In our last article, we detailed several ways that leaders, managers and executives undermine their own credibility and trust. 

Betraying the trust of your employees has a ripple effect—lack of credibility and trust results in  a lack of leadership.  That lack of leadership yields disengaged employees.

Disengaged employees typically exhibit far less productivity than their engaged counterparts, and the organization’s profitability and long-term prospects for success suffer.  In a nutshell, managers and executives, through failures in building the cornerstones of leadership—credibility and trust—will ultimately cause their own organizations to fail, as disengagement becomes viral.

This week, we’ll focus on multiple ways that successful managers and executives exert a positive influence on their employees, driving credibility and trust and fueling employee engagement and productivity along the way.

Build Relationships

Too many managers think they can lead others without forming a personal relationship with them.  They think, largely to their peril, that they can keep an arm’s length approach to managing, drawing upon that old standard of keeping their personal and business worlds strictly apart.

Today’s successful managers realize that real leadership is not about blurring those lines but rather building appropriate professional relationships based on time-tested principles. They are open and available to their people, always there to listen, give advice, and validate or restore confidence when their employees need it.

They have faith in others, and they show it in the ways they speak to their people and delegate work to them. And they prove, over and over again, that they always look to the best interests of others when making decisions.  When people can sense that you have their best interests in mind, they don’t always need to agree with a decision to embrace it and stay engaged with their work and the company’s goals.

Be Steady at the Helm

People place a high level of trust and credibility in the notion of consistency.  The best managers focus on having a steady demeanor regardless of the situation.

There’s a huge psychological aspect to the manager/employee relationship dynamic.  Even the most engaged employees still look to the behavior of their managers as a kind of bellwether for how they, their team, or the company itself is performing.  As competitive pressures peak, it’s important that leaders understand how to remain consistent in their own attitudes and behaviors.

This isn’t to say that managers need to adopt a stoic, nonchalant stance. It’s more about not getting too high or carried away by success or too low, adopting a doomsday attitude after a recent loss. Keeping in mind that we all live to fight another day, whether it’s after a blow to our confidence or a big win, helps us to remain steady at the helm.

Master the Art of Giving Feedback

In our years of working with high-performance teams, we’ve seen that even those who consistently deliver superior performance within an organization crave good feedback from their managers and executives.

When managers are giving feedback to their employees, it must first be frank—people simply can’t improve if they can’t identify an issue through objectivity and honesty from their leaders. Feedback must also be open, meaning that it can’t just be a one-way street. Managers should be prepared to talk through issues, gain understanding by hearing from the employee their thoughts on the issue, and walk away with a greater understanding of the problem and a greater resolution of the issue.

Finally, feedback should be accurate and timely.  This requires that managers stay in touch with what’s really happening with the people on their teams and how they are performing in their positions. Leaders should be able to step in at any time, offering key advice that’s pertinent to the situation and the employee’s needs.

Demonstrate Character and Concern for Others

We all face tests of our honesty, ethics, and ability to put others’ interests above our own almost every day at work.  Perhaps the best way that leaders build credibility and trust is through showing a consistent ability to rise to these occasions and demonstrate character and concern for others.

Those leaders who stand tall on character are those who never look for excuses and remain accountable, not only for their own individual work, but for their team’s performance as well. They keep their integrity no matter the personal consequence, and they see through an ethical dilemma with great clarity.

While these instances to show character may not occur every day, a more constant opportunity for leadership is in showing concern for others.  All too often, managers can be too self-absorbed or focused on their own work to see someone in need.  At any given time, someone on their team can be dealing with something on the broad spectrum of the human condition, from dealing with a family tragedy to missing out on a promotion at the hands of a colleague.

The manager who is attuned to these situations and gives that employee a shoulder or boost at just the right time earns a special degree of trust and credibility that can sometimes last years.

How would you rate your level of trust in your team and organization?  Could it be better? Successful organizations invest in their people; in fact, we recently completed a Foundation of Leadership workshop (based on many of the principles in this article) for North Carolina-based Kerr Drug, a company committed to the ongoing development and engagement of its employees. If you would like a free consultation on strengthening credibility and trust for your leadership team, please contact robpulley@tms-hr.com. 

