This month our member webinar was on
the topic: Relevance & Personal Brand.

                           TOP 10 IDEAS
          ON RELEVANCE & PERSONAL BRAND

What you do

1. The reality is that you won’t be respected and appreciated automatically.  You need to increase your awareness and sensitivity to others, and tune your communications and behaviors to align with what people already care about, if you want them to care about you.

2. Relevance is about credibility plus value.  Relevance gets to “what have you done for me lately?”.  Credibility is necessary, but you have to show you are adding value to the business if you want to be relevant.  You don’t want to be one of those people who is always really busy, but no one knows what value you are adding.

3. Do a bigger job, find your place to add additional value over and above your job description.  Getting your work done well does not make you relevant.  That keeps you from getting fired. Think about how you can personally impact revenue, efficiency, quality, customer care, or people development.

How you communicate

4. If you need to explain what you are doing it is by definition not relevant.  Stop spending lots of energy explaining and educating, which is frustrating for you and them, and start mapping what you do to things that are already important to others.

5. Ask your stakeholders what they care about and look for two things, 1- their list of business drivers and  2 -the specific vocabulary they use to describe them.  This becomes your roadmap for how you communicate with them to be relevant – use their list and their words.

6. Be a translator – keep the jargon of your department within your department, use the business language to explain what your team does and show the value your team adds.  Presenting our internal success measures with your internal jargon is not relevant.

How you behave

7. Use your personal brand to help you act consistently in support of what you want to be known for.  Once you decide on what “extra value” you are going to add to the business, make sure you are supporting that with consistent behaviors.

8. Use your brand to negotiate work with your boss and your team.  The more you understand your brand, and what you are naturally good at, the more you can tune your job description to put yourself in a position to add the most value.

How you interact

9. People don’t wake up in the morning worried about you and what you are doing.  They are fighting their own “dragons”.  Their dragons define what is relevant to them.  You need to help them fight their dragons before they will have any energy to even think about yours.

10. Stepping outside your job description can be politically challenging if you want to add value in an area someone else owns.  Start with a long term desired outcome that is relevant to both of you, and then show how you can help by doing a part what is required to get to the agreed outcome alongside whatever the person is doing.

The Coaching Hour:  We had a great member conversation during the coaching hour that followed the webinar.  You can look for a transcript of that discussion later on the Azzarello Group website.

Download the Podcast of this webinar
Download the presentation & worksheets

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Related BLOG Posts:
Be More Relevant
Do a Bigger Job
Are you a Work-horse?

I have had a number of people recently express concern about looking for work
and being over 50.

The questions range from the very broad
to the very specific:

• Is age-ism an issue?
• How do I compete with younger people for jobs?
• Should I avoid using a photo in my online profile?

The New York Times recently published a series of opinion articles on being over 50 in the workforce.  Opinions were mixed. 

I can’t help but also note that Circuit City laid off all their “higher paid” employees – the older more experienced ones.  Did anyone else notice how much more annoying and frustrating it was to shop at Circuit City recently?  I guess so, they went out of business.

And Harvard Business Publishing just noted a study on air traffic controllers, which showed those over 50, with lots of experience, actually did better on more complex simulations, than their younger counterparts.

It’s a tough game, but opinions are mixed on whether older workers just cost more, or if they are worth more.  But what is true at any age, but perhaps more true if you are over 50, is that right now you need to do more than ever to stand out.

Companies are being really picky

Right now in this period of economic gloom, there are more people looking for work, so companies can be pickier than ever. 

I would imagine that all the “ism’s” are more prevalent when there are fewer jobs to be had, whether it’s age-ism, sexism, racism, never-been-at-a-small-company-ism, never-been-at-a-large-company-ism, never-executed-a-successful-exit-while-being-tall-ism…

So what can you do? 

Let’s focus on the topic of age, but the approach I’ll describe works for anyone wanting to stand out in a positive way, whether or not you are battling an -ism.

If you are fighting a real –ism, like age-ism, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it just means it’s harder.  You have to do more things on purpose.  You’ll need to source more opportunities and be more qualified.

If you are competing for a job and want to project the right image:

1) Be the best candidate
2) Be the most prepared
3) Be the best marketed
4) Be Current
5) Have energy

I have hired people in their 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s who showed themselves to excel in the above points.

Let me address points 4 and 5 first as they are more specific to the age topic.

