Building a career is a lifetime adventure
Looking at my Facebook account for the past few weeks, I couldn’t help but notice a flooding of graduation pictures and congratulatory remarks for student graduates on all levels and the parents and guardians who supported them. The avalanche of commencement pictures brings to mind the large number of new college graduates who will compete with each other this year as they individually start to carve out a professional career.
If you are a new graduate, it’s a must that you prepare a career plan — and I am assuming you have been taught how to do that in school. It begins by clearly defining your personal branding statement, and your brand as a human being is a trust mark. It makes you distinctive from the rest in your arena. Business guru Tom Peters said, “It is either ‘Brand You’ or ‘Canned You’ — become distinct or extinct.”
“Brand You” can very well stand for “Your Own Uniqueness.” It creates immediate awareness, high interest, and a desire for your positive attributes, knowledge and skills. It moves your target public to your desired action. Branding yourself can take your career in a distinct direction, but you have to start thinking of yourself a little differently. You need to build a reputation that will convince people to entrust you with a job, a position or a new opportunity. It’s not easy to build a great one but you have to do it. You have to be noticed for the right attributes. In the end, a big career necessitates everything from appropriate behavior, to the correct way of treating your critics, to the exact timing and instincts about when to stay on at a job or leave it.
The book Career Warfare by David F. D’Allesandro, chairman and CEO of a financial services company, discusses these unwritten rules on how to be an organization man or woman and present honestto-goodness realities you need to understand so you can create a “Brand You” that screams “I will make it to the top.” • You cost as much as a Mercedes, so act like
one. To build a personal brand that will help you succeed, you need to turn selfishness into selfrespect and the respect of the people around you. You have to view your actions in the same way that the people judging you will view them. You can’t build a good brand if you can’t see yourself as others see you. You have to look beyond your navel and accept that your behavior defines you, and that you are going to be judged by your external actions, not by your intentions.
Become a product with the right features. Package yourself as a desirable, expensive product, and project that you cost as much per year as a Mercedes. But as you do that, make sure you are able to deliver the expected performance, and to develop a reputation for five key qualities: the capacity to earn money for an organization, the propensity to tell the truth, discretion, consistency in delivering on your promises, and the ability to make people want to work for you.
• Your boss is the co-author of your brand. Manage the relationship with your boss intelligently, no matter who he or she is. Bosses want loyalty and good advice. They want to make sure the people who
report to them are not trying to do them in. The fastest method of suicide in organizational life is talking negatively about your boss to others. Hell really hath no fury like a boss scorned. Your boss will find a way to take you out.
Bosses also want good advice. They put subordinates into three categories: sycophants, contrarians and balanced players. Only the latter offer advice worth listening to. Sycophants make up about 70 percent of the people in any organization, and they agree with their bosses on everything. Do not allow yourself to be thought of as someone who is afraid to speak your mind. It will brand you as mediocre. You don’t want to be branded a contrarian either. They make up about 10 percent of the workforce and disagree for the sake of disagreeing. The boss starts to cringe when a contrarian comes into the office because it is an unpleasant experience every time. Avoid the contrarian trap. Don’t assume your intellect alone is enough to propel you to the top. It won’t. You need the right kind of character, too.
• Put your boss on the couch and play amateur shrink. Many bosses fit into any one of these basic categories: “The Little League Parent” treats you as if you are an errant son or daughter: understand that what this boss does for you is not for love, but to further his or her own brand; “The Mentor” makes sure your reputation rises in tandem with theirs; “The Wastrel” makes you do everything for him: if you do tolerate his or her weakness, use the opportunity to build your own brand under the circumstances; “The Pariah” tries to keep your brand distinct from himself: defend yourself by proving your loyalty to the whole organization; “The One-Way User” obviously works only for himself; “The Wimp” won’t let you build your brand because he or she won’t let you do anything; and “The Know-It-All” never listens.
• Learn which one is the pickle fork and avoid
putting yourself in embarrassing situations. Asingle embarrassment can be enough to alter people’s opinion of you forever. Go out of your way to not associate your personal brand with anything unethical, unsavory or just plain ugly. Personal habits in food and dress also count. If you want success at a high level, it’s important that you look and act it. Dress professionally. Dress appropriately. It’s also important that your table manners indicate you are a worldly person, familiar with the rules of civilized life. Manners that demonstrate a lack of knowledge will hold you back. If you find yourself at working dinners with a dozen pieces of silver in front of you, take the time to learn which one is the pickle fork. It might not seem relevant to your personal brand, but it is.
• Kenny Rogers is right. If you intend to have a big career, pick your battles and avoid spending your time and energy on places where you will never move your brand forward. In The Gambler, Kenny Rogers sang, “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” Kenny’s right. The best brand attribute you can possibly have in business is the right name. Consider that 60 percent of large public companies, according to the Family Firm Institute, are family-controlled. If you have the right last name and a limited amount of intra-family competition, your chances of rising to the top are excellent. The reality is that without the right name you may put in 30 years with a company only to find your ascension to CEO barred by a favored son. Be careful about who runs the show, especially if the group looks less than diverse and you don’t fit the mold. Unfortunately, discrimination is still alive and there are places where you will bang your head against the ceiling simply by virtue of who you are.