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Gone are the days of consistency, predictability, stability, or maintaining the status quo defining organizational strength.  Instead, an organization’s very survival is dependent on its ability to embrace volatility and change in the marketplace.  Organizations that can demonstrate adaptability can survive and have some short-term success.  However, short-term success does not define an organization’s real strength.  For organizations to have long-term, sustained success, they not only need to adapt to change, they must demonstrate the ability to do more with less, respond quickly to change, and to create change.  Organizations that can do this effectively will not only survive, but thrive.  

Organizational strength is not measured by what you build, what you sell, or how you are structured.   Today, organizational strength is measured by three foundational assets – Efficiency, Speed, and Innovation, along with 12 intangible assets.  These 15 assets make up the body that covers the engine that drives companies to success. Assessment of these 15 assets  of the business provide leaders with the tools they need to make better decisions and engage the organization in more purposeful strategic planning.

In last week’s TM Solutions Blog, the first of a three-part series on what makes a successful company, we discussed the first five factors that drive organizational strength:  the foundational asset of Efficiency, along with the four intangible assets of Trust, Accountability, Quality, and Communication.   This week, we’ll take on five more:  the foundational asset of Speed, along with the intangible assets of Awareness, Customer Focus, Execution, and Flexibility.

Speed

The best companies—the ones that exhibit the greatest strength in terms of organizational effectiveness, manage profitability and maximize productivity by moving fast.  Speed often defines our ability to seize on quickly-closing windows of market opportunity or to retain our customers when situations go awry.  Whatever opportunity or a challenge ahead, companies need speed.

Speed often requires foresight on the part of executives, managers, and teams. Organizations that can stay ahead of their competition identify their opportunities and challenges ahead of time, when possible, and tailor a quick response to meet changing conditions.

Building companies for speed requires the ability and commitment—not one or the other—to meet obligations and exceed goals.  Strong organizations consistently produce more than expected in all areas, even with high expectations and short deadlines.

With ability, commitment, and foresight in their arsenal of weapons, organizations quickly identify what needs to be done and take action with a results-oriented mentality, whether it’s solving a customer problem or bringing a new product or service to the market. 

Anticipating the road ahead enables companies to tackle problems and institute controls and contingency plans to address them.  People can effectively respond to urgent situations calling for quick action and creative solutions, matching these situations with decisive impactful results.

Awareness

The strongest organizations also exhibit a hyper, 360-degree awareness that reaches externally and internally.  They have a strong sense of the market within which they perform, and they understand their competitors and what those competitors bring to the fight for business.

From an internal perspective, the strongest companies are fully aware of their own capabilities, strengths and weaknesses.  They have a solid understanding of how their processes and systems impact customer value which is a cornerstone of building ever-expanding, rewarding customer relationships.

While many companies have mastered the external means of data collection and analysis required to know their markets and competitors, they lack the inward focus they need to be aware of their own power and limitations.  For your organization to fully succeed, you must have a culture where executives, managers, and teams seek and welcome constructive feedback from the individuals and teams that make up the lifeblood of the organization.  When we are able to candidly share information, advice, and suggestions with others on how to be more successful, we can be more responsive to our environment and make adjustments to resources appropriately.

Customer Focus

Companies, whether they deliver products or services, are nothing without their customers.  We must continuously remind ourselves to make our customers the primary focus of our actions.  As we go about our work in a customer-centric mindset, we can more readily readjust our priorities to respond to changing customer demands.

We must always strive to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers.  One way we can easily relate to them is that they face many of the same opportunities and challenges we ourselves face, and at a similar breakneck speed in the modern world of business.  Since our goal is to make our products and services indispensible to them, we must be prepared to readily adjust our own priorities to respond to pressing and changing client demands.

As companies continuously build their own strategies and responses around the needs of their customers, they develop trust and credibility with them.  Organizations often build this trust and credibility, a foundation for an ever-expanding win-win relationship, on demonstrating concern and responding quickly to customer issues.  Customers always remember how you respond when the going gets tough, and it’s in these situations where you gain their loyalty.

With any relationship, you must also manage success.   Companies should never take the ease with which they navigate a customer relationship for granted.  When organizations understand their customers’ evolving requirements and continuously seek new ways to provide value, they will earn greater rewards similar to those achieved when quickly and expertly solving customer problems.

Execution

High energy and commitment, coupled with a strong desire to achieve, is the fuel for executing and making companies stronger.  The strongest companies among us set clear objectives and measures, and match them with the right people who show the energy and commitment to rise to each occasion.

