To succeed and find fulfillment in your work in this dynamic age, you must change the way you think about your career and you must treat career management as an ongoing activity. Creating your personal brand helps you do all of this—with the ultimate goal of distinguishing yourself for career success. In this book, we present a personal branding road map that we call 1-2-3 Success! (developed by Reach and proven with thousands of executives). Building your personal brand takes time—but it is also highly worthwhile. If you invest in the process now, things will get easier later. But before you jump into the process, let’s take a closer look at the mindset you must adopt in order to apply 1-2-3 Success! to managing your career. We call this mindset Career Distinction. Adopt the Career Distinction mindset, follow the principles, and get ready to grab hold of your future.
As you saw in Chapter 1, just doing your job, and even doing it well, is no longer enough. Loyalty and longevity were the watchwords of an earlier day. You saw this reflected in the TV programs of the 1960s and 1970s. Remember Bewitched? Recall Samantha’s husband Darrin Stephens’ role at ad agency McMann and Tate.
Each day, things burbled along predictably at McMann and Tate. Larry Tate, the bombastic cofounder of the agency, barked orders at Darrin, his senior account director. Dressed in his dark grey suit, Darrin arrived at the office knowing pretty much how his day would unfold. Even though the campaigns and clients changed, each day resembled the previous one. Darrin knew everyone in the agency, and everyone knew their roles. People stayed with the company—and in their same jobs—for years.
Despite all the client mishaps caused by mischievous or flawed spells cast by his wife’s witchy relatives, Darrin kept his job and knew he would stay at McMann and Tate until he retired.
It’s hard to believe that just over 40 years have passed since Bewitched premiered. The work scene depicted in the show seems almost unimaginable today. And recent TV programs make the contrast even sharper. To see what we mean, contrast Darrin Stephens with the cast of characters in The Apprentice.
“You’re fired!” If you’re an Apprentice devotee, you hear this phrase every week. Fortunately, it’s coming from the boardroom at Trump Towers, and it’s directed at someone other than you. But every week, like clockwork, someone leaves the show—and not happily. The Apprentice reflects the new world of work, where you’re only as good as your last project. You can outperform everyone around you one week, but there’s no guarantee that you won’t get ousted the next. When your manager and the projects are changing all the time, as with The Apprentice, the successful strategy is not to conform but to continually distinguish yourself.
In today’s workplace, creativity has trumped loyalty; individuality has replaced conformity; pro-activity has replaced hierarchy. You don’t wait for job assignments—you create them. Those who succeeded on The Apprentice were aware of their talents and confident enough to use them to stand out and consistently deliver value to their teams.
With intense competition and pressure from shareholders to deliver ever-higher returns, companies have begun scrutinizing each employee to assess his or her value to the organization. If members of the executive team don’t know you’re there, then they figure they won’t miss you when you’re gone. Those who fly under the radar in corporations are the ones who hear “You’re fired” for real. Today, this happens even to people who have served in the same organization for decades. When the inevitable need to reduce headcount arises, those who are not perceived as making unique and significant contributions are the first to be let go, often regardless of their tenure. The following story offers just one example.
Increasingly many workers are suffering this experience, whether they worked for their company for 5 or 25 years.
In corporate positions, sales, independent business, and even politics and the media, people have realized that you need to “make a name for yourself” if you hope to stay in your profession. Those who can simply do the job won’t receive nearly as many opportunities as those who carve out a unique niche for themselves. And the higher you move up the corporate ladder, the more important this personal branding becomes. It’s all about adding value beyond what your colleagues deliver. It’s about standing out, and standing for something special. Seth Godin put it this way in his blog:
Most people, apparently, believe that if they just get their needle sharp enough, it’ll magnetically leap out of the haystack and land wherever it belongs. If they don’t get a great job or make a great sale or land a terrific date, it might just be because they don’t deserve it. Having met some successful people, I can assure you that they didn’t get that way by deserving it.
What chance is there that your totally average resume, describing a totally average academic and work career is going to get you most jobs? “Hey Bill! Check out this average guy with an average academic background and really exceptionally average work experience! Maybe he’s cheap!!”
Do you hire people that way? Do you choose products that way? If you’re driving a Chevy Cavalier and working for the Social Security Administration, perhaps, but those days are long gone.
People are buying only one thing from you: the way the engagement (hiring you, working with you, dating you, using your product or service, learning from you) makes them feel.
So how do you make people feel?
Could you make them feel better? More? Could you create the emotions that they’re seeking?
As long as we focus on the commodity, on the sharper needle, we’re lost. Why? Because most customers don’t carry a magnet. Because the sharpest needle is rarely the one that gets out of the haystack. Instead, buyers are looking for the Free Prize, for that exceptional attribute that’s worth talking about. I just polled the four interns sitting here with me. Between them, they speak 12 languages. No, that’s not why I hired them. No, we don’t need Tagalog in our daily work … but it’s a free prize. It’s one of the many things that made them interesting, that made me feel good about hiring them.
