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).