4. Be Current. 

The problem with age is not just the number, it’s if you come across as “old” in your attitude, your actions, and your appearance.  The company needs to do business today, and is looking for people to help build the future.

The deck may in fact be stacked against you if the company has a policy to push out people over 50.  You’ll  need to work even harder to neutralize a potential age objection. 

But the point is, at any age:

If you do not come across as current, you appear less qualified. 

It’s as simple as that. 

Current Behaviors:

What you talk about.  Make sure you have fresh professional stories.  Whatever your offer is to a company, make sure you tell stories that highlight that offer in the context of today’s business environment.  Use your network.  Tell your stories to young people.  Get their feedback on what seems interesting and exciting, and what seems old and boring.

Have an online presence.  If you are not versed and present in the online social media communities you will appear out of date.   Check out my prior post on this topic for more on this. 

Be someone that people want to spend time with.   A big part of winning a job interview is the social part.  You need to fit in socially with the people you will work with. (This is equally true for young people going for big jobs where everyone is older.)  You don’t need to pretend to be young, but you need to be comfortable in, and add interest to the world you are joining. 

Join non-profits, or community activities and spend time with younger people.  Be comfortable and engaged for real, and you will come across as comfortable and real in your interviews. 

Current Appearance: 

It matters what you look like.  I am not talking about a beauty contest, I am talking about looking current and showing an effort.

Make sure your appearance is up to date.  If someone walks in with a hairstyle, eyeglass frames, or clothes from 20 years ago what impression do you think that gives?

It’s certainly not current, quality, or well managed.  Why would I want to hire someone to take care of and represent a piece of my business who puts no quality or management into how they present themselves.

Men: grey hair is fine as long as you have a current-style hair cut.  Go to a real hair dresser, then go to a department store and let them dress you, and get new glasses. And men over 45, if you grew facial hair in your 20’s to look older, let me break the news to you — it is still working. 

(One more thing.  Men: if you don’t want grey hair, please go to the hair salon.  If you think it’s embarrassing to go to the salon, at least make sure to take a mirror outside in full daylight and check out your home dye-job, and then decide which is more embarrassing.)

Women: Make sure your hair style and makeup are up to date.  Get your make-up done professionally every 2-4 years.  Styles change, and you change.  If you’ve never done this, it’s free at any department store.  Same goes for women on the eye-glasses and clothes.  Anything you have had for 20 years needs to go. 

5. Have energy: 

Age doesn’t matter if you have real energy.  Physical energy, mental energy and social energy.  You need to show you are in the game fully.  If you show up “old”, it’s not the age-ism that will limit you, it will be your own lack of energy. 

You need to be as ambitious about the job as anyone.  If you come across as un-committed and with no enthusiasm, it’s not your age that is in your way, it is your attitude.

…OK, now here’s the stuff that applies to everybody.

1. Be the best candidate

The simple way around any “ism” is to be the best candidate.  If you are not the best candidate, your age isn’t the problem, your qualifications are.  Make sure you continue to develop yourself so you can go into an interview as “the best”. 

2. Be the most prepared – start doing the job!

One of the most impressive things you can do is to start doing the job in the interview.  Know enough about the job before the interview and come in with ideas, plans, proposals, and even deliverables.  Make them feel like they can’t live without you by doing the job impressively as part of your interview.

3. Be the best marketed

Make sure your marketing package is complete.  Your resume needs to tell a compelling story.  You don’t need to put all your experience on your resume.  Put the things on your resume that you are most proud of, get the most energy talking about and trigger your best stories.

You need a clearly defined “offer”.  Be specific about what you offer.  What do you DO?

Are you a planner, communicator, organizer, creator?  Think about what is common to what you have done over and over again in all your jobs – what makes you stand out from all the other people who have similar skills and job titles on their resume? Make sure that comes across.

You should also write articles about your area of expertise, publish references, and case studies of your work to reinforce yourself as a stand-out candidate.

Your photo: There are mixed views on this.  Some believe strongly that you shouldn’t use a photo because it presents an opportunity for discrimination.  You need to make your own strategic choice on this.

The key thing I want to emphasize about a profile photo – make sure it’s a good one.  If you are concerned you look “old” in your photo, and that it will be a liability you have a few options.  1) Update your look as described above.  2) Get a professional photo that makes you look interesting, open and engaging.  3) Crop the photo in an interesting way that is less revealing of what you actually look like. 

In my book interesting, open, and engaging with grey hair is way better than young-looking, boring, and low quality.