Think about how you look for unique value in the products and services you purchase. For example, let’s say you just received a speeding ticket. Depending on where you live, you can probably take a defensive-driving course to remove the ticket from your permanent record. In this case, it’s not a matter of whether you take the course, but where you take it. Given the choice between a standard defensive-driving class and one that teaches with humor, or one created solely for “singles,” which course are you more likely to choose? Most people will choose something other than the standard class. Why? Those courses offer more than just the basic requirements. They provide added value, and that makes them more intriguing and useful to you, the consumer.
The media and entertainment fields present additional examples. Actors often have a certain character type for which they have become known. Musicians and other artists build their image around personal attributes as well as their talent. Comedians find their “bit.” Take Jack Nicholson. If you’re like most people, his devilish eyebrows and borderline insane characters immediately come to mind. Think of Dennis Miller, and you instantly recall his classic sardonic, intellectual “rants.”
To succeed in any professional endeavor, you must make your unique value memorable. No one should need to ask you what you bring to your position that’s different or special. Your work, behavior, and demeanor should make this crystal clear to everyone around you.
In addition, when people understand how your skills and unique personal attributes support a larger goal that they care about, they remember you more readily. For example, perhaps you have a great sense of humor. Rather than just presenting yourself as the office clown, you might make yourself memorable by communicating why you use humor: “I find that laughter helps people relax and builds cooperation. I believe in leading through positive motivation.” By making the link between your special ability with humor and an important business goal, you transform your attribute into an asset. And you send the unmistakable message that you stand for something important.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. … Every great man is unique.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet
To take the helm of your career and steer it toward your future, you must be your own boss—controlling your destiny, finding and seizing opportunities, and marching up the ramp of advancement in your profession. As your own boss, you decide which positions you will take, how much effort you’ll invest in each job, and how you’ll handle the challenges you’ll inevitably encounter. You control how you present yourself and your intellectual and emotional assets, and even whom you position as your allies and your opponents.
At first blush, you might disagree. Perhaps you think your man-ager—or the CEO or board of directors—controls your future. Maybe you assume that your company’s success—in the form of rising stock price, customer satisfaction, and profitability—will carry you indefinitely. We urge you not to count on outside forces to ensure your success. You can’t control these forces—so you’ll constantly be vulnerable to them. But you do control your own personal brand. Consider: Your skills and unique personal attributes don’t disappear if your company’s stock price plummets. Your future doesn’t unravel if an executive who powerfully supported your advancement leaves the company. Your personal assets are yours, and no one can take them away from you. You must take responsibility for these assets, and use them to your advantage. In short, seek strength in yourself, not your circumstances.
Let’s look at an example of someone who has thoroughly embraced the notion of being his own boss:
Many people still think of their career as a ladder with their ultimate goal being that top rung. Even from the bottom, you can see the top rung off in the distance. You climb the ladder, progressing in your career one milestone at a time. At each rung, you work hard on what you are doing at the moment. You forget about that next step because you’re sure you’ll get there when the right time comes without encountering any obstacles. You fall into complacency.
Then something happens.
Perhaps you make it happen:
Perhaps the something comes from outside your control:
Only when that something happens do you think about that next rung in your career ladder. You put together your resume, re-connect with lost professional contacts, and so forth. You expend enormous effort connecting with recruiters, writing cover letters, refining your career marketing materials, searching through job boards—all the fallback methods that people used back when the world of work was predictable.
But in today’s knowledge economy, this sporadic, effortful approach to career management isn’t the best approach. Instead, you have to get rid of the ladder metaphor and view your career climb as a ramp. When you’re ascending a ramp, you don’t stop and relax—you’re constantly advancing in perpetual motion toward your professional goals. In this scenario, you don’t wait for a trigger to move you to your next step in your career: You manage that movement yourself, every day of your life:
Perhaps you’re thinking, “This sounds like a lot more work than climbing a ladder.” But in fact, perpetual career management is a lot less work. That’s because you build momentum: Once you adopt this mindset and make the corresponding behaviors part of your regular routine, you never have to make a focused effort to work on your career again. Instead, you’re always thinking about it and tweaking it as a matter of course. It’s like brushing your teeth in the morning: Career management becomes something you just do.
Let’s be clear that we are talking about a ramp, not an escalator. On a ramp, you are still in control. You’re ascending the ramp by moving your own feet forward. You are responsible for reaching the top. You are mindful of the actions necessary to propel yourself forward. On an escalator, you’re standing there helplessly, as the mechanism moves you up. You are giving away control and hoping to arrive at (rather than working toward) your desired destination.
If these elements of the Career Distinction mindset sound familiar, that’s not surprising. Corporate marketers have used them for years. It’s called branding. But the Career Distinction mindset puts you in position to brand yourself, not a company or product.
And while corporate branding typically requires scores of ad execs and million-dollar marketing budgets, personal branding requires only you. You are your own 24/7 billboard and interactive ad campaign. Every day, in everything you do, you tell the world about yourself, your values, your goals, and your skills. In fact, you already have a brand—even if you don’t know what it is, and even if it isn’t working for you the way you’d like it to.
The 1-2-3 Success! process presented in this book helps you clarify the personal brand you need to create in order to achieve career distinction—and then communicate that brand unerringly to those around you. In the next chapter, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of branding (including common myths about it) as well as learn more about personal branding’s origins and the nature of the personal-branding process.
Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.
—Tom Peters, management guru