There are two schools of thought on this one. Let the performance speak for itself and the reputation will follow — the school of merit. And the other one, merit always needs a little help from a dose of prudent self-promotion.
If you’re more inclined towards the school of merit, as a great many people are, you’ll need to be very patient. With time and consistent performance your reputation may become established. On the other hand, if you are doing a little self-promotion of your reputation, you’ll benefit in three ways:
- It will keep you focused on your goal, the specific reputation you wish to create.
- This focus will make it more likely that you will behave consistently with your reputational aims.
- You’ll definitely get there quicker.
To do this, you need to be thinking of actions and looking for opportunities in five areas:When I’m talking about self-promotion I am not referring to being boastful, arrogant and self-obsessed. In large complex organisations, you will have those people around and they tend to be those who are not able to back up their rhetoric with substance. What I am referring to is taking small prudent steps to ensure that you gain fair recognition as widely as possible among the community which you want to recognise you.
- Networking. Giving more of the right people the opportunity to get to know you.
- Volunteering. Offering to contribute appropriately to help other teams in their work.
- Collaborations. Finding people in related fields and working together to achieve common goals.
- Advocacy. Making sure key individuals spread the good news in exactly the right way (more on this in a later article).
- Publicity. Using multiple mediums to share your knowledge, expertise and experience for the good of all.
What could you do in each of these areas that would help you to gain greater (and appropriate) visibility among the people you wish to buy-in to your reputation? I’ve got plenty of ideas which I will share in the next article. For now, I’d like to challenge you to come up with as many as you can.
Once you have got some ideas, you can start to build this into a coherent stream of action:
- Refresh your mind on exactly what you are seeking to achieve — what reputation do you want and with whom?
- Create a campaign strategy which documents the key strands of your promotion work and covers all of the five areas above.
- Make a detailed plan of exactly what actions you are going to take and when.
- Get busy implementing them. Self-promotion means you’ve got to do it.
- Review on a regular basis and adjust your strategy and actions according to what you are learning along the way.
Keep this structure in mind over the next few days as you go about your work. See if you can get as far as you can to a concrete plan of action. In the next article I will share more ideas and at the end, I hope you’ll be well placed to begin launching your reputation – if you haven’t already done so!
Colin Gautrey
Provocative Coach/Mentor | Specialism: Impact and Influence
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