The eighth principle of Advanced Change Theory (ACT) is inspire others to enact their best self.  While we always maintain reverence for those involved in change, as we push action toward the edge of chaos in pursuit of our vision for the common good, we have to ask our followers for “stretch efforts.”

In asking for “stretch efforts,” the leader continually models the courage, integrity, competence and concern expected of followers. In this way, mutuality is created between the leader and the follower. (p. 8 )

Because we expect the highest standards from our people, as leaders we have to serve as role models for high standards.  If we are really stretching, there will always be a gap between where we are and what we are trying to become.  Those gaps take time to close, and they make us uncomfortable because they reveal our vulnerabilities.  As a leader, you can find strength in vulnerability if you can learn to live with the creative tension that exists in the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

Don’t surrender to the expediency of pulling the vision down to your current level of competence. Model the way in allowing the vision to pull you forward.  Your folks need to see you struggling with imperfection in your pursuit of transformational learning.  Only then will they know for sure it is safe for them to do the same.

None of us can ever become our best self unless and until we confront our imperfect self.  Model the way for your folks in this continual process of transformation and improvement.

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Leadership integrity: Touchy-feely crap?

Today I am speaking to the Reno Rotaract Club about personal branding, and next week I start a class on personal branding through UNR Extended Studies.  In this video I encourage you to create an attitude in others about yourself and your brand.  The attitude you attempt to create about your brand should have all the components of the ABC model of attitudes: Affect, Behavioral intentions, and Cognition.

Always lead with your value, and be consistent and authentic as you use different social medial platforms to communicate your brand.  If you are inconsistent or inauthentic, you risk creating cognitive dissonance in those that evaluate you and your brand. 

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Personal Branding: Document and Target Your Value

Consistently Contribute Value

One of my favorite bloggers, Mary Jo Asmus, wrote an article recently entitled “Staying in Integrity.” She correctly pointed out that integrity is hard to define.  I’ve written about integrity previously in my articles entitled “Leadership Credibility,” and “Trust.”  I see a lot of folks confusing integrity with honesty.  Honesty is necessary for integrity, but it’s not enough. 

When people look at us to determine if we have integrity, the key thing they are looking for is an alignment of our values with theirs.  Do we speak and act in ways consistent with the things they value? Even if we have impeccable honesty and do what we say we will do, if the things we say and do are not things that our followers value and care about, then we have not passed the integrity test in their eyes.

So to have integrity, the first and most important thing you need to do as a leader is to shut up! It is impossible to listen if you are doing all the talking, and you need to listen to your followers if you want to have any chance of discerning what they really value.  When your followers feel safe enough with you to share the things they really value, engage them in dialogue.  Ask questions to make sure you really understand not just what they care about, but also why they care about it. 

Next, you are going to need to speak – about yourself.  Your followers need to know who you are, what you value, and why you value it, so please share these things.  Be transparent, clear, and consistent as you develop for your followers the story of you.  They need this story to make sense of who you are and why you do the things you do; without it you are simply a black box.  You need to come to grips with the fact that your folks are going to talk about you, so give them something to talk about.

Now you are ready to begin speaking and acting consistent with what we say we will do.  Remember, you can’t credit yourself with integrity.  Only your followers can credit you with integrity, so you better have a credible system for keeping your finger on the pulse of what they are thinking.

Let me suggest the most credible system – relationship.  Form real relationships with your direct reports.  Teach, train, and coach them to do the same with their direct reports and make quality relationships a formal part of your accountability, reward, and promotion systems.  The only way to make integrity anything more than lofty rhetoric is to make it a formal part of your operating system.

Sound like touchy-feely crap to you?  Well remember this – if you fail the integrity test your people won’t trust you.  If your people don’t trust you, those that can’t find another job will never realize peak performance.  Your customers won’t be impressed by the poor service and substandard products, so prepare for the pain of trying to maintain your bottom line with an evaporating top line.

Any leader that is serious about results is serious about integrity. 

What do you think?  Have you worked with people that were honest but lacked integrity as I’ve described it here?  Does your leader’s integrity affect you or is my head in the clouds?

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Value is the core concept of personal branding.  Once you understand what you do uniquely well to help others solve problems that matter to them, the Web provides you some powerful tools to associate that value with your name.  If you are not using a blog to document and target your value you are neglecting the single most powerful tool for personal branding.

Document your value by blogging about your competencies and strengths that matter most to those that need to care about what you do.  Never forget that lots of other people also do what you do. Differentiate yourself from the competition by writing blog articles that showcase how what you do and particularly why you do it merits attention and action.

