Название: Reinventing You
Автор: Dorie Clark
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Поиск работы, карьера
isbn: 9781422144145
isbn:
By chapter 11, you’ve developed a new, robust brand, and you need to stay on top of how it’s perceived in the marketplace. I’ll identify online channels to monitor regularly and talk about setting up your own ongoing feedback mechanisms to keep you honest. I’ll talk about ways to mingle your old and new brands successfully, and the importance of staying consistent and committed moving forward. (A desire to expand into international work won’t go far if you don’t make the effort to learn new languages or the nuances of other cultures. And a onetime charitable gift is nice, but quickly forgotten.) The key is long-term effort, and I’ll show you prominent examples of professionals who’ve succeeded and explain why.
Finally, in the epilogue, I’ll bring it all together and summarize your road map to reinvention. As a hardworking professional, you want to understand, and shape, how you’re perceived by others. By following the steps we outline in the following chapters, you’re on your way to cultivating a powerful brand that reflects who you are—and want to be.
Recognize Where You’re Starting
The first step in reinventing yourself professionally is getting a handle on where you’re starting. Everyone has a personal brand, whether some skeptics want to admit it or not: there’s no such thing as opting out. The concept of personal branding gained currency in the late 1990s, after a famous Tom Peters cover story ran in Fast Company (“The Brand Called You”). But really what we’re talking about is something that’s always existed: your reputation. What do people think of you? What do they say when you leave the room? Understanding that, and identifying any gaps between the current reality and where you want to be in the future, is critical to beginning your reinvention process. (Even if you’re not sure where you want to end up, starting with a “personal brand inventory” is useful because it can shed light on your unique strengths and areas where your colleagues think you could make a contribution.)
You may think you already know how others view you—as a skilled communicator, or an incisive numbers guy, or a manager who always brings out the best in her team. But then again, you might be surprised. One executive coach told me about a client who was shocked to hear that his colleagues considered him arrogant. Despite being a modest and fairly self-deprecating guy, his habit of interrupting people convinced them he felt superior—almost the exact opposite of the truth. This behavior, which had been hampering his career, was easy to correct once he recognized it.
The message you’re giving others may be very different than what you intend. So follow the advice of angel investor Judy Robinett: “If three people tell you you’re a horse, buy a saddle.” In other words, listen to what those in the outside world are telling you, because they’re probably right. So how do you get that feedback? There are four major ways you can get a read on how others perceive your personal brand. In this chapter, I’ll teach you to become your own HR executive—or private detective—and learn how to:
Conduct your own “360 interviews.”
Hold your own focus group with friends and colleagues.
Examine your online presence.
Seek out patterns in past performance evaluations or recommendation letters.
Finally, we’ll integrate the data to get the full picture about your brand.
Getting Started
At the back of this book, in appendix A, you’ll find “Your Professional Reinvention Self-Assessment” worksheet, which may be helpful to fill out as you reinvent yourself.
Your Personal 360 Interview
The first step when you’re working with almost any corporate coach is to do a “360” (as in, all directions). Basically, that means the coach will interview everyone in your sphere—your boss, peers, subordinates, clients, suppliers—and try to elicit honest feedback about you and your performance. (It’s necessary to talk to everyone to locate the suck-ups who are perfect in their relationships with their bosses and tyrants to everyone below.) It’s obviously easier for people to speak openly to third parties who promise anonymity (coaches usually aggregate the data and won’t reveal who said what). If you work for a company with a reasonable training or professional development budget, ask if it would be willing to hire an executive coach to work with you. Because many employees shy away from coaches, viewing them as “remedial education for executives,” your boss is likely to be impressed with your proactive approach to self-improvement.
Even if your company won’t pay for a coach, it may have recommendations about coaches you can retain personally. They can be expensive, with fees in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, but if you’re in a position to do it, the information they gather (and their recommendations based on it) can be invaluable. You can also ask for suggestions from colleagues.
But what if you simply aren’t able to work with an outside coach? Don’t worry: there are steps you can take to elicit “360” information yourself. First, create a list of questions you think would be helpful in enhancing your self-knowledge. Executive coach Michael Melcher suggests “paired questions” such as, “What’s my strength? What’s not my strength? What career can you see me in? What career can you definitely not see me in?” That format, says Melcher, “gives people permission to give the full picture—they don’t want to be too negative.” The best questions will be the ones most relevant to you. But just for starters, some additional examples might be:
What are three words you’d use to describe me?
If you didn’t already know what I do for a living, what would you guess?
I’m trying to go from X to Y; what steps would you suggest for me?
Who are some people who have some of the qualities I should be trying to build?
What are my blind spots?
Tapping Your Network
Next, identify the people you’ll be reaching out to. Whereas a coach who has been hired to interview people about you has license to talk to people in your organization, you need to be more careful if you’re doing your own assessment (plus, you don’t want to tip your hand if you’re considering a move away from your current employer). Focus on friends, colleagues, and family members who know you well and whom you can trust to give you honest feedback (no frenemies need apply). Phyllis Stein, the former director of Radcliffe College Career Services at Harvard University, suggests identifying up to twenty people СКАЧАТЬ