CHAPTER 2
Understand Perceptions
What Do People Think About You?
The first step in identifying what people think about you is to determine which people matter. Personal branding is not about being famous. It’s about being selectively famous. That means you build your brand with only the people who need to know you so you can reach your goals. To this community, you are always visible, available, and valuable. To the rest of the world, you can live in complete obscurity. Isn’t it a relief to know that you don’t have to be all things to all people? I have a term for this selective audience; I call it your brand community because all the members are providing value to one another.
MINDSET RESET
Think of your brand community as your 5D team: decision makers, doyens, disciples, defenders, and discoursers. Every effective brand community is made up of people in these categories (Figure 2-1).
Figure 2-1. Your 5D Team
Decision Makers: These are people who have a major impact on your being able to reach your goals. This category includes people like hiring managers and senior leaders. It includes people who are instrumental in your current career activities and future career success. It also includes the people who influence those decision makers.
Doyens: These are the thought leaders in your field—the “stars” in your industry or job function. And it also includes “expertise colleagues”—others who aren’t so famous but share similar knowledge or thought leadership goals. You may not share the same point of view, but you are cousins in expertise.
Disciples: These are your employees if you manage others. It can also include people you need to motivate to achieve your goals—even if you aren’t their line manager. The people who follow you and those you mentor are also in this category.
Defenders: These are your go-to people for moral and professional support and guidance, including your mentors, close family, and friends. They are often the people who can help you accelerate your growth, having an impact on the speed at which you attain your goals. They can help give you the perspective you need during challenging times.
Discoursers: These are the mouthpieces with megaphones who can help you get your message heard. It includes the traditional media, authors, podcast hosts, blog owners, and social media leaders.
Now it’s your turn. Take a moment to document your brand community—or 5D team, the people who need to know you so you can achieve your goals.
Once you’ve made a list of the people in your brand community, highlight the ones you rarely or never see in person. It takes extra effort to nurture virtual relationships. Making note of these people will help you be more intentional in your efforts to engage with them.
Fun Fact
A 2018 study by Olivet University revealed that 76 percent of people think mentors are important, yet only 37 percent of people currently have one.
The 3 Ps Formula of Successful Branding
It’s time to take a look at your brand from the outside in. Professional success doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To succeed in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, you must be keenly aware of external perceptions. At CareerBlast.TV, we use the 3 Ps formula—purpose, performance, and perception—to describe what we believe it takes to be successful today (Figure 2-2).
Figure 2-2. The 3 Ps Formula of Successful Branding
Purpose: Who You Are and What Drives You
If you’re not feeling fulfilled at work, it’s possibly because there’s a disconnect between what’s important to you, what you do, and how you do it. What motivates you? What goals inspire you? When you are straightforward about your purpose, values, and your unique approach to work, you have a compass to help keep you moving in the right direction toward your ultimate vision.
Performance: How You Deliver Value at Work
This component calls for you to examine the skills required to do your job along with what it takes to get you noticed for your next role. Performance partially has to do with your technical skills, but the area that’s most important when it comes to branding has to do with traits that have long been called soft skills, which reflect the human part of career success. Examining your technical skills alongside your soft skills will help you build and nurture meaningful relationships at work. Then you can make things happen.
Perception: What People Think About You
This element of the 3 Ps formula is the one that people often overlook—yet it’s absolutely essential for career success. You can have clear direction and honed expertise, but if you don’t have the ability to build relationships with people who count, your success will be hampered. Like it or not, our success is inextricably linked to how we are perceived by others.
Validating Your Authenticity
Whether you’re searching for a new job, looking to get promoted, or seeking new clients, a complete portrait of your professional reputation is essential.
Although successful branding is based in what is authentic and genuine about you, your personal brand is held in the hearts and minds of those around you. I keep repeating that phrase because you must face these external perceptions. They help you validate self-perceptions and also provide information you can use to refine your brand.