• It’s always show time. There are three kinds of meetings whose premises you should understand. Staff meetings are particularly dangerous. Don’t use them for anything except letting the boss know what’s going on. Don’t use them to argue for something you want from the boss. Don’t attack peers. Staff meetings are designed to make the boss feel good — the proud patriarch or matriarch of a great team. Watch your behavior at get-something-done meetings, too. Don’t just cut off ideas, even those you know are useless. Tell the presenters you’ll think about it. Let ideas flow, but make sure the group stays focused. Then there are combat meetings involving money or approval. At these, make sure you understand the players and the agenda. Be ready to admit victory or defeat when either is obvious and move on. Accept bad news gracefully.
• Make the right enemies. You cannot build an effective brand by never offending anyone. No matter how smart, hardworking or kind you are, you will make enemies. You are especially likely to make enemies if you are ambitiously trying to build a personal brand by taking risks and accomplishing big things. The more successful you are, the more enemies you will have. How do you know when an enemy is trying to do you in? Some telltale signs: it’s taking longer for your calls to be returned; people you used to get appointments to see easily now are often busy; people greet you with “How are you doing these days?” — code for seeing if you know your days are numbered; many people are using the same metaphors about you; at parties, the boss’s spouse barely glances at you; other people are unusually concerned about your well-being. If this sounds familiar, find out what’s going on and fight it energetically.
• Don’t be swallowed by the bubble. Attention, praise, money and power — in other words, success — can be isolating and unsettling. Unless you are very careful, your achievements will nudge you into a kind of bubble that distorts your judgments. That can make you very, very arrogant and careless. Follow the six rules for keeping some perspective on your success: Be skeptical of your own genius; surround yourself with equally skeptical people; keep friends that remind you of your humanity; have some sympathy for your victims; develop interests other than your favorite sport; and remember who feeds your family — your customers and shareholders. Use your success to connect with the rest of the world. It’s smart to win the approval of the community around you, create an organization the world admires, and give back something significant, whether it’s your money, your time or your influence in supporting good causes. Give because the world has made you prosperous and successful and you owe it a debt. • The higher you fly, the more you will be shot at. It doesn’t take a crime or some extremely immoral act to generate negative news. Under the right circumstances, all it takes is the fact that you spend too much money on your hairdresser or gym instructor, you launched a product no one likes or you play golf on company time. You make mistakes and you do well-intentioned things that look like mistakes. The more your profile has been heightened by success, the more likely any mistake you make will get a broad airing. It’s very simple. The higher you fly, the more interesting it is to shoot at you.
Prepare for bad news right now. Sooner or later, you will face unpleasant headlines. If you handle it well, you can turn what might be a yearlong story into one that lasts a few weeks and inflicts no lasting injury on your brand. If you handle the attack brilliantly, you may even come out of your trial by fire with your brand enhanced. The first tactic is to blunt bad news before it becomes a huge story. Explain bad news to the world. Forthrightness is disarming. And once the story breaks, behave in a forthright and reasonable manner. Explain yourself and move on. If you refuse and retreat to the bunker, the story changes focus from one mistake to every unfortunate thing you have ever done.
Don’t even think of lying publicly or your brand will be finished. If you lie under scrutiny, you can no longer successfully refute anything, even the most outrageous story, because you will have no credibility. Remember, the truth may be bitter medicine for a brand, but a lie is toxic. Whatever you do, don’t go on a jihad. Don’t blame your employees, your accountant, your students or your spouse. Don’t blame a vast, unnamed conspiracy. If you try to shift blame, you make a bad story worse.
• Make sure you stay a contender. Your responsibilities are growing and they conspire against risk and change. To keep momentum going long after your colleagues’ brands have settled into inertia, don’t be generic, be distinctive; get back on the horse, it’s foolish to throw in the towel after a setback or two; ask for opportunities and promotions, it will remind your bosses that you are someone to keep in mind for big jobs; never sell your brand for short money; make sure assignments include interesting opportunities, not just a raise; if lightning is about to strike, make sure you are standing in an open field; gamble shrewdly, promise to do something difficult and then deliver; create a brain trust, develop a circle of people whose advice you trust to help you bet wisely; tinker with success — you are building your brand until the day you die, so expect to make adjustments; don’t lie, cheat or steal, power won’t protect you from disgrace; and understand that the unexamined reputation is not worth having.
Be conscious every day of the “Brand You” you are building. This will set you apart from 99 percent of the people you will meet in your working life who are also building a career. Nick Carter paraphrasing Forrest Gump declared, “Your career is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re going to get. But everything you get is going to teach you something along the way and make you the person you are today. That’s the exciting part — it’s an adventure in itself.” And it will take forever.
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Business guru Tom Peters said, ‘It is either “Brand You” or “Canned You” — become distinct or extinct.’