Build Your Professional Persona

Build An Unbeatable Professional Persona

By Ross Bonander | AskMen

 

"One of the hardest-won lessons of being a professional is that work is, ultimately, a form of theater."

You've heard that perception is reality, right? Well, that's especially true when it comes to the workplace. One of the hardest-won lessons of being a professional is that work is, ultimately, a form of theater. Yes, you have to actually do the work. You have to bring about change, results, progress, whatever it is that you're mandated to do. But you also have to act out the role of a person who does your job, and if you don't act that role with panache, you won't be fulfilling your true potential.

The way people will perceive you in the workplace is as much a product of your appearance, presentation, attitude, and communication skills as it is of your performance.

When you’re new to the workforce, you have the unique opportunity to build your professional persona from the ground up, allowing you to correct your flaws and present to the professional world the man you would like to be. By building your professional persona, you give others a reason to believe in you and to have confidence in your abilities; as a result, they’ll be more willing to go to you with new opportunities.

To that end, we offer you the following tips in an effort to help you build your professional persona -- a persona that is effective in giving others a positive perception of you and your abilities.
 

Clean up your e-persona

Don’t allow your Twitter and Facebook personae to tarnish your image. On the one hand, your real-life interests and passions can be a valuable asset. On the other hand, your tone-deaf rantings about politics can be a liability. Make wise use of privacy settings on Facebook, and carefully consider your audience before you Tweet.

Granted, your life outside work is your own. Unless you signed some legally binding contract that prohibits your behavior beyond office walls, nobody can tell you how to act or how to think. However, if negative judgments are made based on your blog or whatever else you have going on in cyberspace, you’ll never know it. Nobody would deny you a promotion and justify it based on your Facebook posts; instead, they’ll simply deny you the promotion without saying a word.

The point is that you have no idea how that material might hurt you, so you’re better off cleaning it up a bit just in case.  
 

Pay your dues

Few office attitudes earn disdain quicker than the presumptuous young guy who thinks his college degree entitles him to a quick sprint up the company ladder, allowing him to bypass all the hurdles faced by others in the office. In its own way, the office is a fraternity with various rites of passage. Enduring them is necessary for the wider shared experience; sidestepping them is considered unacceptable.

In other words: Earn everything you get. In an attempt to build your professional persona, respect the traditions of the company and show both willingness and gratitude for every opportunity, regardless of how small or trivial some of them may seem.  
 

Have an elevator pitch prepared

An “elevator pitch” is a short expression that encompass who you are and succinctly outlines your goals, and will prove helpful in trying to build your professional persona. In reality, your elevator pitch should be anything but off-the-cuff and casual, yet this is precisely how it should sound.

The point of having an elevator pitch is simple: When you suddenly find yourself in the presence of someone higher up, someone who can benefit your career down the road, and you engage in casual conversation, such a speech gives you a tight response to the question of what you’re all about -- a response not full of tentative “ums” and “uhs.” 

It is an opportunity that rarely comes along, but when it does, you should be ready for it.
 

Rub the right shoulders

Through our perceptions, we often grant people credit through the company they keep. Like most perceptions, this one can happen on a subconscious level without fully realizing the conclusions being drawn or the consequences of them.

This doesn’t matter -- these perceptions can still shape your professional persona. So, be mindful of who you spend time with at work and who you’re around when great things happen or when they hit the fan. Make a point of getting in with the leaders -- the people who matter -- so you can score that credit by association.

Make yourself available

Often, most people have no idea how unapproachable they appear until someone points it out to them. You may walk in a cerebral manner, leading with your forehead, and mean nothing by it. Yet, doing so means you aren’t actively greeting others in passing with a smile or a hello. As a result, it has the tendency to make you seem angry or moody -- in a word: unapproachable. Simply lifting your chin a tad and making eye contact with people you don’t know can break down some of the barriers between people and create unforeseeable opportunities for you down the road.

