How to Stand Out In a Crowd

Do you want to stand out in a crowd?  Want your resume to go to the top of the pile?  Want hiring managers to remember you?  Want more fruitful meetings with prospects?  Want your ideas and recommendations to be considered and even adopted? 

If the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes YESSSSS!!!! the key is to talk about value.  And don’t just talk about value.  Really understand and ‘own’ the value you create, the value of your product, the value of your solution.

As I work with clients to revise their resumes, prep for job interviews, prep for performance reviews, or prep for big presentations, one thing I notice is that we all talk about what we do.  We might even talk about how we do what we do.  We think that’s what will influence and appeal to the hiring manager, the boss, the prospect, or the executive team.  It’s what we know.  We’re comfortable talking about those things – we could go on and on, and in our heart of hearts we believe that if others fully understood what we do and how we do it, they’d see how awesome we are. 

Or if the prospect understood how a product was produced, they’d buy it in an instant.  But the school of hard knocks quickly teaches that this isn’t the case.

I’m reminded of my pet peeve during my corporate job when looking at status reports where project managers (not people on my team) just listed the contents of their calendars for the week:  I went to this meeting on Tuesday, facilitated this other meeting on Wednesday, talked to so-and-so about x, investigated y.

Or resumes.  Here’s what my job responsibilities were and here’s a list of tasks I performed.  Yawn.

If you want to stand out in a crowd, you need to show ‘what’s in it for them.’  It’s Marketing 101 - so basic yet so often overlooked.  Whether you’re looking for a job, selling a product, or promoting an idea, you’ll be more successful if you can help people see the value to them or to the organization.  After all, that’s all they really care about no matter how awesome you are.  

If you’re looking for a job, your resume should focus on the benefits past employers got because they had you on their staff.  As Dr. Phil would say, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.  So list out the benefits (how you created value) backed up by multiple examples, not the features (job duties and tasks you performed).  When someone reads your resume they may be reading about you, but they’re thinking about themselves, it’s basic human nature.  You want them to say, I know what this person can do for me - they’re the solution I’ve been looking for.

Do you create order out of chaos?  What a great statement to put on your resume followed by concrete examples that recap results produced through your efforts.  If someone is wrestling with chaos, you’ll make them sit up and take notice more than if you say you analyze processes using SIPOCs and paredo charts, and facilitate cross-functional work teams to identify best practices…blah blah.  I’m bored just writing that sentence. 

Whether you’re selling yourself, a product or an idea, you’ll get to explain the ‘how,’ but only after you’re invited in.

When I start working with a new client, they often claim that they don’t know the value they create – they’re not conscious or aware of it.  They know what they do, but it often takes a game show’s worth of questions to get to the underlying value.  Once we’ve gone through that process of few times, they start paying attention and seeking this perspective. 

And wonder of wonders, they’re happier, feel more fulfilled and are often viewed by others as being at a more senior level. 

How do you create value?  

3 Ways To Turn Up The Volume Of Your Job

Your job is OK, not bad, just OK.  But you’d like it to be more than OK, you’d like it to be – dare to dream - great! 

You don’t need to find a new job to have a great job.  Here are three ways to redesign, add on, and de-clutter your way to a great job.

Work To Your Strengths:

We all have things we do really well, without even trying.  People ask, how do you do that?  And we answer, I don’t know – I just do it.  That’s one of your strengths in action.  A strength is a combination of innate talent combined with knowledge and skills acquired through experience. 

Becoming conscious of our strengths is the fast path to success because your greatest potential for growth comes from your areas of strength, not your areas of weakness.  To turn up the volume of your current job, redesign it around your strengths.   You probably have more leeway than you think to design your job around your strengths.

One of the core questions Gallup asks is, “At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”  Think how great it would feel to answer, “Yes!”

I love the Gallup StrengthsFinder tool.  If you’ve never taken this assessment, purchase a new copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0, complete the online questionnaire using the access code in the back of the book, and download the detailed report of your top 5 talent themes.   Then identify your strengths and find ways to incorporate them into your days. 

Don’t’ Go It Alone

When I interview new clients who are unhappy in their current job, the common theme I hear is they feel alone.  No one supports them, no one appreciates them, and interactions with coworkers are generally negative.  They feel isolated, set up for failure, and the only solution they can see is to find a new job. 

Don’t let things deteriorate to this point.  Building authentic relationships with coworkers, networking in your industry, and partnering with others is something successful people make a conscious effort to do well, even if it’s outside their comfort zone.