The best organizations demonstrate the highest levels of execution.  Our level of execution determines whether we win or lose in business (revenue) and by how much (profit or loss).  Thus, we must drive to be successful and in a timely fashion when meeting and achieving our objections and deadlines.

Strong organizations also require an even greater fire burning within their executives, managers, and teams at an individual level, that of initiative.  These companies have an abundance of self-starters who identify what needs to be done and take action, often before ever being asked.  The initiative of just one person within an organization can make the difference, company-wide, in a group’s ability to seize an opportunity or address a problem before it’s too late.

Finally, the best companies execute in good times and bad. It’s true that success often builds upon itself—our ability to win today’s business often places us in an optimal position to win tomorrow’s.  But what really defines the most successful among us is the ability to keep moving forward with our plans and remain focused, even as we face challenges and deal with adversity. When we create wins in these negative situations, our pile of victories grows even more formidable, building a sustainable operation for years to come.

Flexibility

If you haven’t picked up on this recurring theme by now, let us note that the one harbinger of successful enterprises in modern business is their ability to embrace change on a daily basis.  Whether it’s change to drive innovation, adapt to a customer need, or to shape our teams better to meet future opportunities, we must be comfortable with ambiguity and a fast-paced environment. 

The more comfortable we are with these realities of business—and we must accept them as facts of life and respond accordingly—we can quickly adapt to the changing needs of our market and customers.  With the size and speed of the challenges organizations face in modern business, there’s no time to dwell on mistakes or to daydream about how things were like yesterday.

To have this ability to adjust promptly and effectively to changing circumstances, companies must prove they can find alternative methods, often at the expense of tried-and-true methods, when they encounter fresh obstacles.  Our greatest challenge in today’s business is maintaining our effectiveness, even when experiencing major changes in work tasks or our work environment.  Having the right attitude to match our abilities enables a flexibility that leaves our organizations more nimble to adapt to our own needs and those of our customers.

Come back to this space next week, as we will explore a third foundational asset–Innovation–and the final four intangible assets that drive organizational strength.

Gone are the days of consistency, predictability, stability, or maintaining the status quo defining organizational strength.  Instead, an organization’s very survival is dependent on its ability to embrace volatility and change in the marketplace.  Organizations that can demonstrate adaptability can survive and have some short-term success.  However, short-term success does not define an organization’s real strength.  For organizations to have long-term, sustained success, they not only need to adapt to change, they must demonstrate the ability to do more with less, respond quickly to change, and to create change.  Organizations that can do this effectively will not only survive, but thrive.  

Organizational strength is not measured by what you build, what you sell, or how you are structured.    Today, organizational strength is measured by three foundational assets – Efficiency, Speed, and Innovation, along with 12 intangible assets.  These 15 assets make up the body that covers the engine that drives companies to success. Assessment of these 15 assets  of the business provide leaders with the tools they need to make better decisions and engage the organization in more purposeful strategic planning.

In today’s first piece of a three-part series, we’ll introduce the first foundational asset – Efficiency, along with four intangible assets: Trust, Accountability, Quality, and Communication.

Efficiency

Companies that define and excel at their core business processes consistently maximize customer value and profitability. With these dual goals in mind, organizations are able to have a long-term mindset focused on sustainability that keeps customers coming back while providing a great return for all stakeholders, whether they are owners, managers, or employees.

A culture of efficiency should permeate an organization from top to bottom and all the way across.  Each individual and each team should have a mentality of being as resourceful as possible in terms of how they spend their time, how many people they utilize to complete a project, and, of course, how much money they expend to achieve results.

In order to maintain the highest levels of efficiency, organizations should be prepared to redefine their standards from time to time. Leaders must continuously encourage others to question established work processes and systems.  Companies should encourage an open-door environment where employees can challenge the current company orthodoxy, with no business practices off limits or politically untouchable. 

Trust

Organizations, by their very definition, are collections of people striving together in a unified purpose or mission.  And collections of people build their interpersonal relationships on a foundation of trust.

There are several widely held misconceptions about trust that impact organizational strength.  The first is people do not automatically trust you because you have a title or position of authority.  And the second is you can’t expect people to trust you by simply asking for it—“Trust me.” We build trust with others by demonstrating consistency between our words and our actions.  When we make realistic promises and keep them, people learn that they can count on us.  Of equal importance to keeping our word is keeping their confidence.  It’s quite natural for people to have concerns that they need to share, and they deserve respect, openness, and an ability to keep their confidence in these moments where they need reassurance or a sounding board to clear the air. 