To that end, build your professional persona by being fearless about approaching others, regardless of your initial perception of them. Doing so can foster your reputation as an agreeable, accessible person -- someone people want to go to when they have an opening or need something done.  

Keep personal info personal

Some guys don’t need this tip; they naturally divulge very little information to people they are not close to or don’t know terribly well. But this isn’t so with other guys.

Keeping your personal life to yourself means withholding the events from your wild weekend of sex and booze. It means suppressing details of how screwed up your family is and how crazy your girlfriend can be. If you believe that these stories will help develop your persona as a stud or a storyteller, think again; if anything, you will be perceived as someone without discretion, someone who can’t be trusted with important company information. 

Ultimately, by keeping your personal information personal, you build your professional persona into something that is both trustworthy and discerning -- just the kind of person most will turn to with big opportunities.  

Dress your ideas in strong terms

People will develop faith in you if you’re willing and able to dress your ideas and your input in positive, self-assured language. Doing so projects confidence, and you appear to others as someone who isn’t afraid to assert themselves even at the risk of being wrong.

Thus, strive to eliminate the kinds of qualifiers from your language that sink anything you say before you even say it, such as  “this is probably a dumb idea, but...” or “I doubt this will work, but…”  Instead, say “why don’t we...” or “one idea is to…”   

The changes you make to how you phrase ideas won’t make a tremendous impact, but it will be far more effective than continuing to use the types of frightened, weakening qualifiers that inspire no one.  

It is naive to think that all that will matter at this stage in your career is performance, and it’s potentially harmful to operate accordingly. The sooner you lose this illusion and accept the office as a place where perception can be as important as results, the quicker you’ll see success.  

Seven Steps To Happiness At Work

By Jenna Goudreau | Forbes

Positive psychology expert Shawn Achor helped design and teach the famed happiness course at Harvard University. Now he hopes to take those lessons to the business world. His recently released book The Happiness Advantage, based on research at Harvard and in companies around the globe, lays out the seven steps to leveraging happiness to career success.

1.    Start Believing
“I define happiness as the joy we feel striving after our potential,” says Achor. “It’s not pure pleasure, and I don’t want people to be irrationally optimistic.” In other words, you can’t fool yourself into happiness by denying reality. However, study after study shows that positivity fuels success, says Achor. Positive employees outperform negative employees in terms of productivity, sales, energy levels, turnover rates and healthcare costs by as much as 30%. In fact, research shows that happy employees are better paid, enjoy more job security and are less likely to quit or burn out. Some easy ways to jumpstart positivity are daily meditations, more frequent exercise, planning something to look forward to and spending money on fun outings rather than on stuff.

2.    Think Again
“We think work is the opposite of happiness,” Achor says. Instead, he suggests workers reframe the way they think about their jobs. Studies show that people who view work as less of a “job,” which is a chore and takes away from their free time, and more as a “career” or “calling” are exponentially more likely to feel fulfilled. These same people also invest more time in their work and are usually more successful. Achor suggests that you rethink each of your daily tasks. If you are a health professional, for example, and paperwork usually drains your energy, consider the purpose of the task. If you think of it as documenting the progress of a patient and making it easier for other health professionals to step in later, then it becomes easier to view your actions as contributing to a greater good.

3.    Practice Positivity
Psychologists discovered “the Tetris Effect” after studying people who played the video game Tetris almost nonstop. The players began to see the same shapes and colors of the game even after it had been turned off. Now the term refers to any activity that begins to shadow a person’s thoughts, and Achor believes a negative Tetris Effect is experienced by most workers. Because many are hired just to find and solve problems, they begin scanning everything for a flaw. It overflows into their lives outside of work and the more they look for the negative, says Achor, they miss the positive. However, he suggests that workers can create happiness by using the Tetris Effect to their advantage. Once they begin practicing positivity, it becomes the default pattern. He advises jotting down three things you are grateful for each day or daily journaling about a positive experience. Soon, scanning for the positive rather than the negative will become second nature.