4) Of course your other choice is to not use a photo. On one hand you need to consider the possibility discrimination, but on the other hand, showing no photo could also cause discrimination. 

No photo could say either you are hiding something, you don’t know how to upload a photo into your profile, you do not follow though to complete things you do, or your are not enthusiastic about connecting with people.  None of those are good for a job search!   Decide your strategy and if it is to use a photo, do it well.

If these things sound like changes you don’t want to make, that is fine unless you want to get full consideration professionally.  If you want to stand out, and be current and relevant, you need to do things on purpose to stand out, be current, and relevant.  

The best way to overcome any -ism is by being the most qualified, and by presenting those qualifications in a more compelling way than all the other qualified people. 

I am not yet over 50.  But I’m a girl.  I have faced many times in my career where being female stacked the deck against me.  My approach has always been to ignore that part, and any possible associated -ism, and to just focus on being the best candidate, and doing more things on purpose to stand out and win.

The only other choice is to stay stuck, so you migth as well give it a try.

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90% of people asked will say they are an above-average driver!

When working really hard and doing excellent work, many people tend to feel that they are above-average.  I have had discussions with many talented people who are surprised to learn that consistently doing excellent work and flawlessly delivering on their job description does not make them a top ranked employee.

As I mentioned in the last post, Be More Relevant:

Deliver excellent results — that is a must.  But don’t expect that alone to make you relevant.  Doing your job keeps you from getting fired.  What makes you stand out, and makes you highly relevant is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description. 

So in this post I want to talk about some ways you can this: 

1. Generate Revenue
2. Reduce Cost
3. Improve Productivity
4. Develop Talent
5. Communicate
6. Innovate

1. Generate Revenue

Nothing will make you stand out more than having a direct impact on revenue.  For an executive, taking on a troubled sales region and turning it around, or shoring up a struggling product line so it becomes profitable and growing are the shortest paths to big career gains.

Not everyone is in a position to do this, but don’t be too fast to assume you are not in a position to impact revenue.  Here are just a few ideas:

• Going on a customer visit and realizing that you could make small change to an existing product and have a new product and revenue stream for a new segment.
• Doing customer support and finding a recurring new service opportunity
• Being the one to search twitter for discussions of your company’s products and turning unhappy customers into loyal purchasers.
• Implementing a system that helps sales reps close more business

2. Reduce Cost

So many times we set our sights on getting the biggest budget possible so that we can deliver the most value with it.  Sometimes it is important to step back and understand what is going on across the business and give some money back.  Get famous internally for being business minded, and personally helping with brilliant and createive cost management, that doesn’t sacrifice value.

It is critical for any leader to reduce the cost of doing the same things year over year.  If you ask for the same budget as last year to do all the steady state stuff and incremental budget to do new stuff every year, your credibility will degrade.  You need to self-fund some of the new stuff by reducing cost of maintaining current programs.  No one should need to tell you do to this.

3.  Improve Productivity

Every year, you should have one explicit agenda to improve productivity in your team.  Your team should be more capable next year than this year.  Some ideas: have better meetings, make project review processes more efficient, build a process for handling chaotic ad-hoc work, implement a better measurement and accountability framework, use the web for better employee communication…  the list is endless.  You should always be working on at least one productivity improvement for yourself and in your team. 

4. Develop Talent

One of the things that makes people stand out from their peers is to be the one who is mentoring and coaching others.  Anyone in any position can be a mentor.  It is critical for managers to be on the look out for talent, and develop leaders below them in the organization, but it is also important to think about developing talent as a personal agenda.  Share your knowledge.  Help others learn and grow.  I have interviewed hundreds of people for management and executive positions.  The ones who talk about developing people without being asked was about 5.  They stood out.

5. Communicate

Most organizations (any organization bigger than 1 person!) suffer from ineffective communication.  Be the one to organize information and share it with others.  I have been amazed throughout my career about how stepping up to be the one who consistently communicates scores huge leadership points, and is a stand-out trait.  I started this in the days of voice mail!  I gave weekly updates to my team, I copied my peers.  A following developed.  It evolved to email and web based communications over time,  but the important part is to share useful information consistently.  (Hint: I always found that the consistency was even more important than the content.  Set a regular schedule and communicate.)

6.  Innovate

Sometimes we tend to think of innovation as only inventing a new product, or getting a patent on a new idea (that can be turned into a product).  Why limit innovation?  For starters it absolutely applies to the above: generating revenue, reducing cost, improving productivity, developing talent and communicating. 