Because these perceptions are so critical to building a truly authentic and compelling personal brand, I developed a tool to help career-minded professionals get candid feedback about how they are perceived by those around them. It’s called 360Reach. But don’t confuse it with 360 tools most companies use. This survey doesn’t answer the question “How are you at X?” It answers the question “Who are you?”
The insights you obtain will be invaluable to your brand building. Often the insights you gain provide subtle yet powerful clues to external perceptions. I was working with a really smart and dedicated executive at a law firm. She prided herself on being the kind of leader who involves others and listens fully. When she received her 360Reach results, she realized that while some people saw her as open-minded, inclusive, and willing to consider all points of view, others saw her as wishy-washy and indecisive. Armed with this awareness, she was able to refine how she delivered her brand attributes of “open-minded and inclusive” in a way that was seen as positive and valuable to the firm.
Another client—a very senior and successful finance executive at a technology company—received one comment on her 360Reach report that forever changed the course of her career. The comment said “You’re really impressive. I admire you. The only thing I don’t understand is why you are in finance. You just seem like a marketer to me.” Interestingly, that was always her dream—to be a CMO. But her first internship in college was in finance and she excelled in the role. Her great work led to her being hired full-time as a financial analyst. That led to other opportunities in finance and ultimately to a senior role where she was a respected and revered leader. The comment she received, though, was too much to ignore. She was passionate about marketing and wanted to pursue it. So she proposed to the CEO that she take on responsibilities for the marketing and finance of a new product that was being incubated. That move increased her happiness at work and allowed her to deliver greater value to her employer.
The message here: Get feedback from others—regularly. And take action on what you learn. You can find a complimentary version of 360Reach at http://360reach.me.
Having a tool that can help you understand your brand from the outside can really help you get a baseline understanding of external perceptions, but formally surveying people all the time is just not realistic. And the once-a-year performance evaluation summarizing what your leaders think about you is a very narrow gauge; not surprisingly, relying on those can actually impede your ability to advance rapidly. That’s why you need to proactively ask for and listen to feedback from the full circle of your 5D community.
BRAND HACK
Solicit regular feedback. Overtly ask for feedback. Check in with colleagues at the end of a meeting you deliver. Ask your employees what they think you’re doing well and not so well. Solicit feedback from your manager during your one-on-ones. State plainly that you encourage and appreciate candid feedback—the good, the bad, and the ugly. If the feedback doesn’t jibe with your self-perception, ask yourself if this is happening because you’re miscommunicating or because you haven’t acknowledged a truth about yourself.
Clarity: The Key to Powerful Authenticity
Knowing your brand before crystalizing it into your unique promise of value is essential. It speaks to the first of the three Cs of personal branding: clarity. The novelist Julian Barnes is widely quoted as saying, “Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all.” But in personal branding, the labor required to unearth the authentic you will pay off in the long run.
We’ll talk about the other two Cs—consistency and constancy—in chapters 4 and 11, but for now, let’s get clear about clarity (Figure 2-3).
Figure 2-3. The 3 Cs of Personal Branding
People with strong personal brands are explicit about who they are and who they’re not. Being resolute about your unique promise of value is not only essential, it’s an asset that pays huge dividends. It:
• helps you know what’s on- and off-brand for you
• enables you to say no to things that won’t help you reach your goals, giving you more time to focus on what’s important
• informs how you talk about yourself to others
• makes it easier for others to spread the word about your brand on your behalf by talking to others about you
• provides a sounding board to help you make decisions about what to pursue and what not to pursue
• helps you identify topics, keywords, and points of view to include in your brand communications
• makes it a snap to write your career marketing materials
• boosts your confidence by reminding you what’s unique about you
• liberates you from a hamster wheel of duties that you don’t enjoy.
Summing Up
Now that your brand is firmly embedded in your mind, you have validated those self-perceptions, and know who needs to know you, it’s time to put it all together so you can tell the world who you are and why they should care. Don’t become the world’s best-kept secret; share yourself with the world. So, it’s time to tell your story. In chapter 3, we’ll distill all that you learned about yourself into a story—your brand story. And you’ll learn all the ways to tell that story so you can connect and engage with members of your brand community.