4.    Use Failure To Fuel Success
When Achor lectured about positive psychology at financial firm UBS, he noticed that they had been teaching their employees that stress is bad, which only increased their stress further. People who are in stress too often become immobilized by it or wallow further into negativity, he says. However, if workers begin conceiving of failures, mistakes, setbacks and stress as an opportunity to learn and grow, they are in a much better position to pull themselves out of the conflict. First, try to avoid playing the blame game. Consider your own actions and what you could do differently in the future. Feeling in control of your life will boost feelings of happiness. Use failure to fuel success, says Achor, adding that Coca-Cola investor meetings begin with the telling of its successes and failures, each considered equally.

5.    Focus On Small Goals
If your goal is to get to the corner office, consider the small steps over time that will lead to your destination. Achor advises that you begin with manageable goals that you are confident you can accomplish. Then keep pushing the bar further and further. When setting goals, Achor says to begin by articulating your current situation—defining the emotions that you feel and pinpointing the aspects of your job that are under your control. Once you understand what can be changed, map out how to make those changes little by little. Creating and accomplishing small goals will increase your confidence and feelings of control.

6.    Use The 20-Second Rule
When people try to create lasting changes, their most common mistake is relying on willpower, Achor says. He once had a woman tell him that she’d tried 18 different diets and none of them worked.  “But she didn’t really try any of them,” he says now. He advises clients to make positive habits 20 seconds easier to start and bad habits more difficult. If you want to eat better, for example, put all of the “bad foods” on a high shelf and the “good foods” at eye level and arm’s length. Eliminate as many barriers to your good habits as possible. If you want to exercise in the morning, sleep with your gym clothes on and put your shoes at the edge of the bed. Then, practice the change for 21 days in a row in order to make it a true habit.

7.    Seek Social Support
Workers stunt their own happiness in two ways. They put off happiness until they reach their next goal—be it turning in a big project or receiving a raise or promotion. (Once they accomplish the original goal, however, they just create a new goal and perpetually put happiness on hold.) And secondly, workers often feel they will become successful by working themselves to death alone in their offices. Neither of these works, according to Achor, because investing in the people around us and our own happiness is the best predictor of career success. Begin by changing your own attitude. Brighten and say hello when you see people in the hallway and elevator. Make an effort to recognize the contributions of members of your team every single day. And when work is particularly stressful, spend more time with family and friends rather than less.

Sales & Marketing tips: How To Probe for Customer Information

By Geoffrey James | CBS News

B2B sales typically involve multiple decision-makers, scores of "influencers" and a complex buying process. To make the sale, you need a road map, and the only way to get that information is to extract it from your initial customer contact. Unfortunately, if you come right out and ask, it can sound like you're being nosy and, worst case, you can end up sounding like a police interrogator.

Step #1: Do your research. Never ask a customer a question that you can get answered somewhere else. Before your first customer meeting, dredge through news stories on the web. Write down the basics of the customer's finances and the names of key individuals. Also record what you can learn about your initial contact's career.

Step #2: Refresh your memory. Immediately before the meeting, read over the results of your research to make sure you've got the basics straight. That last seems obvious, but I once had a manager who, at a meeting with a major customer, asked "Who was that guy?" after the customer CEO (who was dressed very casually) dropped in for a quick chat with his negotiating team.

Step #3: Ask creative questions. To keep the conversation from sounding like an interrogation, sprinkle it with questions that have built-in, positive assumptions. For example:

• "Your industry is in tough economic times, but your company seems to be doing better than everyone else. How do you guys do that so consistently?"
• "You've obviously developed a wealth of business contacts. What's your secret?"
• "How did you learn so much about the ins and outs of corporate politics?

Step #4: Listen. Really listen. Listening is not a part of questioning; questioning is a part of listening. Listening -- completely and intently -- shows respect for the contact's knowledge and provides an opportunity for the contact to expound upon his or her experience. The more carefully you listen, the more you'll learn.

