Master Class in Personal Branding—Lesson 3: Do You Know How You’re Coming Across?

Interview, Resume and LinkedIn

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Master Class #3In the previous post in this series, we spent some time trying to understand ourselves. Now we need to take a little bit more of a risk and see if others think the same!

 

What Would Others Say About You?

“As you become clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you—the first time around.” –Oprah Winfrey

As an experienced professional who has either conducted many interviews or been on the receiving end of a few tough interview questions, you should be well-prepared for the somewhat overused interview question, “If I were to ask your best friend/closest work colleague to describe you, what would they say?”

If you are able to take the interviewer through a detailed analysis of others’ perceptions of you in a positive and informative manner, the impression you leave will be much stronger.

All good marketers at some point in a brand’s development look for feedback, usually in the form of a focus group—and it should be no different for you in your own career. It’s critical to know how others perceive you for a number of reasons:

  1. To know if your beliefs of how you’re perceived are consistent with what people actually think about you.

  2. To determine if there is consistency among the different groups you interact with. Do your friends and relatives see a different you than the one peers and colleagues see, for example?

  3. If your next employer is going to go to some of these people for references (either officially or unofficially), it’s important that you are at least armed with some information to counter any potential negative feedback they may give.

  4. If there are some glaring shortfalls others see in you, at least being aware of them can help you understand how you impact others, even if you decide not to do anything about it.

 

Getting Feedback

If you’ve had the pleasure of corporate performance reviews, a quick way to determine how others see you would be to look back over these reports and see if there’s consistency in the feedback and if certain strengths or skills are constantly mentioned.

One of the major disadvantages with this approach is that corporate feedback, although anonymous, is quite often given with reservation and only comes from the internal dimension of your brand at work—you don’t usually get external work feedback in these situations.

A more informative exercise would be to get a mix of friends, colleagues, managers and (if applicable) clients and ask them for objective but honest feedback on what they think of you. You could ask them to:

  • List the top 6 attributes that best describe you.

  • Describe your greatest strengths.

  • Describe your greatest weaknesses.

  • Give any other comments they think would be useful.

This could be done in an in-person focus group or one-on-one; however, you might find people will be more willing to spend time and give honest and objective feedback if you ask for written or email responses to your questions.

You can even use the likes of SurveyMonkey.com to gather online and anonymous feedback. Also take a moment to do this for yourself (a self-assessment); it’s always good to see if your perceptions are in line with other people’s.

Look to see if there is consistency among the feedback from the various groups you asked. If there is, that’s an indication of a strong personal brand; if not, there might be some work needed on your brand.

This approach can be flawed in the cases where you’re “openly” asking for feedback, which some people might be reluctant to give and may cause them to be not as honest as they might be if the questions were anonymous.

Still, in all likelihood, this type of feedback is more than you’ve ever collected about yourself before and is a good starting point to understanding what people perceive as your main “brand points.”

 

Analyzing Your Feedback

Here are some suggestions to follow so that you can both understand and use the feedback you receive:

  • Ensure first of all that you’ve received all the responses you think you are going to get. If not, you’ll just have to accept that some people were too busy or didn’t want to participate.

  • Ideally, you’ve received at least 12-15 responses—any less might mean you can’t read as much into the results.

  • Consider if there is anyone else you might be able to get feedback from, and if you have time, send them a request.

  • In performing the analysis, try to remain objective when looking at the feedback; try to stay focused on the big picture and don’t give any individual response too much attention.

The big picture:

  • First, have a good read through what everyone said and look for a few common threads, themes or messages. What is this feedback telling you?

  • Next, look at the attributes: What’s showing up straightaway as clear groups of words that might be put together? Are there any inconsistencies—words that just don’t seem to fit? (Usually these will be the less common ones.)

  • Do the same for strengths and weaknesses.

 

Consolidating the Data

The hardest part of the analysis is to try to group some of the various responses together. This may be more evident in areas like strengths and weaknesses but will take a little more time with attributes.

What you’re looking to do is to put the attributes that seem similar together. For example, you could group together “sincere,” “honest,” “helpful” and “supportive” and then to try to hone those groups down to 6-8 words that best describe you.

These are your rational and emotional attributes. The rational attributes are those that most people might expect to see in someone in your position, vocation, industry, etc., and the emotional ones are not. These emotional attributes can then be seen as true differentiators and are likely to be the ones that people really connect to you.

 

Are the Results What You Expected?

If you did a self-assessment, compare your responses to the consolidated data you’ve put together. Look for similarities and differences between your self-assessment and the summary of external feedback.

This analysis is the basis for creating some alternative career marketing documents that can be used in various situations where a resume cannot or should not be used.

In addition, much more can be done with the actual comments and feedback you received, including lifting comments to use as mini-testimonials or quotes in other job marketing tools.

In the next post, we’ll look at putting this all together in your career marketing documents.

Image result for The Career Hacker, Paul CopcuttKnown by his clients as The Career Hacker, Paul Copcutt was described by Forbes magazine as a global leading personal brand expert. Paul helps people uncover their uniqueness and communicate it in an authentic way that gets them noticed and remembered, for the right reasons. Over the years, he has inspired and worked with thousands of people from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 executives, and he regularly speaks to business audiences across North America. Visit his site, Square Peg Solution, and find him on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

 

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