Increase Your Career Velocity

In this week's Leadership Refresher, executive coach and guest velocity guru Cherie Healey offers her sage advice on how to grow your personal brand and achieve happiness with three essential actions.

 

1.  Build Your Own Brand

Everyone understands why businesses need a solid brand — it distinguishes the company and conveys its essence.  But brands are not just for big companies.  The people who take the time to build their personal brand stand out in a crowd of talent.  What really differentiates you is not your title, your credentials or your resume, it’s the experience of YOU.

If you are consistent in the way you deliver that experience, you build equity, and as you build equity, everyone is going to want to work with you and connect with the YOU brand.

Like any big brand, consciously decide:
 

What you do for your customers: Your boss, your employees and clients. How you do it: What kind of consistent experience do you give them?  Be innovative.  Get creative.  This is how you build trust and big relationships. Why you do it: What drives you?  What do you stand for? This is critical and what will make people follow you, talk about you and repeatedly “buy” you.

Distill this all into 1-3 lines that capture YOU.  Like a powerful tagline or an elevator pitch, own the way you communicate your value.

 

2.  Get in Alignment

When you feel “off”, “overwhelmed” and “not yourself,” you are out of alignment.  Many will just call it stress, and will attempt to power through and ignore what’s going on within — all of which will simply deplete you and make your greatest work impossible.

A better strategy is to learn how to stay in alignment so you can tap into your highest potential and stay turned on for good.  There are several principles of alignment that will bring out the powerful leader in all of us.  For this week, let’s focus on the first one:
 

Feel good in your skin.

If you want to get ahead, advance your career and have a bigger impact, it all starts with the body.  If you’ve got low energy, will your brand truly stand out?  If you put your workouts, great food and sleep on the back burner, how will you do your best work?

Think about any great leader, they’ve got x factor — that magnetism, that energy that just makes us want to follow them.  You can’t fake that.  It can only come through when you feel good in your skin.

 

3.  Choose to Partner

Being in business can bring out the worst in us — or the best.   It’s a choice.  Hierarchy, competition, pressure, poor communication, deadlines, lack of financing or budget and more can all create a feeling of scarcity, adversary and fight or flight.  No one gets ahead in fight or flight; most of us operate as our worst selves when we operate from a sense of scarcity or high adversity.  The blame game, politicking, punitive management, paralysis, and backlashing are symptoms you may recognize.

True leaders get wildly creative in the face of challenges.  They commit to genuinely partnering with their teams every day and to find ways through adversity — rather than devolve to fight or flight and operate overpowered by their own reactions.  A master of partnership sees anyone as an equal and aligns on a shared outcome that makes everyone a winner.

That mastery gets recognized as nothing short of a genius.  You have it in you.  We all do.  But it takes making the choice to rise above the reaction, operate from authentic power and choose to partner.

Now go blow their minds AND grow your brand.

—Cherie Healey, velocity guru for Workboard, Game Changer and Leadership Coach


P.S.  If you’re looking for more clarity and honesty with your team on what the goals and priorities are and the status of important work, try Workboard.  It makes it easier for high velocity teams and leaders to work smarter, not harder.