Step #5: Relax and enjoy. The best way to get somebody to open up is to actually enjoy listening to them. People are fascinating. Careers are interesting. Companies operate in fascinating ways. Everyone has stories to tell. If you get yourself in the right mood, the "questioning" (i.e. "listening") part of your job can be the best part of your day.

The above is based upon a conversation with Mark Shonka and Dan Kosch, co-authors of "Beyond Selling Value (Dearborn Trade, 2002).

Build Customers’ Trust by Listening and Learning

By Sam Allman | evancarmichael.com

Picture courtesy of OnePage CRM

Customers trust humble (“teachable”) salespeople. Customers don’t shop price with salespeople they trust. Salespeople build trust by listening and sincerely wanting to learn about the customer.

Recently, sales managers at a life insurance company puzzled over a drop in sales at about 18 months into the career of many new sales agents. The managers speculated that these agents were burning out. Or, maybe they had exhausted their list of friends to solicit. The company investigated.

They found their speculations were wrong. The real cause was the agents’ declining interest in learning all they could about their customer. When new, these agents were truly teachable. They listened to their customers’ stories to uncover the whole situation. They listened until they could recommend the insurance products best suited to each client. On average, they devoted more than an hour listening to each customer.

However, after working about 15 - 18 months, most agents had figured out that nearly all customers fit into a limited number of categories. The agents found they could ask a few key questions and, within 15 minutes, fit the customer into one of those categories. They were nearly always right.

But, then, their “closing percentages” dropped. The problem? The minute they pegged the client, they stopped asking questions and listening, and started recommending products.

What were they doing wrong?

They were not projecting their need-to-know – their desire to fully understand the customer’s particular situation and desires. The number one characteristic of peak performing salespeople is empathy. Why? When one feels understood, they are more open to influence. These customers sensed that the agents were not interested in their needs, so they declined to buy and sales declined.

How many sales might you have lost in just the last two weeks for that same reason? Do you have favorite products that you like to push? The risk you take when you don’t listen and sincerely want to learn is that the customer will think you are more interested in the sale than in what they really need.

Learning to ask questions, like you are really interested in learning about your customer may be the most important selling skill you’ll ever master. It may be the most under-used skill in the salesperson’s toolbox. As you read the following list of “probing benefits”, consider all the things that good questions will do.

1. Probing prevents you from talking too much. Probing forces you to swivel the spotlight from you to the customer, especially at the opening.

2. Probing intensifies your concern for this customer, and her feelings for you. By setting aside your agenda, and working to understand the customer’s agenda first, you invest in the customer. As you invest, your caring grows naturally. The customer then feels validated. So, she naturally reciprocates with trust for you.

3. Probing elicits the customer’s needs and wants. Effective probing questions elicit the customer’s left-brain needs and right-brain wants. Knowing them, you can personalize your response.

4. Probing keeps the customer focused on you, on your products and services. As long as the customer is answering your questions, she is listening to you. Listening requires the customer to focus and understand the benefits. By contrast, when you lecture, she may tune out. She may become confused. A confused mind can’t decide.

5. Probing clarifies in the customer’s mind what is right for her and how much she wants a particular product. Your probes tell her needs, wants, and possible solutions – all in her own mind. More powerfully, as you have probed with empathy, she has retained control about the buy-in. She draws her own conclusions. Being hers, they are good. As a result, she wants to buy from you . . . naturally.

It takes a master salesperson to know when to cease asking questions and to begin presenting. If you have doubts about your ability to know when to cease your learning, I guarantee you probably need to ask more questions.

To build trust faster, try shedding any shreds of knowing-it-all. Intensify your teachableness. See if customers don’t trust you more and then buy more.

Richard Branson on Intrapreneurs

BY Richard Branson | Entrepreneur.com

The business icon talks about empowering employees to break the rules. 