We can’t simply rely on being trustworthy when times are good or things are easy. Many people turn constructive behaviors into destructive behaviors when they face difficult challenges or their performance is called into question.  We can’t react to these challenges or questions with anything but forthrightness and honesty. Again, earning trust is about being consistent in our principles, values and actions, no matter the situation, positive or negative.

Finally, both leaders and employees need to step forward to address difficult issues and be counted on when times are tough.  We all need to be in-tune with our behaviors consistently to what we know is right—the organization’s defined values, and, just as important, we must be courageous and disapprove of others when their behaviors aren’t aligned with the organization’s values.

Accountability

Accountability describes a mentality where we take charge of our environment and take ownership for our actions.  Basically, we need to take a combination of courage, initiative and responsibility.

People who strive for the highest levels of accountability lead courageously. They take responsibility for their own mistakes, never blaming others or making excuses. They don’t fear the consequences of taking responsibility, because they take the initiative to control their destinies.  The most accountable among us take initiative because they have a low tolerance for mediocrity. If they see something that isn’t right, they step forward to make it right.

For effective organizations, accountability is balanced throughout individual, team, and company-wide performance to achieve expected results.  These organizations keep everyone involved and informed of progress, issues, and potential problems or obstacles that will impede the company in its quest to succeed.

Accountability is also about timeliness and having a sense of urgency.  It’s not just about stepping up at the end of a project or campaign, but rather through a set of opportunities throughout the life and work of a company where people deal timely and effectively with their own performance issues.  Successful people do this because they see performance issues or mistakes as a new way to learn and grow, becoming a better individual, team, and organization as a whole with each hurdle cleared along the way.   

Quality

If we can’t say we’re striving to be the very best at what we do, we may as well pack up and go home.  Quality, as a driver of organizational effectiveness, means that we must deliver our very best products and services and strive for continuous improvement in everything we do. 

To continuously improve in the area of quality, we must identify areas of weakness that may affect organizational performance.  In order to properly identify our weaknesses, we must create an environment that actively seeks and welcomes constructive feedback regarding customer, product, or process issues. 

Strong companies create awareness of quality principles throughout their organizational footprints and talent processes. They are relentless in their evaluation and improvement of end-user valued processes in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and adaptability.  And they not only show openness to suggestions for improvement, they also don’t place limitations on what they need to do to right the ship when necessary, even if it means re-engineering entire processes from scratch to meet customer needs.

Communication

A fourth intangible asset that drives organizational strength is effective communication.  The communications within strong organizations have several hallmarks. First, companies are timely in their delivery of need-to-know information that people require both in order to do their jobs and also feel good about being a member of the organization.  Companies’ commitment to openness and timeliness thus fuels performance, motivation, and commitment among managers and team members.

Effective organizations also foster open, honest, and sincere communication practices, the kinds of behaviors that build trust and drive powerful interpersonal relationships, the key ingredients of successful teams.  These companies also recognize that being timely and forthcoming in delivering critical information, as opposed to keeping their cards close to their chests for political or power-related reasons, enables people to make more accurate decisions in their work. 

Tune in next week, as we’ll introduce a second foundational asset—Speed—and another four intangible assets that drive organizational strength.

The demands of modern business are difficult on companies and their people. Whether we’re battling recessions and industry downturns, or faced simply with disruptive market forces and competition, we find ourselves too often with a short-term focus on just surviving the quarter.

Can we still find happiness, reward, and fulfillment in our work, in spite of these obstacles?  The answer is a resounding yes, and it lies within each of us. As the organization or your team within fights these battles together, you must look within yourself to achieve these rewards.

The key to success and happiness is to be engaged, recognized and rewarded based on what you value, what’s important to you, and what interests you—fueling your passion.  Developing or renewing your personal brand is all about aligning this passion with what you do and how you do it, your own niche within a team and the organization at large.

To develop or renew your personal brand, you must adopt a strategy to achieve prominence, recognition, and trust for the things that matter to you.  We like to think in terms of a five-point strategy, what we call the Five Ps of Personal Brand—Purpose, Promise, Perception, Promotion and Passion.  These Five Ps will help define or redefine who you are, what’s unique about you, and why others should seek you out, with the desired results of building credibility and strengthening relationships throughout the organization.

