The Career You'll Love » brand

Becoming world class

Carl — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:33:03 +0000

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, he stated that to achieve mastery in an area, it generally takes about 10,000 hours of serious learning, practice, and skill development.

I think it’s a valid conclusion, but there’s more to the story.

If you want to be famous for something, to be at the forefront, you have to establish yourself as world class. You want to be one of the best violinists? 10,000 hours. You want to make a living as a pro golfer? 10,000 hours.

How to brag with style!

Carl — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:05:00 +0000

Nobody likes a braggart. But there are times where you need to promote yourself – to your boss, to potential customers, to future employers. How do you promote yourself in a way which doesn’t come across as shameless and inauthentic?

Here’s the trick: You promote in a way which is well-founded, or where promotion isn’t the primary message.

Here are a few examples:

Share the recognition. The message is a lot softer when a group of us achieved something, as opposed to just my own personal accomplishments. And it can be more powerful as well, because typically a group can achieve more than just an individual.
Provide objective evidence. The fact that I’ve published a book or delivered 433 hours of coaching is more powerful than just claiming that I generally have lots of experience. In addition, the book is almost always a great conversation starter: people want to know about my writing and publishing experience.
Relate it to a future goal. I may not be the world’s best expert yet, but it’s very interesting to tell people about the business I’m building. It’s not uncommon to find people who want to help me, then find that I already have considerable expertise to offer.
Demonstrate expertise in a helpful way. I often sell my coaching services merely by having coaching conversations with people, or as part of a presentation I might give. When people like the way I come across, they see that I can bring them value in a paid coaching engagement.

More than anything, keep the conversation open, honest, and useful to your audience. Let that work to build up the impression that you have expertise and experience.

What are soft skills?

Carl — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:24:58 +0000

There’s more than a little fuzziness around the concept of “soft skills.” “Hard skills” are thought of as those technical abilities which often lend their name to an entire profession: designing, architecture, repairing, nursing, and so on. These are easy to identify because there’s a specific body of knowledge around each, and they’re the kind of things that our schools teach.

In contrast, soft skills are harder to define because they’re fuzzy, harder to describe, situation dependent, and often avoided by schools. So why bother?

Because these are exactly the skills which are most portable during your career. I started out as a programmer, then got promoted to manager. Every time I moved to a new project I had to learn new technologies, but the core principles of how to work with my team members remained the same. Although my technical abilities as a programmer are now obsolete by decades, I continue to use core people-related skills that I learned way back when. Some from kindergarten.

You’ll find lists of “soft skills” at various levels of detail. They’re often called “people skills” or “interpersonal skills.” Below that you’ll see things like negotiating, leading, managing, motivating, engaging, conversing, communicating, teaching, listening, and so on. All very valuable, and worth developing no matter what career you might have.

I’ll offer an additional way to figure out some soft skills which might be important to you: Imagine that you’ve just had a conversation with a couple of people, which has now drawn to a close. You depart. One person says to the other, “That was useful; he (she) was quite ________.”

What words would you prefer to see in that blank? competent? inspiring? articulate? motivating? friendly? smart? generous? spiritual?

Pick two or three words that you would strive for, that you would most like to see used in the context of how you affect others. Sure, you might not feel that you live up to those words today – great. But if you can identify some ideals for how you will affect those around you, you’ll have a lot more clarity on the soft skills you’d like to develop. That’s a lot more useful than having a general list of 20 attributes that try to describe the full breadth of human interaction.

Creating that amazing personal brand

Carl — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:46:07 +0000

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent years about “your personal brand.” Even though the idea can be sometimes used in a rather cynical fashion, I’ve found it to be pretty valuable for myself.

Here’s the idea: People will formulate ideas about who you are and why you might be valuable to know (or employ). What happens if you drive that intentionally, rather than just have it happen at random?

I’ve been focusing on this idea myself for about five years now. Actually, now that I think about it, there’s been three distinct contexts that I was working on:

As a highly experienced strategic planner in the corporate environment;
As a leader of coaching inside and outside my previous employer; and
As a spiritual leader at my church.

No, I didn’t develop a fancy logo or great marketing brochure, I didn’t take out ads on TV. Instead, I became extremely clear on who I wanted to be in each of these contexts, and developed strategies for building up an image consistent with the perception I wanted to give. For example, I volunteered for a number of roles in leading coaching in the community and within my employer, and made sure that people knew my name in connection with that.

This blog, actually, is an outgrowth of that brand-building exercise, but reaching out to a much broader audience.

This “brand” had huge value for me in that company, and gives me great value for building my new business. I have a whole bunch of people who know me and their image tends to be positive. A lot of people are very generous with their help.

Do you have continuing strategies that you use for building your “brand image” to certain people, driven by a particular goal?