The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Fast Company’

At a recent event hosted by the Canadian Women in Communications for senior level women, the guest speaker Linda Jojo, new Executive Vice President, ITS and Chief Information Officer of Rogers Communications shared three lessons she has learned with the women in attendance, but I’d like to focus on only one because it incorporates the other two. And that is the importance of branding yourself.

Quite recently, I have been reading a lot about creating a personal brand for yourself. You have to be known something. Each of us has a unique set of skills and we need to let others know about them, so that when your skill set is needed, your name is synonymous with those skills. It’s interesting that so many people are now talking about personal branding because Tom Peters, the management guru, wrote a seminar article, The Brand Called You in Fast Company in August 1997 – that’s 14 years ago.

How do you brand yourself?

Get yourself SEEN and HEARD. Jojo suggests that you take on tasks that others may not want such as running the United Way Campaign. Why? Because you’ll get visibility doing it, and you’ll also get the opportunity to make presentations about the campaign – this puts you in front of senior managers, the decision makers. She also recommends that you should take on jobs that others do not want. When no one wants a particular job, you can bet that it’s for a reason, and it’s probably because it’s plagued with many problems. But you should not be deterred because if you master that difficult job that no one wants to touch, you will be known as the person to call to solve difficult problems.

Jojo took on the job of running GE’s payroll system, one that didn’t run very smoothly. She made many mistakes along the way because it was a very complex job, but it was the best job she ever had because it taught her how to prioritize and how to communicate during a crisis. Over the years she has built a reputation for herself and that’s one of the reasons why she has moved up the ladder in her career. Sponsors also played a seminal role in opening doors for her. Jojo created a personal brand for herself, and she was SEEN and HEARD.

Unlike mentors, sponsors usually choose their protégés. To be chosen though, they have to know about you, so to have to be SEEN and HEARD. I have been building my personal rand as The Invisible Mentor and Expert Interviewer, how about you?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Many times we face problems that we think are unique to us, but similar problems have already been solved in a related or unrelated industry. How do we cross sectors to see what’s going on in their backyard, so that we may learn from them? How can we cross pollinate our ideas for superior solutions?

I love Fast Company magazine, and I was completely mesmerized while reading their recent article “Does Architecture Have a Foot Fetish?” by Michael Cannell. Cannell made an analogy between shoes and buildings, “What are shoes, after all, but mini buildings for your feet?” Do you agree with that statement? After reading the article and seeing some of the shoe designs, I will never look at shoes the same way again.

Now that the economy is slow, some architects have been applying their knowledge in building design, to designing shoes. Take a quick look at “Does Architecture Have a Foot Fetish?” and tell me what you think. The first shoe design is quite classy in my opinion, but the others are too futuristic, Star Trekky for me (no offense Star Trek fans).

In another Fast Company article, “A Problem-Solver’s Guide to Copycatting” by Dan & Chip Heath (authors of the bestseller Made to Stick), they present a few case studies where executives used nature (biomimicry) to solve organizational problems that appeared unsolvable.

How can you cross pollinate our ideas for superior solutions? And how can you build a body of general information that you can merge with specific information when problem solving? Simply read up on topics that you wouldn’t usually read: biomimicry, botany, biology, zoology, astronomy, agriculture, philosophy, science and so on. And read a few magazine that you usually wouldn’t read as Futurist, Utne, Skeptical Enquirer. And make sure to take a look at what other industries have done and are doing.

Even though the grass is seldom greener on the other side, it’s worth it to take a look. Please keep this conversation going, provide comments.

Photo credit: Flickr

Further Reading

Does Architecture Have a Foot Fetish?

A Problem-Solver’s Guide to Copycatting