For our first installment, we discussed the first three Ps of Personal Brand:  purpose, promise, and perception.  Today, we’ll wrap up with the final two Ps, promotion and passion, along with some learning objectives to help guide you along the path of building a strategy for your personal brand.

Promotion

The fourth P, promotion, is perhaps the hardest of the five Ps to give full attention and effort. After defining our purpose, building our promise, and monitoring perceptions, it’s hard for many of us to then go about actively promoting ourselves.

But we must do it anyway, because people must market their brands through promotional activity. And we do this in such a way that others gravitate toward us, not distance themselves from us.. First, ask yourself why people should want to work with you. But do so in such a way that’s not about your own skills (your features), but rather how you can help others (your benefits).  When you leave these types of positive impressions on others, they will remember you and need you at some point, if they don’t need your help right at the moment.

If you are someone who is not comfortable marketing yourself (you don’t normally seek recognition or “blow your own horn”), then promote yourself through your actions. Remember, it’s all about showing, not telling, anyway. Be that person who’s never afraid to start a new venture, add new ideas, fix a problem, or deliver a solution. Whenever there’s an opportunity, seize it, and do it better and faster than others. 

Here’s a short checklist for promotion tactics within your personal brand strategy:

1.       Identify the people most important to your success, whether they are direct reports, peers, executives, or colleagues in cross-functional groups.

a.       Identify your needs.  Whose support, advice or cooperation do you need or want? 

b.       Whom do you want to help? 

2.       Analyze what you have to offer others.

3.       Do these people seek you out for advice and support?  If so, what for?  If not, why not? 

4.       Do these people come to you in a time of crisis? 

5.       How would these people describe you?  Are their perceptions consistent with how you see yourself? 

Passion

Passion—it’s so important that we leave it for last during any discussion of the Five Ps of Personal Brand. It’s actually so foundational and so critical to success that without passion the other four Ps— purpose, promise, perceptions, and promotion— don’t matter.  Think of it this way: if you’re building a high-performance car for the long haul, you’ve got to have gas in the tank. Passion fuels all of the other elements of your personal brand.

You shouldn’t be able to even imagine being proactive in showing others your purpose and promise if you lack passion.  If you have passion, then your “elevator pitch,” along with how you express yourself during challenging situations and while solving tough problems, will exude confidence. In turn, others will understand what drives you and gravitate to you as a go-to person in the workplace.

If you don’t have passion for what you’re doing, there’s a simple answer.  Find it.  Dissect your role and try to find something that aligns with your defined purpose—why you’re there, in your role—and build your passion from this smaller foundation.

If you can’t find anything to be passionate about, among much introspection, it’s time to move on to something else.  Find something that aligns more with who you are, giving you that abundant sense of purpose, with the ability to build promise and then influence others through your personal brand.

A great roadmap for gearing your mind and your actions toward building your personal brand is located on our blog.  For greater insights, read our three-part series, 12 Steps on the Path to Excellence.

Learning Opportunities

In conclusion, review the following learning opportunities. These goals will help you to absorb the concepts expressed in the Five Ps of Personal Brand, and then help you apply them in a strategy that supports your long-term happiness, fulfillment, and reward in your professional life.

·         Gaining a thorough understanding of personal branding principles and the impact these have on your relationships and career.

·         Learning the importance of and power of perceptions and how to align these perceptions with your desired personal brand.

·         Gaining a deeper insight into your personal, interpersonal. and leadership style and how these styles impact your personal brand, both positively and negatively.

·         Determining how to leverage your personal brand to make more meaningful contributions to the organization and your peers.

The demands of modern business are difficult on companies and their people. Whether we’re battling recessions and industry downturns, or faced simply with disruptive market forces and competition, we find ourselves too often with a short-term focus on just surviving the quarter.

Can we still find happiness, reward, and fulfillment in our work, in spite of these obstacles?  The answer is a resounding yes, and it lies within each of us. As the organization or your team within fights these battles together, you must look within yourself to achieve these rewards.

The key to success and happiness is to be engaged, recognized and rewarded based on what you value, what’s important to you, and what interests you—fueling your passion.  Developing or renewing your personal brand is all about aligning this passion with what you do and how you do it, your own niche within a team and the organization at large.

To develop or renew your personal brand, you must adopt a strategy to achieve prominence, recognition, and trust for the things that matter to you.  We like to think in terms of a five-point strategy, what we call the Five Ps of Personal Brand—Purpose, Promise, Perception, Promotion, and Passion.  These Five Ps will help define or redefine who you are, what’s unique about you, and why others should seek you out, with the desired results of building credibility and strengthening relationships throughout the organization.

