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Career Success And Personal Branding: Self-Promotion 101

Written by Natalia

career successIt might surprise you, but personal branding is much more important for your career success than you think. No matter how hard you work and how good you are at what you do, if you don’t pay attention to your personal branding, achieving career success will be rather difficult.

Personal Branding and Self-Promotion

What’s the connection to career success? Why do we need to promote ourselves in order to succeed?

It is a fact that there are a lot of people (most of them women) who truly hate to talk about themselves; what they do, what they know, what they have to give. They believe their advertisement should be their work. They think that self-promotion is like bragging. I know, I am one of them! (at least I used to be – I’m making progress)

But it isn’t like that at all! The truth is that self-promotion is about demonstrating your value. And demonstrating your value is about building your personal brand.

And don’t forget: every time you are applying for a job, you are selling yourself. The ‘product’ is you! And like any other product, you need a good advertisement.

This is why my choice for today is Margaret Buj’s article on ‘career attraction’. Her article is meant to help people who feel awkward advertising themselves. She provides five tips for promoting ourselves with ease and confidence.

You Need to Change Your Perspective

Authentic self-promotion is about giving and sharing. You are not bragging; you’re giving and sharing your gifts with the world. You’re sharing ideas that can change a person’s life.

Self-promotion is about strategically building your personal brand to ensure that those who can help you accomplish more in your career will know not just who you are, but the value you have to offer and how you’d like to add more of it.

The truth is, people aren’t going to know how talented and accomplished you are unless you tell them! If those who can help you accomplish more in your career don’t know who you are and the value you have to provide, it doesn’t serve anyone.

You can read the whole article here: “How to Promote Yourself with Ease and Confidence”

Even if you won’t be able to implement all of these at once, with one step at a time you’ll be one step closer to your career success.

However, I’d like to endorse the statement in the closing paragraph of her article: “Letting the fear of being criticized determine what you do is a surefire way to never achieve what you want in work or in life“. What a valuable lesson! If you manage to adopt this way of thinking in your life, you can’t even imagine how much happier you will be and how free you will feel! It’s the only way of pursuing your dreams and letting them come true…

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Filed Under: Career success, Leadership, Success Tagged With: building your personal brand, Career Success, career success and personal branding, Leadership, Personal Brand, Personal Branding, self-promotion, self-promotion for career success, self-promotion tips

Professional Leadership Development: 5 Encouraging Signs For Women

Written by Natalia

leadership developmentGreat news for women who are committed to their professional leadership development and aim to be bosses! According to Aaron Guerrero’s article in US News, “trends are slightly moving in the favor of females who want to lead“.

I particularly enjoyed the part where the author refers to a Pew Research Center survey. Its results showed that Americans rate women superior to men in many leadership qualities, and believe that they are equal to them in some others. With women being the minority among business leaders, I find this study quite encouraging. It was about time for people to understand that women are competent, are not meant just to follow, and acknowledge their leadership skills.

Mary Barra made history this month when it was announced she’ll become General Motors’ first female chief executive officer.

Over a span of 33 years with General Motors, Barra, 51, has moved up the ladder from intern to chief of global product development and soon CEO, succeeding Dan Akerson on Jan. 15. When she starts her new post, Barra will join the ranks of 23 other women who head Fortune 500 companies. What’s more, she’ll be the first woman to lead a major automaker.

For some women, aiming for a higher office can be stalled by worries about work-life balance. In an October Pew Research Center survey, 51 percent of working mothers said being a working parent made it harder to advance their career, compared with 16 percent of working fathers who felt the same way. Other women may feel held back by sexism in the workplace. According to an August 2013 Gallup poll of 1,309 adults, about 15 percent of U.S. working women surveyed said they have at some point felt passed over for a promotion or opportunity at work on account of gender.

Still, here are some encouraging reasons why more women might be moving up in the workforce.

Read the whole article here “5 Encouraging Signs for Women Who Want to Be Bosses”

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Filed Under: Business, Career, Leadership, News Tagged With: career, Leadership, professional leadership, women leading

Any One For Ice-Cream? Leadership At Udderlicious

Written by The Career Success Doctor

Leadership at Udderlicious Ice-cream

Leadership is a quality that just about any job paying a reasonable salary requires, but employers can be so vague about what it means. Yesterday I was facilitating a networking event for Islington Chamber of Commerce’s Women In Business club. The topic was Personal Leadership.

We took over a family-owned business – an ice-cream parlour (Udderlicious, 187 Upper Street if you go near Islington in London, England), which has only been open for 2 months. As facilitator, I asked the owners to talk about their journey to opening the shop and the challengers they face, to see what lessons could be learned.

