what energizes you, and where you can help people, the more you can share confidently and build your professional brand.
You can build your brand and reputation on social media by sharing all kinds of content, including articles and books you’ve been reading, courses you’ve taken, or your original content, including blogs, podcasts, articles, videos, and text posts.
And don’t forget that you can also build your brand and network by regularly taking time to interact with others’ content, and you may need to create and share your own.
Lots of thoughts on this one:
- As I’ve said, you need to pay attention to your professional brand or it will develop on its own, which will most likely be sub-optimal. few things are maximized when left alone to develop on their own. 🙂
- You can get feedback from friends and colleagues to find out what your current brand is. I worked for companies that would often make peer reviews part of performance evaluations or part of some sort of training we were doing. These were very insightful (though not always pleasant to hear). You can get similar results by simply asking others for feedback, though the more anonymous the feedback is, the more truthful it will be.
- Like with networking, you’ll need to translate growing your professional brand into a series of tasks you can perform to mold the brand you want. What the tasks are depend on your words/brand goals, of course.
- There are many benefits of having a strong professional brand including getting paid more, being able to network easier (your reputation proceeds you), getting promotions and/or jobs at new companies, getting help from people in your company when you need it, and much more.
- One thing they don’t mention but that can be a GREAT brand builder is to get a career award. When an outside organization recognizes you for some reason, that is a HUGE professional brand builder. I have received several awards (some individual and some team related) in my career and they helped create my brand. They were also especially valuable when I was job hunting — they looked amazing on a resume.
That’s it for this subject. Let’s move on…
Hire a Coach or Join a Mastermind Group
As the book begins to come to a close, it shares several ideas for growing a career.
One I particularly like is the suggestion to get some help from a coach or a group of people.
The book’s thoughts:
Finally, one of the most effective thighs you can do to ensure that you achieve your goals is to hire a coach, join a mastermind group, or both.
If you have never hired a coach before, you might want to consider it. You can think of them like a sports coach — someone who helps guide you, motivate you, and push you to achieve your goals. It may seem like a strange concept to some, but the most successful, high performing people all have coaches. Obviously, athletes have coaches. As I write this, Tom Brady is probably the most successful American football quarterback of all time, and he has three coaches (or maybe more) to constantly help him improve.
If you work in a company, perhaps you’ve been provided an executive coach, or noticed that the top executives all have coaches. That is key to helping them develop strengths and improve on weaknesses.
If you want to change careers, you may want to consider hiring a life, career, or performance coach. I have personally worked with a few coaches and always find it beneficial. And any time I set a big goal, I make sure I have a coach, mentor, or mastermind group to support me. I never assume I can figure things out on my own. That’s too frustrating.
I also mentioned mastermind groups. A mastermind group compromises like-minded, ambitious professionals who meet regularly to challenge and support each other in their goals. The phrase was coined by Napoleon Hill in Think And Grow Rich, referring to how industry titans like Henry Ford and Dale Carnegie met regularly to support each other.
Over the years, I have invested thousands of dollars in personal development programs, coaching, and mastermind groups, and it has always paid off.
My take on these:
- Hiring a professional coach wasn’t really something people did during most of my career. In fact, I don’t even know where I would have found one back in the day. They’ve only become more prominent recently.
- That said, I probably wouldn’t have done it anyway. I knew too much to need a coach. LOL.
- But I may have hired one (if one had been available) as I’ve learned over time that hiring the right person can make a world of difference. But is a career coach more like a financial planner (something I don’t need) or a personal trainer (something I do need)? These days I do have a trainer as well as take pickleball lessons from a coach. But I don’t hire people for things I have mastery of (of course). So who knows what I’d do now.
- My last boss had a personal coach — for all the good it did him. Of course maybe he would have been a lot worse without the coach. LOL.
- I do like having mastermind groups or mentors. If you can find people who have done what you want to do (like created a thriving career) and who are willing to share their thoughts, insights, and experienced, they are like GOLD! Grab onto them and soak up their wisdom. It doesn’t mean you have to do everything they say, but hear their thoughts and then act on the suggestions that make the most sense for you and your goals.
- Books can be mentors as well. I realize this falls under the continuous learning topic we’ve already covered, but I at least wanted to mention it here.
- I was fortunate in my early years to work for companies that invested in career development for their employees. I had classes on time management, sales, negotiating, Seven Habits, and more. Aside from those, I invested thousands of dollars (mostly in books and buying lunches for people) to grow myself. It was money well spent. Do not be afraid to invest in your career. After all, it’s your biggest asset (and can be even bigger), so why wouldn’t you invest to make it grow?
- The payback on investing in your career can be tremendous. One tip from a single book can earn you thousands of dollars over a career lifetime. That’s a pretty good return on your money, right?
Well, that’s it for today.
For the final post in this series, see Own Your Career, More on Getting Career Help and Book Conclusion.
Barry says
I work in a large organization and building my personnel brand, changing it honestly, it was put me over the top. As a Project Manager I looked at myself as a consultant almost, it is my own company, Barry’s Project Management Company.
I got my PMP certification in 2010 after working on one of the largest projects our company had ever completed with a customer. I then went to work in another sector, we rewrote how we managed projects and within a year I was promoted.
Fast forward to 12 years later and I am the guy that the organization comes to when we have a non-standard project, something that is a blank sheet of paper of requirements that we have to figure out what it is that needs done, gain agreement on what needs to be done and then execute that scope that is agreed upon. My group no longer just manages revenue and improvement projects our senior staff comes to us when they want a problem solved.
It is no longer me that has that brand, my entire group does, because we have a method to our madness when it comes to managing projects and solving problems. We have legacy documents and a solid foundation for managing projects in our organization and incorporating LSS principles when we are challenged to solve projects in our business unit.
I am in the process of training a new PM in our group and that is the number 1 thing I have told him, develop your brand, be someone that everyone wants to work with, use things like Maslow’s Theory and Tuckman’s Model for Group Development and Theory or X and Y to not only develop who you are but who the team members on your project are so you know how to understand and work with different personality types. Most important of all, learn the methods of dealing with conflict, once you master that you will master your brand.
steveark says
Its really big, next to networking having a recognizable and very strong brand can be huge in terms of living a career the way you want to live it. I was basically the spokesmodel for our company, giving talks to large national and state groups, testifying before state and federal congress members in hearings. I had to have a strong network, know my stuff and had to look and sound good on television and YouTube. It took decades of work to get to the point where I had a strong enough brand to be effective. And that included taking care of my physical fitness, weight and muscles, learning effective presentation skills and learning to dress well and in style. Appearance is pretty huge in some circles and it isn’t normally a natural part of an engineer’s skill set. Neither is public speaking but it is virtually impossible to get to the top of corporate life without those skill sets.