Selling Yourself Without Selling Out: A Leader's Guide to Ethical Self-Promotion

Hernez-Broome, McLaughlin, Trovas

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781882197958
• eBook ISBN: 9781604917352
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Even high-performing individuals and groups can be overlooked and underestimated. The antidote is self-promotion-the act of generating personal visibility in service of your work and career. In this guidebook, we discuss how you can benefit from self-promotion and maintain your integrity and authenticity. We help you reframe common beliefs that get in the way of effective self-promotion, and we provide numerous strategies and activities that can become part of your repertoire.

Techniques for Promoting Yourself

Choosing the techniques that suit you and your situation best is an important step toward effective and authentic self-promotion. Connecting with people and taking advantage of opportunities using suitable behaviors help individuals develop the skills to promote themselves in comfortable and influential ways. We’ve grouped the techniques into three categories: connecting with others, developing yourself, and creating opportunities.

Connecting with others addresses strategies and tactics that help you build your network, create relationships, and gain visibility in the organization. Developing yourself focuses on skills and behaviors that are useful in your efforts to promote yourself. Creating opportunities is about the where and when of self-promotion—specific actions that lend themselves to visibility and self-promotion.

In real life, the categories often overlap. In fact, in your efforts to become more skilled and more comfortable with self-promotion, you will want to address all three areas in some fashion. For example, you might choose to be more proactive (developing yourself) in your efforts to make your boss aware of your ability to resolve conflict (connecting with others). You could volunteer to lead a group to address a challenge that involves competing agendas and opinions (creating opportunities).

Connecting with Others

This category includes strategies and tactics that help you build your network, create relationships, and gain visibility in the organization.

• Cross-pollinate. Sometimes the best ideas come from unexpected sources. Allow more people to be an ongoing part of your team, initiative, or problem-solving process. You can draw on their information, expertise, and experience.

• Extend an invitation. Invite people from other areas of the business to sit in on a meeting to give a fresh perspective. An “outsider” may have useful ideas and information to share, or may simply stimulate good discussion. You may also discover common concerns and find ways to work together or share resources.

• Involve senior people. To get noticed and implemented, many good concepts need a person with formal authority or a high degree of influence. Ask seasoned or senior people for their insights and opinions. Once they’ve given their input, you have a good reason to keep them informed.

• Ask for help. One of the simplest and often overlooked ways of making useful connections is to ask for help. By asking for other people’s assistance, you naturally have to describe your work. They may not have known of your involvement in a project, and this gives you a sincere way to talk about your work.

• Spread the word. Communicate with a wide group of stakeholders. Present a project to a group that has a link to your work. Describe the positive results and the obstacles you’ve overcome. You may have solved an issue that other people are just tackling. If you share your accomplishments, they won’t have to reinvent the solution.

• Communicate up. Ensure that management is aware of and understands results achieved and special accomplishments. Put your best foot forward in meetings with management.

• Acknowledge collective effort. When you promote yourself, be sure to recognize the group that helped make you successful. Touting the accomplishments of your group is one of the most comfortable ways to gain visibility, extend your network, and build relationships.

• Recognize individual contributions. Give praise and credit to specific individuals for good work.

• Model self-promotion. Set the standard for the group to talk about their work. Modeling effective self-promotion sets a positive tone and shows specific behaviors for others to emulate.

• Seek opportunities for group members. Ask other group members to make presentations or attend meetings where your project may be discussed.

• Celebrate visibly. When you have a success, don’t keep the news under wraps. Celebrate your group’s accomplishments in a way that invites others to find out more. Create an awards ceremony, host a party, put up signs, give out T-shirts, or spread the news via e-mail or the company newsletter.

• Promote your boss. You are on your boss’s team. Apply your group-promoting mind-set to your boss’s priorities and interests.

• Give feedback. Tell your boss what you think. By providing your boss with appropriate feedback, you are setting an appropriate tone of openness. This will provide you more opportunities to talk about your own contributions, share your ideas, and generally bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Self-Promotion: A Leader’s Job)
• Strategic Visibility and Its Benefits
• Rethinking Self-Promotion
• Techniques for Promoting Yourself
• Finding the Sweet Spot
• Suggested Readings
• Background
• Key Point Summary