I am incredibly lucky to be able to live in the British Virgin Islands, one of the most beautiful spots on the planet. My family's home is on Necker Island, which is both our home and a luxury resort. Here, I'm much more likely to do my thinking in an office hammock rather than an office chair.

Seeing guests exploring the beach reminded me that one of the first charming things visitors to the BVIs see are signs in the airport arrivals area that designate the immigration channels. Unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, here the signs read "Belongers" and "Non-Belongers," rather than "Residents" and "Nonresidents."

Since I became a resident, I've come to find the term "belonger" amazingly powerful. When a nation embraces its own as "belonging here" as opposed to just living there, it breeds a different form of loyalty. It reminds us that this is where we belong, and so our efforts are not just on our own behalf, but also to benefit the community.

This made me think about how such little, seemingly semantic, details apply in the business world: What if companies had belongers rather than employees? Does what we call each other make a difference in other contexts?

Many millions of people proudly claim the title "entrepreneur." On the other hand, a title that hasn't gotten nearly the amount of attention it deserves is entrepreneur's little brother, "intrapreneur": "an employee who is given freedom and financial support to create new products, services and systems, who does not have to follow the company's usual routines or protocols." While it's true that every company needs an entrepreneur to get it under way, healthy growth requires a smattering of intrapreneurs who drive new projects and explore new and unexpected directions for business development.

Virgin could never have grown into the group of more than 200 companies it is now, were it not for a steady stream of intrapreneurs who looked for and developed opportunities, often leading efforts that went against the grain.

One example that springs to mind was at Virgin Atlantic, about 10 years ago. None of the big expensive seat design firms seemed able to solve the design problems posed by our specifications for our Upper Class cabin, but a young designer, Joe Ferry, volunteered (insistently) to give the project a go.

We set him loose, and the herringbone-configured private sleeper suites that resulted from his "outside the box" creativity put us years ahead of the pack and made for millions of very happy horizontal fliers.

How to unleash the power of intrapreneurs like Joe? The key is to enable them to pursue their vision. But people don't always think of leaders within a company – the managers, executives, and the chief executive officer – as people who enable others. As I learned back when I was starting up Student magazine, "The chief executive officer of a major corporation might only make a couple of decisions a year, but those decisions can affect the lives of millions." What a terrible way to run a company!

So, since this seems to be true throughout the business world, clearly it's time for a major shake-up in the nomenclature of business. What if CEO stood for "chief enabling officer"? What if that CEO's primary role were to nurture a breed of intrapreneurs who would grow into tomorrow's entrepreneurs?

We inadvertently developed this role at Virgin by virtue of the fact that when we've chosen to jump into a business about which we have little or no real knowledge, we've had to enable a few carefully selected people who do know which end is up.

When Virgin moved into the mobile phone industry we had no experience, so we looked for our rivals' best managers, hired them away, took off their ties and gave them the freedom to set up their own ventures within the Virgin Group. Tom Alexander in the U.K., Dan Schulman in the U.S. and Andrew Black in Canada have all done this with great success, aggressively taking Virgin companies in new and unexpected directions.

Perhaps the greatest thing about this form of enabled intrapreneurship is that often everyone becomes so immersed in what they're doing that they feel like they own their companies. They don't feel like employees working for someone else, they feel much more like ... well, I think the only word to describe it is "belongers."

Mauritian Public Key Infrastructure Ecosystem Launched

By Government Information Service | Prime Minister’s Office 
 

June 22, 2012: The Mauritian Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Ecosystem, which aims at creating the right environment to engage e-Commerce and e-Business in a secure and trusted environment, was launched at the Hennessy Park Hotel, in Ebène Cyber-city.

 

On that occasion, the first certification authority to operate in Mauritius, eMudhra Consumer Services Ltd, received its recognition certificate, and the Information and Communications Technologies Authority (ICTA), which is also the Controller of Certification Authorities (CCA), launched an Information Guide on the Mauritian PKI Ecosystem.