I was coaching a new client recently who likes to work at a really fast pace.  But he understands the risks associated with his business well enough to know when he needs to reach out to a couple of trusted partners for help thinking things through.  We all need those sounding boards, no matter what we do for a living. 

My last boss in my corporate job asked me about my networking outside the company. I was not an industry networker, and I regret it now.  When coaching people in senior management positions, I urge them to make sure they have a network (including LinkedIn connections) with people outside of their company – people they meet at conferences, etc.  Keeping up with trends in the industry keeps you current and could spark some new ideas.  And of course it comes in handy if you find yourself looking for a new opportunity.

Stay Away from the Dark Side

The dreaded dark side is populated with negative people and energy vampires as well as your own inner beast or shadow.  The sooner you recognize that you’re engaging with the dark side, the sooner you can extricate yourself.  This includes Negative Nellies as well as those people who might be gunning for you, determined to make you look bad in public.  Find a way to disengage or limit your engagement with these people.  Recognizing them for what they are is the key.

We all have a shadow, that inner ogre that takes over when we’re stressed or pushed beyond our limits.  Different people have different looking shadows.  Mine retreats, but other people have shadows that turn combative, judgmental, overly critical, manipulative, close-minded, or pessimistic.  Learn what triggers your shadow so you can take steps to avoid those situations, or if you can’t avoid them, manage your responses.

Implement these three strategies, and “kick it up a notch” at work!

Am I On The Right Career Path?

For many years my dream job was to run a clothing boutique.  Starting when I was in high school I helped my Mom plan and shop for her wardrobe when she traveled with my Dad, who worked for Boeing.   These trips, usually to Asia or Europe, were 3 to 4 weeks long, covered multiple climates and included casual to dressy occasions.  Oh, and she was limited to one suitcase.  I then moved on to helping my friends shop for clothes so they could find just the right thing for a specific event or when their weight fluctuated up or down.  This is still one of my favorite things to do!

So running a clothing boutique made sense as my dream job.  I could do what I love all day and get paid for it!  Who wouldn’t love that?

How wrong I was.  It didn’t take long to learn that working in retail meant sore feet, an aching back and seeing the worst in people.  I loved helping women find something new to wear that communicated the best of how they saw themselves.  Unfortunately, I often had to smile through my frustration when they brought those great outfits back the next day because their husbands didn’t like this new image.  After a few months I headed back to banking.

Why was I so off track?  Looking back years later I see that I wasn’t off track.  I had just put the wrong job description to what I love to do.  That early experience was the first time I tried to create a career out of my passion, but I only dealt with the surface layer – I loved to help people shop for clothes.

It took me a number of years and a lot of distance to see and connect the dots that led me to being able to articulate my passion and my purpose: to see potential in people and help them bring that to the surface.  Whether it’s helping people choose something to wear, challenging my staff to grow by giving them more difficult assignments, or coaching people on how to navigate their careers – those are all pieces of the same puzzle. 

There’s a wonderful quote by Steve Jobs from his commencement address at Stanford:  you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backward.  How frustrating is that!  It’s like my horoscope, which never makes sense at the beginning of the day, but is more clear at the end of the day.

Want to find your purpose?  Start with searching for the dots – those common elements and themes that travel with you no matter what circumstances you’re in.  Resist the temptation to apply a job description.  You can do work that expresses your purpose any time and any place in your job, with friends, and with family. 

Here are a couple of ideas to help you spot your dots:

What draws you – what do you read, what interests you, what do you love to talk about?  Delve down into the weeds and get specific.  What is it that interests you; why does it interest you?  Make lots of notes.  My favorite books to read have always been self-help books and biographies.  I’m fascinated by people’s lives and what drives them.

At work, what do you do in every job? Regardless of the subject matter of my job whether running a big program to reduce deposit fraud, increasing the number of localized software product releases, or defining requirements for a new product, what I actually did was the same:  empower people and get them motivated to get moving in the direction we need to do go.   Some of my clients have said things like create order out of chaos, rally people around a common vision, build bridges across the organization, fix a mess.  What is that you can’t help but do?

Find those common threads and begin to follow them.  When you know what to look for, you’ll find those threads everywhere.  Once you do, your job description will be secondary.  Find and connect the dots, choose work you love that’s meaningful to you, and you’ll be on your way to the career of your dreams.