Innovation should occur in all aspects of the business.  Here are some places I think businesses have opportunities to innovate: How your phone is answered, how you manage business processes with partners, how you deal with IT issues, how you evaluate the competition, how you use social media, how you bundle and price, how you re-use information…  Don’t leave innovation to “the lab”.  Understand your business at the grass roots level, and look for ways to make an impact. 

Getting it done.

Don’t try do all of these things at once.  Pick one.  Schedule some time to do it.  Involve your team.

One of the reasons I talk so much about making room, and making more time is that you can’t do “bigger” stuff, at the expense of your current job.  You need to find a way to master your current job and do really well it in less time, so that you make room for other things. 

If you stay consumed doing an excellent job at your job you will not be seen as above-average.  That requires doing more.

Related Articles:

Better with Less
Make More Time

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Many people are asking me how
to become more relevant — how
to stand out and be seen as more
central and critical to their business. 

If you want to increase your
relevance there are a few key
realities to consider:

 1. No one cares what you do. 
The sooner you accept that reality, the faster you can be more relevant.  Relevance is about being relevant to the things that others care about, not making others care about what you are doing.

2. Everybody is fighting dragons.  If you are finding that no one is embracing whatever it is you are talking about  (which is you fighting your dragons), step back and consider what dragons they are fighting. 

You need to either help them fight their dragons first, or show them why they can stop for a minute without getting killed. 

Say you are a program manager.  You go into a team to propose something strategic – a change of course that is much better for the business.  No one listens to you.  The reason is that they are already working hard to deliver commitments they are on the hook for (their own dragons).  They simply can’t care about your dragons while they are currently engaged in battle with theirs.

Your only choices are to either help them fight their dragons first , or make sure their boss calls off the current dragons. If you do neither, your strategic mission will not be relevant to them.

If you are the boss, and it’s your team that you need to change course, remember to explicitly show them that you have made the world safe from the old dragons so they can stop fighting them, and that they need to start fighting the new ones.  People do not naturally or easily give up their dragons, once they are in battle.

If you are selling your idea upwards, make sure you understand what dragons your management is fighting, and show how your proposal helps that particular fight.  You can’t be relevant unless they think it’s important. 

To make them think it’s important you are much better off to start with something they already think is important, than to try and educate them on something new.  To the next point…

3. Don’t try to educate people about your function – remember point #1. they don’t care.  Instead find out what is important to them and translate everything you say into THEIR vocabulary — not yours. 

For example:  If you are trying to educate a business unit about your brand campaign or data center investment, or vertical market program, remember they only really care about their business unit.

Trying to educate them to the value of what you are doing in your terms will waste time and annoy both of you.  Instead learn about their business and translate everything you say about what you do into their language and the specific benefits for them.  Your “data center investment” becomes “improve customer service for your specific products”.

4. Put the business in the center of your thinking and conversations.  If you always talk to the CEO only about your function, you will not be building credibility and relevance to the business.  If you are only ever advocating about your plans, your budget, your functional objectives, you are not being relevant to the business.  You are being relevant only to your function. 

Your conversations should be centered on business initiatives like quality improvement, customer loyalty, geographic expansion, channel optimization, etc.  If what you are really talking about is needing more computers, investing in a partnership, doing demand generation, etc.  keep those terms within your function and translate your language to the vocabulary of business initiatives when you communicate external to your function.

5. Be the voice from outside the company.  You must keep educating yourself, watching for examples of how others do things, and learning from customers.   Bringing the external voice of the real world back into your business sets you up as highly relevant.  But make sure there is a point to it.  It’s not just about sounding smart.  It’s about bringing high value, real world input into the business that causes positive action – so connect it with what the business cares about before you talk about it.

6. Deliver your work AND Do more.  Deliver excellent results — that is a must.  But don’t expect that alone to make you relevant.  Doing your job keeps you from getting fired.  What makes you stand out, and makes you highly relevant is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description.  Otherwise you are just one more person doing what is expected of them.  

I will be writing more on why you need to do a bigger job and how to do it in my next blog post. 

Also you can join this month’s member webinar/podcast on Relevance and Personal Brand

Now more than ever it is time to stand out build your value and increase your relevance.  There is no better way than to keep the business in the center of your thinking, stay focused on what other people care about, and help them with their dragons.

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