There were three particular attitudes and behaviours they talked about which for me epitomise good leadership.

1. Playing to staff’s strengths and encouraging them to develop. One of their staff is a real people person, so they actively encourage him to come out from behind the counter and meet and greet customers, and take their orders. The customers love him, and he loves doing it, so everyone has a great experience.

2. Getting involved when everyone’s back is against the wall. Delegation is an important skill, but there are times when you all have to turn your hand to all manner of unsavoury or menial activities. If the toilets need cleaning, and you’re the one not doing anything, then toilets it is! And it’s important to know when to stop mucking in, and to step back to ensure that the strategic side of things is also being attended to.

3. Passion for the product and what they do. Udderlicious is unique, because they make the ice-cream themselves, on the premises (and it’s delicious). When they talk about what they are doing you can hear the enthusiasm, excitement and belief in what they are doing, which, for a customer is so reassuring. It rubs off. I found myself leaving there as a passionate advocate of what they are doing. You get such a strong sense that this is important to them, and that they want their customers to have a great experience. They also do everything they can to source all their supplies (including the furniture) locally, which is another great selling point.

When you’re an employee, it’s not always easy to have that passion. Nor do you necessarily have the opportunity to bring on other people. However, if you can’t demonstrate passion, a willingness to get involved and a generosity of spirit, you’re likely to get left behind. And if the organisation constrains you so much that the joy has gone out of your working week, then it’s worth considering what price you are paying in emotional terms to stay there.

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Filed Under: Business, Leadership, Success Tagged With: Family-owned Business, Islington Chamber of Commerce, Leadership, Udderlicious

Do Leadership Models Stop Authenticity?

Written by The Career Success Doctor

We are all, in one way or another, leaders.  Whether it’s running your own business, being a role-model for your kids (or other peoples’ kids), being a ‘thought leader’ or a senior manager in an organisation, it’s all leadership.  In recent years, there’s been a call for more authentic leadership, led by Bill George and others.

In the Authentic Leadership model, the leader aspires to be true to themselves and their values, to walk their talk.  Leadership models are generally the antithesis of authenticity.  Yet this doesn’t stop the ‘Leadership’ market from producing new models of  ‘best practice’.

In a recent article produced by researchers at the London School of Economics, one of the key conclusions is that leaders are more successful when they adopt a more participative style:  ‘…while leaders who exhibit a powerful demeanor may boost their appearance of competence, they also risk stifling follower voice precisely because they appear more competent.’

But what happens if your own, authentic style leans more towards command and control?  One of the authors of the LSE report observed that when leaders deliberately try to be more influential, for example by increasing eye contact and thinking about their body language, they often come unstuck.  We have very good inbuilt b/s detectors: we tend to intuitively know when someone is trying to fool us, and we push back against it.

As a coach, I have worked with some really excellent leaders: their people enjoyed working for them, and they got excellent results.  I have also worked with some real ‘one trick ponies’.  People who got results by sheer force of personality, but managed to demotivate their staff, who would have performed even better if the boss had behaved differently.  And there are those who still think that command and control is the order of the day, and don’t even manage to get the results.

Most observers agree that the days of ‘you’ll do what I tell you, and you’ll do it like I tell you, otherwise I’ll…..’ are over, even though there are still some dinosaurs out there.  What they don’t agree on is whether we should apply the more prescriptive models (which don’t agree with each other anyway) or go the authenticity route.

I believe there is a case for a middle ground.  If you read or listen to Bill George, it’s clear that he changed his style over time. He admits that he had to!  He also figured out who he was and became comfortable with his own identity.  In too many models, the concept of knowing who you really are and what you stand for and being comfortable with it doesn’t seem to have much place.

As an individual, you can’t be all things to all people all of the time.  It’s too exhausting.  When leaders really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and figure out strategies for dealing with their weaknesses (being honest about what these are is a good start), then they can step into their own power.  It’s what most leaders want to do anyway, if they only knew how.

The less successful ones often go about it the wrong way, either seeing ‘power’ as a game of me versus you, or believing if they deliberately apply every trick in the leadership handbook, they will have people lining up to follow them.

The most comforting thought in all of this, as a recent article in The Director identified, is that leaders are made not born.  You can work at becoming a leader, and ‘those who’ve worked at it have more to offer the modern workplace.’  So if you dream of leading from the top of a great organisation, but secretly wonder if you have what it takes, take cheer. You can still be authentic AND develop the skills to become a successful leader.

Filed Under: Career, Career success, News, Success Tagged With: Authentic Leadership, Authenticity, Bill George, Leadership, Leadership Models, London School of Economics, Models of Leadership, The Director

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