Core to building a leadership career is learning how to be visible. Yet raising one’s own profile can feel profoundly uncomfortable.
How do you build your personal brand without feeling like a colony of ants is crawling through your brain?
The truth is, unless you have a ginormous ego, raising one’s own profile will never feel truly comfortable. For some of us, like women of colour, cultural expectations we’ve been raised with make it worse: be humble, defer to your elders, don’t boast…
It leaves some people wondering whether, let alone how to raise their profile.
However, you can raise your profile while retaining your integrity. Here are some tips.
Know why you want to raise your profile
Knowing your “why” is key to working out how to raise your profile with minimum discomfort. Here are some questions to get you thinking:
- What do you want to achieve in your career?
- What are your values and how do they inform or drive what you want in your career?
- Who will benefit if you achieve your ambitions (e.g. your children)?
- Are there sectors other than the one you are in that you want to enter?
- Are there particular organisations you want to work for?
- Are there particular leaders you admire who you’d want to work alongside?
The more precise you can be about what purpose raising your profile serves, the better able you will be to target your actions.
Know what you want to be known for
What specifically do you want to be known for *** BEYOND*** your professional discipline?
Being good at your job is rarely enough to get you into senior leadership
- Are you good at bringing new ideas into your organisation?
- Are you great at spotting new trends before other organisations have got out of bed?
- Can you inspire colleagues to go above and beyond?
- Are you good at breaking down your organisation’s strategic intent into practical actions?
- Do you bring left field thinking that unlocks solutions no-one else has thought of?
Identify what you are good at, alongside being brilliant in your professional expertise, and work it for all its worth. Your profile will grow organically because you will stand out without having to shout about yourself.
Work out how you can be helpful
Raising your profile can feel awkward is because it seems self serving. Well guess what?
You don’t have to be “me, me, me” to raise your profile.
Think about what you can do to make others’ professional lives smoother and do it. The trick is to keep these tasks small and to the point so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
- Read a great article? Share it.
- Went on training or to a conference? Write up the three things you took away – bullet points are fine – and share with anyone you think would find it helpful, particularly those outside of your immediate team.
- Tried a new technique that helped (e.g. on time management)? Offer to do a five minute “show and tell” at your next all staff meeting.
- Have a new perspective on a topical subject? Explain it in a relevant meeting.
- Admire a colleague? Shout about them to boost their profile and confidence.
- Your team did a great job? Tell your bosses so they recognise the contribution your team made (and notice you for bringing it to their attention).
Be consistent and intentional in finding ways to help others while making sure it is manageable for you. You’ll be surprised how quickly your profile will rise within and outside of your organisation…
Start with platforms you feel comfortable with
- Happy doing a Linked In post? Up the number you do. Short, sharp and regular is better than once in a blue moon.
- Most comfortable on Slack or internal email? Use them to reach out to people or share information regularly beyond the scope of your day job.
- Comfortable in one to ones? Create an opportunity per week/fortnight to meet over coffee virtually or in real life to talk about mutually helpful stuff outside of the daily grind. If you can make the person you meet someone you don’t know well, even better.
- Love public speaking? Offer to present something at your next departmental or staff meeting or offer to take an external speaking opportunity off your boss’ hands.
When doing the things you feel comfortable with becomes second nature, dip your toe into something that feels new or a bit scary. Get confident with that and then build further.
Know how you want people to feel
Whether you want people to feel safe around you, trusting, energised, amused – whatever it is, define the emotional impact you want to have with precision.
How you want people to feel should drive your tone, the language you use, what you talk about, when you speak and when you do not
Most people spend very little, if any, time thinking about how they want people to feel, but it is the one thing people will remember about you. To quote the late, great writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Thinking about the emotional impact you want to have on people is also a good way to align your personal values with profile raising activities.
If you are values aligned in how you raise awareness of your personal brand, you will naturally become known for the person you are and the value AND values you bring.
Next Level Leadership Programme
If you are a woman of colour, we go into this topic in more detail on our Next Level Leadership Programme:
To find out more about the Next Level Leadership Programme click here
To book a call to explore what the programme can do for you click here