There are 3 things that drive a leader's career and success - their reputation, on-the-job performance, and their relationships up, across, and outside their organization. Each factor has a varying degree of impact on how successful or how far they progress in their career but, when all three are aligned and in good order, the leader's career will be boundless. They will have the advantage when the next promotion becomes available and are more likely to be selected for advancement opportunities over their peers. They will also be presented with the hidden opportunities that are not visible to others but highly desired.
From my years of experience leading executive recruitment, approximately 70% to 80% of the searches I manage are not openly advertised. Many times I work on searches that are sensitive in nature and confidentially conducted in order to avoid disruption to the team and organization. In order to learn about these concealed opportunities, leaders need to position themselves strategically so that they are known for the right things (reputation), demonstrate the right results (performance), and known by the right people (relationships). This makes them actively sought after and selected for the more challenging (and interesting) roles as they become available.
For the purpose of this post, I will focus primarily on 2 of these factors - reputation and relationships - and only touch on the performance factor. Performance on the job is, of course, a necessary component to a leader's career but not the key focus here. I explain more below.
Reputation
Your reputation is different from your professional brand so let's first distinguish the two. Your brand is something that you can determine on your own in order to make a mark and stand out. This usually demonstrates your values and what you stand for as a leader. The tools commonly used for branding are LinkedIn, social media, resumes, and websites.
Your reputation, however, is determined by how others view you. It is established by what people think about when your name is mentioned, how they feel about working with you, what they have heard about you, and how reliable or credible they consider you to be. Reputation is based on other people's perception of you.
Reputation often begins to form long before people personally interact or observe your behavior and it can spread quickly. It is shaped from both indirect and direct observations which means that it can start to form in moments before you even enter a new role such as during the interviewing process, word of mouth, or formal and informal references.
While both indirect and direct observations will impact and shape your reputation, the indirect ones can have more significance. It starts to happen when other people share stories about their interactions with you which creates a second-hand experience. Observations can also happen in more subtle ways such as when others witness your working style in larger settings, the decisions you make along the way, and the results and impact of your work. Similar to any personal perception made, these indirect observations can be influenced by biases, emotions, and motivations which make it difficult to monitor your reputation but, nevertheless, critical to manage.
Performance
Many organizations (and leaders) tend to place a large amount of emphasis on your actual performance on the job because this a measurable behavior. It's easy to examine and there are actual metrics and goals to track. There are skills and knowledge that are observable and, where there are gaps, there is training that can be provided.
Your performance is the component that is mostly in your control. Given how easy it is to monitor, many organizations have historically used this is a primary factor when considering leaders for promotion or a new role. This has been changing with time as we start to see more leaders fail when being promoted based on performance alone.
Relationships
Relationships are your main currency as a leader. Your relationships are what allows you to accomplish goals, make the right connections, gain access to information, and influence decision-making. You can have very strong performance in your role but, without having developed strong relationships with stakeholders and partners, your advancement will get blocked. Fortunately, the health and status of your relationships can be within your control and you can develop action plans to improve or strengthen where it is needed.
To learn more about relationships, please read a previous post "Building Your Leadership Network (Power Base)" , where I discuss a systematic approach to evaluating your relationships, assessing the health and level of influence each relationship has on your career, creating a visual relationship map, and developing an action plan to improve the key relationships in your network.
How To Position Yourself For Success
Ok, now that we know what factors drive your success, what can you do about it?
Let's start with an assessment. The goal of conducting an assessment is to use the information learned to create actionable plans for growth. For the purpose of strengthening relationships and leadership reputation, I like to start with the ProfileXT Select assessment. This tool is a multi-dimensional assessment program that evaluates a leader's behavioral traits, thinking style, and interests.
Why ProfileXT Select?
ProfileXT Select measures behavior styles.
Your behavior is linked to your reputation and how others experience you.
Your behavior impacts how you interact with others around you which lead to the status and development of your relationships.
What are the benefits of using ProfileXT Select?
You can build a stronger self-awareness on your thinking style and behavior traits which directly relate to how others may view you.
The reports allow you to review information in comparison to another leader with the goal of working together better and strengthening the relationship.
