Advance Your Reputation
Welcome to March!
Since January, I have elaborated on each of the “Six Tips to Elevate Your Leadership & Retain Talent”, a free resource you can download from our home page.
In February I shared tips on how to “Expand Your Network with Purpose”. This month we will explore how to “Advance Your Reputation”.
Your personal brand is how you present yourself to others. Your personal brand helps you to control your narrative, whereas your reputation is decided by other’s opinions. It is important to live your brand, know and demonstrate your value to others, and advocate for yourself while others advocate for you to help advance your reputation.
Let’s explore these tips further.
1. Live Your Brand
Let’s recap from January when you built your personal brand. You identified traits you want to be known for as a leader, determined behaviors to practice that support these traits, and consistently and continually practiced the behaviors.
How are you doing so far?
One exercise that is helpful is to reflect on your week and determine the behaviors you want to START, STOP or CONTINUE. While this exercise may not be new to many of us, it is a powerful tool that helps us to focus on prioritizing the actions that will help us live our brand.
2. Know And Demonstrate Your Value To Others
Have you ever heard “know yourself to know your worth”? It helps to define who we are and the value we contribute before someone else defines it for us. The key is to understand the value of our contributions is not the same as achieving our goals. While achieving our goals is important, don’t downplay your unique skills and strengths that lead to your and your team's success. Note and demonstrate these unique skills and strengths.
3. Advocate For Yourself And Have Others Advocate For You
I used to think my actions were enough to "show" my value. I did not realize advocating for myself was essential for others to understand the valued I contributed. The reality is, our leaders cannot read our minds and we are doing ourselves a disservice if we are not transparent with sharing the value we deliver.
It benefits ourselves and others, particularly when we offer a unique skill that is needed somewhere else in our organization. If we cannot speak to our value, we cannot expect others to speak to our value when we are not in the room.
And advocates are essential. Build strong relationships that lead to securing strong advocates. Advocates can play a significant role in the development of our career. They also amplify our accomplishments, value, and contributions to the organization’s success.
Now what?
You are the CEO of your career and no one should care more about it than you. Practicing these tips will help to advance your reputation.
Next month we will learn how to “Nurture Inclusion and Belonging”. I look forward to diving into this topic further with you. Until then, be well and keep shining!
We at Cultivate and Thrive help women leaders by providing guidance on strategy and culture so that they gain clarity, work smarter, improve experience, and optimize their organization’s performance. Book a call so we can learn more about you and how we can elevate your organizational culture and performance.
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