The Power of Difference

In CTI’s data set, permanent lieutenancy turns out to be frighteningly typical because, like Maggie, many women and people of color haven’t figured out their special currency. They go the extra mile, and they’re unquestionably loyal to their superiors. But they toil in relative obscurity, giving up their weekends not to elevate their own profile but rather to help their boss secure a fabulous year-end bonus.

Unless you have decades to spare, you’ll need a different strategy. You’ll need to differentiate yourself, not to win sponsorship, necessarily, but absolutely to leverage it to your own ends. You’ll need to identify, develop, and deploy a personal brand. Or you’ll wind up fulfilling your sponsor’s ambitions instead of your own.

Dana, a vice president at a public relations agency, toiled for years in the PR world, first as a recruiter and then as an HR manager at a small executive search firm that focused exclusively on the PR sector. This experience gave her a unique insight into the industry: she understood not only the culture of the various firms but also the competitive tensions between them. “This was my currency when I came to this agency,” she explains. “I had the inside scoop on hundreds of competitor firms, which allowed me to give this firm a sense of how it was perceived in the marketplace—a perspective that, as a privately owned company, it just didn’t have. It was very helpful to them to have me tell them, ‘This is your key differentiator.’” Over the course of three years Dana used this currency to differentiate herself, winning a sponsor and ultimately her promotion to vice president.

To home in on your brand or distinctive value, revisit your performance reviews, if you have them, or the self-assessment you conducted in chapter 3, and look at where you consistently excel. Better yet, ask your mentor for his or her insights on your distinct value add, or consult with your personal board of directors. Solicit the feedback of friends and family: they may be able to reveal to you the basis on which to build your brand.

Rest assured, you absolutely have an important piece of value to leverage. You just may not be projecting it. Ask yourself or others:

• How am I innately different from my peers?
• What about my background, experience, or schooling makes me unique?
• What skill sets do I have that set me apart?
• How does my perspective differ from that of others? What informs my perspective that doesn’t inform theirs?
• What approach do I bring to solving thorny problems? How might this approach distinguish me from my peers?

Figuring out what constitutes the deepest well of your identity might help. Some people derive an enduring and reliable identity based on the school they attended. Others define themselves by the religion or culture in which they were raised. Still others see themselves through the lens of the expertise they’ve come to wield. If you think of people with globally recognized identities, people like Mark Zuckerberg or Coco Chanel or, on a more modest level, a leader on your team, it’s clear that doing one thing particularly well can earn you that next rung on the ladder. What accomplishment might you reference or continue to draw on for distinction? Consider, finally, that what brands you as an outsider to the flock—even painfully so—might constitute your most distinctive edge, your most valuable currency.

Todd Sears is a successful entrepreneur, the founder of Coda Leadership, a strategic advising firm that focuses on diversity, leadership, and social impact. He is also openly gay. Early in his career, working on Wall Street, Todd hid his sexual orientation because he perceived it to be a liability—despite the fact that he’d come out in college. But in 2002, working as a senior financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, he realized he had the inside track to a community of affluent investors that the competition didn’t understand: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. This community certainly needed advice. Those with domestic partners faced thorny tax issues on both the federal and state levels, including titling questions and gifting problems. Sears, whose personal as well as professional experience had given him a working knowledge of these issues, knew he could guide them.

The trick was to make Merrill Lynch a trusted brand in LGBT circles. So, drawing on his familiarity with the target audience, Sears conceived of a way to bridge the gap. The gay community, he knew, was a major supporter of arts organizations such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—entities that Merrill Lynch also funded. Sears crafted an engagement model that leveraged these relationships, offering donor-appreciation events mixed in with financial planning seminars to well-heeled gay individuals in his network.

The New York seminars gave Sears access to an affluent and differentiated market. But he didn’t stop there. Sears took his domestic partner program on the road, eventually delivering over four hundred financial planning seminars nationwide. In two years, his core team grew to comprise ten financial advisers in six cities. Internally, the team educated over 250 other Merrill Lynch financial advisers to serve LGBT clients worldwide. By 2007, Sears and his team had built the first LGBT-focused business in private banking and had attracted over $1 billion in assets to Merrill Lynch while also garnering global visibility by winning both the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Award and the PFLAG Corporate Leadership Award.

Looking back Sears understands that what distinguished him from other top performers in his industry and won him the backing of powerful sponsors was the very aspect of his identity that he had tried episodically to suppress—his sexual orientation. “My being gay definitely helped forge the relationships that proved critical to my success,” he says.

• Identify the currency you already have and lift it up. If you’re fluent in Spanish and your firm is expanding in Florida or Mexico, make sure your boss knows—and volunteer to help out on a project that needs your language ability. If you have great quant skills and your team is technically challenged, bring your expertise to the fore and make it useful.
• Acquire skills (currency) that your current job doesn’t actually require, but that set you apart from your colleagues. An executive at Freddie Mac describes how, as a thirty-year-old working for a state housing authority, he spent hours of his own time learning how to underwrite mortgages. “It wasn’t my job, but I wanted to know how it worked, the nuts and bolts. I spent hours going through this material with a yellow pad and a calculator until it became second nature to me. And now? I can be in any conversation about the financing of houses and be one of the strongest contributors.”
• Reverse-mentor. Bring to your sponsor the skill sets or know-how she lacks. This might be technical or social-media savvy. One twenty-four-year-old sales rep, noting that her sponsor “wasn’t exactly current in terms of the Internet,” briefed her on job candidates whose résumés bristled with technical jargon and references to social media innovation that she simply couldn’t comprehend, let alone assess for relevance. “I just helped educate her so she didn’t come off as some kind of dinosaur,” says the rep.
• Innovate. Access an underleveraged market, cultivate a new customer base, improve a process, or, in some other way create value. Rajashree Nambiar, head of branch banking for Standard Chartered Bank in India, saw a way to flex her cultural and gender smarts with the redesign of two bank branches in Kolkota and New Delhi. As a professional Indian woman Nambiar had experienced more than her fair share of traditional male bankers, and had a hunch that women (who accounted for more than 50 percent of the clientele at these locations) would respond to a female-friendly environment. So when a market research firm confirmed her hunch, she pitched her novel idea to the executive committee: making over the two bank branches to be branches staffed exclusively by women, from the top financial advisers to the security guards. She got the go-ahead and proceeded to transform not just the “look” of the branches but the nature of the products and services provided. These all-women branches proved to be immensely successful, indeed one of them went on to become one of Standard Chartered’s most profitable in the country, burnishing Nambiar’s brand as well as that of her employer.