The leadership report covers 6 commonly required skills (across different types of organizations) and provide links to traits that show how a leader might approach that particular skill allowing you to identify gaps to focus on.
Below is a sample summary report for an individual leader. What I like about this report is that it's a one-page summary of important traits and styles that impact how we interact with others around us. The scales do not go from "low" to "high" and there are no "bad" nor "good" traits. It also helps you understand what type of role and environment you thrive in the most.
How this information is best used.
Strategic Self-Awareness
Self-awareness a crucial leadership skill and it takes a lot of time and effort to gain an honest understanding of your strengths and challenges. Gaining awareness helps you to connect with ourselves and understand how you are showing up to the people around you. As you strengthen your leadership reputation, building strategic self-awareness means you learn what your reputation is, understand what events took place to develop it, and discern what will be required to change the reputation (if needed). As you build new relationships with stakeholders or peers, you learn how to recognize your different approaches and styles and find a common path. Knowing where you are in relation to people you work with and understanding where you are unique will address many situations and challenges.
Self-Management
Monitoring and managing your own behavior is key once you've gained awareness. If you think about the leaders around you, you may notice that the effective ones can talk about how their previous behaviors may have impacted or derailed them during their early career stage. However, over time they may have strengthened their reputation by learning how to control their behavior and apply it differently in any given scenario. For example, at times you may want to eliminate a particular behavior (do less of something) to avoid reputational damage or add a behavior (do more of something) that will build a more positive image.
Situational Context
Your reputation does not remain static in every situation. It is necessary to know the different situational factors that may affect how you are being viewed. A few key circumstances may be the organizational culture (the norms and behaviors that may be accepted in one organization may be taboo in another), the personality of your direct manager (his or her values, priorities, and definition of success), and the role itself (newly created roles are different from well defined positions).
Another valuable report that comes from the ProfileXT Select assessment is the leadership report which measures 6 common leadership skills that are required by many organizations. These skills are creating a vision, developing a strategy, ensuring results, inspiring others, being approaching, and mentoring others. Each of these skills can be directly linked with a few of the behavioral traits, thinking styles, and interests that this tool measures. This direct linkage allows you to identify where potential gaps might exist in order to build and strengthen your leadership capabilities.
Here's a quick sample of the first leadership skill - creating a vision.
How this information is best used.
Understand Leadership Skills
This information helps you learn more about how you might confront the complexities of a leadership role. Just as there is no one-size fits all description of a leader, there is no set of behaviors that is better than the other. Therefore, you can leverage the potential strengths and challenges to assess how you may approach a leadership situation or role. It's important to consider the situational context that I discussed above because each role, organization, industry, and manager may require different areas to focus on.
Know Your Market Value
Knowing how your leadership skills, strengths, and challenges compare to your peers within the same group or industry will help you understand your current market value. This self-awareness is honest and objective information on how marketable your skills are and identifies areas in which you may need to improve to make more opportunities available to you and position yourself for the next advancement.
Summary and Next Steps
It's important to recognize that changes in your leadership reputation and status of your relationships are occurring constantly. The goal is to learn how to manage it so that it becomes as stable as possible. The more stable your relationships and reputation are, the easier they are to protect and any new information that flows in by other people will only reinforce the positive image you have developed.
The bottom line is your leadership reputation and relationships make the foundation upon which others will make decisions regarding your career. It is up to you to stay in touch with this information and manage it through your behaviors and interactions with others.
If you're ready to start an assessment, strengthen your reputation, and develop strong relationships, you can reach out to me at anmcleod@hexa-search.com. To learn more about designing a career strategy that is intentional and within your control you can also visit www.hexa-search.com.
About HEXA Executive Search
An McLeod is an Executive Recruiter and Executive Coach who helps high-growth companies build their leadership teams and bench strength while also preparing the leaders for continued growth and transitioning.
I am certified in delivering and using ProfileXT Select, a multi-dimensional assessment program that evaluates a Leader's behavioral traits, cognitive abilities, and interests. We can use these reports to evaluate an individual's environment fit, team dynamics, managerial fit, leadership capabilities, coaching and development opportunities, and succession planning.
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