In today’s post, we’ll discuss the first three Ps of Personal Brand:  Purpose, Promise, and Perception.

Purpose 

Any brand, personal or commercial, starts with a purpose, a reason for being.  Finding this purpose requires introspection—why you do what you do? 

You must set clear goals for yourself in life, especially, for your career.  Thinking about these goals should breed optimism and confidence, rather than thinking them unrealistic or unachievable. To set these goals properly for yourself, and by extension, your personal brand, you must carefully define what’s important to you and what you value in your career.  Many people like to start at the end, by thinking about the legacy they will leave at retirement.

Once we know ourselves, why we do what we do, and the goals we have for ourselves, the next purposeful job is to be positive. It’s one thing to know oneself, but it’s another thing entirely to know ourselves as others see us. Being positive will attract others—in other words, people will want to work with you. And when they do, you should seize every opportunity to display confidence, engage with them, and seek to be a leader in tackling different situations and solving problems.  That’s how you become a person of influence to those around you—executives, leaders, managers, colleagues, and employees.

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For more reading on establishing your purpose, check out this article from the TM Solutions blog and take a look at step one, establishing a foundation and purpose.

Promise

Building upon the foundation of purpose is the notion of a brand’s promise.  If purpose is about your reason for existing within an industry or organization, your promise is all about what you can achieve for yourself and what others can expect from you.

The key to building a brand promise is the same as any other promise. You should only make promises you can keep.  To do this, you must think in terms of how good you are at your work, as well as how good you can be through devoting yourself to continuous improvement.

We are often our own worst enemies, either through overconfidence or by being too self-critical, when neither may be a fair assessment.  Be fair to yourself. Know what makes you unique and special, what makes you different from others around you, and value these attributes. Ask yourself why others should seek you out in the workplace—do you present something of value to them, and is your personal brand’s promise that you can deliver results based on this value?

A clear promise goes a long way to building the credibility and trust to advance your personal brand strategy.  Based on your promise, others will have confidence and faith in you and seek you out.

For more insights on building your promise, check out this article on the TM Solutions blog and take a look at step two, Awareness and Understanding.

Perception

After we define our purpose and build our promise, it’s time to monitor and develop the perceptions that others have of us. All of us communicate our brand to the world every single day, 24/7, in ways that both live up to and betray our promise.  Even if you think you don’t have one, your personal brand exists—these five Ps are all about taking control and managing to your own happiness and fulfillment.

As you have defined a clear purpose—knowing yourself and your reasons for doing what you do—and have built a strong, reasonable promise—your capabilities for achieving—you must ask yourself, “Do you live up your personal brand?” Next, you must ask yourself if your network of all of the people who are connected to you, the people who interface with your personal brand on a daily basis, understands your purpose and promise.

If people lack clarity about who you are and what you want to achieve for yourself and the team, can they possibly gain a perception of you that you actually want them to have? Not providing a clear identity (purpose and promise in tandem) can create negative impressions for others, including insecurity, lack of confidence, purpose, ambition, and/or commitment to the cause, and most dangerous to our purpose, a lack of real value to others on the team.

As you monitor perceptions, both good and bad, the key is to be proactive in pursuing your personal brand. Don’t assume others know you well. Always make sure that first impressions count, ensuring that others know what makes you tick and what you’re all about. This doesn’t mean talking about yourself excessively—nobody gravitates to arrogance. Rather, show people through your actions and behaviors. Actions always speak louder than words.

Furthermore, be open about your own challenges—humility is not weakness. Facilitate what others will eventually find out about you when you aren’t able to do your best work.  Just as you shouldn’t present yourself as the savior of the organization, don’t be bashful or modest about your true value. The way to contextualize this for others is to show them how you can help them achieve their goals—again, show your value versus talking about it.

Finally, seize your opportunities to shape perceptions of your personal brand.  Don’t wait for things to happen—if you see a problem you can solve, show others your value with a proactive fix. While people often neglect to give proper credit when the group has a big win, you can bet they will notice when someone moves out of his comfort zone to take care of an obstacle for the team.

For more insights on managing perceptions, check out this TM Solutions blog piece, with attention to step three, Personal Branding & Strategy.

In our next installment, we’ll discuss the final two Ps of Personal Brand, Promotion and Passion.