Branding yourself

Career building becomes an important piece when we zoom into our thoughts about the job we're doing. We are encouraged by opportunities to get promoted, to enrich the resume by new achievements, to get new appealing challenges. But sometimes people pay too much attention to this (undoubtedly important) question and look at everything through the prism of career building and rewards. This behavior, of course, has a detrimental effect on their reputation and, eventually, on the desired promotion. How to not to get to extreme and find a right balance - is the topic of this blog.

• Don't push too much. My strong believe is your success depends 99% on luck. Also I'm a strong believer that everything is managed from the heavens so - don't push too much. Do what you can to build a stainless shiny brand of you and opportunities will find you in mysterious ways.
• Build the brand of a doer. Find what can be done in the given circumstances, criticize, suggest, but always complete a bemoan's speech by concrete suggestions and plans. Execute with excellence, complete what you start, and always make a project postmortem at the end (at least for yourself)
• Act like a SVP. Found this formulation in great advice from Dumb Little Man. Climbing career ladder is not only about getting promotion and higher salaries. It's about taking higher responsibility. Don't wait to be promoted to SVP. Start acting today as a hidden one. See what can be done and act properly.
• Work for the company. A mentor of mine went further and said work for the board of the company. But the idea is the same - think what should be done to make the company successful - not only what your group is after. Be creative with suggestions but don't go too far - suggest only pragmatic and practical things that you will start doing.
• Work for the boss of your boss. That's simple - make your boss happy by making his boss happy. He's the one who can remarkably promote you and he's the one who can reward your boss for delivered results - so you'll win anyway.

Don't be frustrated if your career doesn't advance with a desire pace. Much more important thing is to build your own brand as of one who addresses the problems, plans, and delivers. Your brand (read, your reputation) is the only long-time investment you have. Don't let it to catch a stain of a carper, or one who just plans, or one who starts but doesn't complete, or one who throws dust in eyes. I've seen so many colleagues that instead of making things happen on the current position worried about the next position, yet to come. Instead of promotions they got demoted, gained a reputation of unprofessional persons, and killed any opportunities to grow in the network of the people they've worked with.

Think about delivering and completing. Become a known doer and new opportunities will find you in a surprising way.

Technorati tags: career, promotion, gtd

Comments

[David Maister]

Really great stuff, Roman! very wise and helpful.

David

[LLewis]

It's hard to consider professional advice from someone who doesn't bother to spell check his advice column.

[Roman Rytov]

Thanks Lewis for pointing to the typos. I've fixed it. Hope you find now some portion of the advice useful.