PKI is a cyber security infrastructure put in place to prove the identities of people, websites, computer programmes and applications on the Internet as well to secure online transactions through the use of Digital Certificates.  The Information Guide gives an insight about the PKI to the public in general and contains salient features of the legislations related to the PKI.

In his opening address, the Minister of Information and Communication Technology, Mr Tassarajen Pillay Chedumbrum, said that the development taking place today is a stepping stone in making e-Government applications more interactive on a secured environment.  He announced the launching of a paperless Government project using the PKI.  This, said the Minister, will then spill over to other applications that are currently running under the Government Online Centre.  He also encouraged Ministries, departments, public bodies as well as private institutions to make use of the facilities developed around the conducive environment created for the development of the Mauritian PKI.

For his part, the High Commissioner of India to Mauritius, Mr. T.P. Seetharam, congratulated all parties concerned for the implementation of the PKI following the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding with the CCA of India three years back.  India stays committed to be a productive partner with Mauritius in various fields and continue to work together to the mutual advantage of both countries, he added.

About PKI

Mauritius has its own PKI since 6 December 2010.  In a PKI, a CA issues Digital Certificates to end users.  A Digital Certificate on the Internet is similar to an ID card in the real world. The CA verifies the identity of the end user and publishes certificates on an on-line repository where people can verify each other’s certificate. The CCA as the apex trust agency for the Mauritian PKI, in turn, must approve the methods used by the CA to verify the identity of a subscriber before granting or renewing a subscription for a certificate.

In May 2012, the technical infrastructure required for the issuance of the digital Licence/Recognition/Approval was installed at the premises of the ICTA.  In the same month, the CCA of Mauritius issued a recognition certificate to the first foreign CA who can now start its operation in Mauritius.

It is recalled that to enable a secure electronic transactions operating environment, the Electronic Transactions Act was amended and the Electronic Transactions (Certification Authorities) Regulations 2010 came into effect on 1 December 2010 providing for the licensing framework as well as the regulation of Certification Authorities (CA) activities in Mauritius.

Learn to Leverage Social Media to Enhance Your Career (Podcast)

By Jennifer Curry | From CFA Institute

 

Miriam Salpeter, author of Social Networking for Career Success, explains the importance of social media as a channel to enhance your professional reputation and to become known as a thought leader in your field. She offers practical advice and instruction on how to leverage specific functionality that can help you brand and differentiate yourself.

Listen to the podcast HERE. 

 

This presentation was recorded at the 65th CFA Institute Annual Conference. 
 
About the Speaker

Miriam Salpeter is owner and founder of Keppie Careers, a coaching and consulting firm helping job seekers and entrepreneurs leverage social media and other tools to achieve their goals. She has appeared on CNN, and major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and others have quoted her advice. 

In addition to her own blog, Miriam writes for U.S. News & World Report’s On Careers column and for Salary.com. Her book, Social Networking for Career Success, is available via Amazon or your favorite bookseller. In fall, 2012, her second book, 100 Conversations for Career Success (co-authored with Laura Labovich) will be on store shelves. 

CNN named Miriam to their list of “top 10 job tweeters you should be following.” Monster.com included her in their “11 for 2011 — Career Experts Who Can Help Your Job Search” and respected online resource, Quintessential Careers, called her a “Top 15 Career Mastermind.”

In addition to coaching job seekers and small business owners, Miriam is an in-demand writer and speaker regarding job search and social media, and she transforms resumes and creates online social media profiles (websites) for clients.

A vice president for a Wall Street firm prior to earning a master’s degree from Columbia University, Miriam headed the Career Action Center at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University before launching her own business. She has been empowering job seekers and small business owners for over 14 years.

Miriam coaches job seekers and entrepreneurs about using best practices to land great opportunities by offering clarity, confidence and know-how. Clients can save time, money and sanity by working with her. She believes everyone controls his or her own future and her job is to provide the road map to success.