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Developing personal brand equity is a key element to
establishing and maintaining your career mobility.
Increasing manager equity is the quickest method for
improving and selling your brand throughout the
organization. It requires an understanding of what
managers like, how to measure your changes and how
to influence their perceptions with less effort.
Developing a compelling personal brand image still
remains essential to winning and keeping
management's faith. Since the massive downsizing
wave that swept the 1990's, management has begun to
suffer the same pains as the blue collar workers.
Everyone is overworked and unable to focus entirely
on any one thing. Professional development in the
corporation has transformed into personal
development. In other words, management doesn't
have time to help you develop your career. Sure,
they'll take a few minutes to help you jot down your
goals but it won't go much further than that.
Employees don't get the kind of attention nowadays
that helps develop careers. The best way to promote
yourself is to promote your brand.
Personal
brand value should be managed by focusing on the
creation of your manager equity. Too many times
employees focus on creating value for themselves.
They engage in activities that they think will
increase their value to the organization. Maybe
they work longer hours per week or learn new skills
to increase their productivity. These types of
performance are valuable in that they give your
manager less to worry about. However, they don't do
a great deal to increase your equity. Technology
has already ushered in an improvement in
productivity and unfortunately longer work hours.
Everyone is getting better at these so you won't
necessarily be distancing yourself from the
competition by improving them. Building manager
equity will require a change in mindset. Your
actions should not seek to make you look better but
make the managers look better. Here are a few
questions you should consider in developing the
manager equity mindset:
- Do
your decisions on what to work on take into
consideration what you need or what your manager
needs?
- Do
your efforts focus on key managers and building
their loyalty and trust in your abilities?
- Do
you focus on resolving some of their problems?
- Do
you identify the skills that managers seem to
appreciate most? Do you focus on improving them to
be your equity?
- Do
you change your efforts to cater to each manager in
hopes of maximizing their satisfaction?
Managing
your brand equity not only requires an ability to
modify it but to also measure it. Gauging how
others value you and your contributions is always
difficult since most managers will avoid being
brutally honest about what they think you contribute
to the company. This can be avoided by using your
friends and trusted colleagues to probe your
managers for what they really think. Use their
feedback to adjust your strategy. For example, if
your assessment team identifies that managers are
disappointed in your ability to lead projects, take
a look at your history and understand why they feel
that way. Then, improve it.
It's
important to remember that brand equity is
subjective. Not only will different managers value
your brand differently, the same efforts that
improve your equity with one manager may have little
effect on another. Your efforts can increase or
decrease it. Therefore, it becomes critical to
understand what drives each manager's equity.
Awareness is one essential element in how they
develop equity and the easiest to manage.
Lastly,
don't try to influence their perception of you
alone. The most reliable information managers use
to learn about you is the advice from others.
Tooting your own horn is good but endorsements from
others can carry a lot more weight and serves to
validate your abilities. Luckily, the same team you
use to learn how well you are developing your equity
can also sing your praises and improve your brand
equity at the same time.
Todd
Rhoad is a Senior Program Manager at Symtx Inc. He
has served numerous management roles in profit,
non-profit, private and public organizations. He's
the creator of the Blitz Approach to getting ahead
in your career. Todd holds a Master's degree in
Electrical Engineering and Business Administration.
You can see more and read more at blog.myspace.com/toddrhoad.
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