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?
