The key to actively managing your career
“Career management” sounds like something you should be doing, right? But how to get started? You should read a book on marketing and selling services.
The very idea brings up images of car salesmen, snake oil, and telemarketing. The small person in our heads says, “I’m not in sales!””
Oh, but you are. It turns out that as a technologist you and, say, a contractor who wants to remodel your house, are selling the same thing: a service. And if you are going to lead others, or even just have a successful career as a technical team member, you’ve got to learn to sell your service.
Services are different from products
Services are different from products in several ways that make service customers very uncomfortable.
When you are buying a product (some thing, like a car), you can experience it. Products are tangible, and being able to have a personal connection with a product reduces the consumer’s fears before the sale.
A service, on the other hand, is intangible. You cannot touch, taste, smell, or feel the competence or trustworthiness of any of the contracting services you are evaluating to remodel your home. When big money is at stake, most of us have a whole lot of fear that we’ll end up getting bad service and not being able to do anything about it.
A building contractor may provide a warranty on his workmanship when he remodels your house, but do you really want to have to rely on the warranty? Can you do without your kitchen for another six months while he fixes his mistakes from the first six months?
In comes the brand
In the face of fear people do something really interesting: we don’t seek to buy the best service. We seek to buy the service with the smallest chance of failure. And this is where your career comes in.
When you were hired into your group it was to fill a gap in skills or to meet a specific need of the group. These skills are your service. Your competence, professionalism, timeliness, attitude, and record of success are the intangible assets of your service.
Your boss has a warranty: he can fire you if you cannot deliver. But he doesn’t want to, because firing you damages him (his bosses see him as having failed), and in most modern organizations it is very difficult to fire anyone for pretty much anything less than arson or murder.
To lead and to be seen as a leader you must reduce your consumer’s (your company’s, your boss’s, your coworkers’) fear of failure from buying the wrong service. Do this the same way big companies do: build and manage a brand. Brand You.
Making it work for you
There is too much material in this topic for a single article, so next week look for even more practical tips about how to create your own brand. Before then, however, you need to know the most important factor in creating a brand for yourself that will take you where you want to go with your career: being apart.
You need to look around at your peers and at the people in the closest management layers to you, and understand what their brand is. Those who perform at the bottom or middle of pack aren’t really managing a brand that you want to compete against. In terms of brands, you have to study the top performers. Who are the “go to” folks?
The odds are fairly good as you study each of these performers you’ll see that they are different from one another and different from the lower performers around them. One is funny and dresses casually but smartly. One is serious, highly organized, and very conservative. One is crusty, and one is super nice, and both write better reports than Faulkner would have if he had been in technology.
Know what the other leaders in your organization are doing, and decide where you fit in. Make this your brand.
No reward without risk
The drawback of branding is that you will no longer fit in with the crowd. If you aren’t comfortable not fitting in, you won’t be comfortable managing yourself in this way.
It won’t be easy for all of you, but a properly managed brand can launch you on your way to being recognized as the “go to” person and give you control of your career.