For example, if you are an accountant, blog about why you love accounting, how you chose it as a profession, why you think it is a critical function for companies, and your advice on how to do it with distinction.  Tell us about the leaders in your field that have influenced your thinking about accounting.  Give us your opinion about changes that are taking place and changes that are not taking place that you think would improve the practice of accounting.  NEVER mention your current job or employer, but help us understand the beauty you see in the profession of accounting.

Target your value with blog posts that will appeal to those that need your value right NOW.  For example, last week I submitted a proposal to provide training on courageous followership to a government agency.  To help support my proposal, I blogged extensively about courageous followership in the month leading up to the submission date.  This week I spoke to the Sparks Chamber of Commerce about personal branding and in November I plan to teach a class in personal branding, so I am doing more blog posts on the subject.  I am working on another proposal to provide training on performance management systems, so guess what you should expect to see me blogging more about in the coming month?  Yep.

Blogging is the single most effective way to document and target your value.  Anyone serious about personal branding needs to be serious about blogging.  There are many other benefits to blogging, and the best thing is blogging is free!

If you are serious about personal branding, and you should be, use your blog and every other social media site you operate on as a tool – not a playground. Stay focused and don’t dilute the power of your brand with a mixed message.   Don’t tell folks about what an ethical, professional accountant you are and then operate on Facebook as if you have something to hide.

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Rebecca Thorman’s Advice on Blogging and Personal Branding

If you followed the advice in my previous article Personal Branding: Some Simple First Steps, you should now have a decent photograph of yourself, an e-mail address with your name in it, an about me statement or better yet a statement of purpose, and an account on Linkedin.  Everywhere you go online with your personal brand you should have a consistent display of your name, photograph, and purpose.

Next you should set up an account in Facebook.  Facebook has surpassed Myspace in terms of number of users, and it is a much better platform for your personal brand.  It is also a very misused social media site.

When you create your page at http://www.facebook.com/ make sure to use the vanity URL, which puts your name in your Facebook address.  My Facebook address is http://www.facebook.com/bretsimmons

Use the same photo you used at your Linkedin account as your profile photo in Facebook.  Right below your photo, insert your statement of purpose or a short about me statement.  This is the essence of your personal brand and to be effective it needs to be consistent on all your accounts.

Set up your “info” page as if you were having a conversation with someone at a meeting of your local Chamber of Commerce.  You don’t want to give out your phone number or e-mail address, but almost anything else you can share on this page could potentially come up as a topic of casual conversation at any in-person networking function, so tell us something about yourself.  Include the link to your business if you own one, your blog when you get one, and your Linkedin page (which everyone should have by now).

I think Facebook is the perfect place to be both professional and personal at the same time.  A lot of folks will tell you that you should keep these parts of your life separate online by creating multiple identifies or sorting your contacts on Facebook so that not everyone can see everything about you.  I think that is terrible advice.  As I’ve said before in my article The Google Background Check, the sooner you accept the fact that you have no privacy online the sooner you can learn how to be professionally personal and develop your personal brand with social networking sites much more effectively.

By using your real name, a recent photo, and some facts about you in the info section, you are being personal.  The photo section of Facebook can be used to be even more personal, which I would encourage you to do, but this is also the section where people make the most mistakes.  Use the photo section to show people the breadth or your interests and activities.  If you run, show us some pictures of your recent events. If you travel, show us some photos from your favorite trips.  If you love animals, show us a few pictures of your animals.  You do NOT have to include your face or the face of any of your friends and family if you are not comfortable.  If you take a trip to Tahoe, post some pictures of your favorite spots on the lake and include a caption that says something like “my family really loved this spot.”  Now we know you have a family and you love Tahoe.

Post pictures of yourself having fun, but not being stupid.  I’m sorry, but you have to practice some professional judgment here if you want to use Facebook to build your personal brand.  Get rid of all those pictures of you and your friends in swimming suits drinking like fish.  Your friends were there to see you do it in person – they got the real thing and the rest of us won’t know or care what we missed.  If you want to use Facebook to help you build an effective personal brand, you must always put your best foot forward.  If you have a picture of you and your friends where you were too drunk to find your feet, don’t post it on Facebook.

If I post a comment to that picture of you scantily clad in a bird cage at Burning Man, everyone in MY friends list will be able to see your ENTIRE photo album.  So much for privacy.

Speaking of friends, don’t buy the Facebook lie that this site is only for your “friends.”  As I said in my article The Google Background Check, you should set your site up in such a way that you have nothing to hide and you have no reason to ever deny someone’s request to connect to you.  You can always hide any status updates on your home page if they bother you too much, and as a last resort, you can always disconnect with (unfriend) anyone does really stupid things in Facebook.

NEVER participate in any of those silly games your friends will send you that ask you stuff like what superhero are you or which small farm animal you are most like.  When you are on Facebook for personal branding, always remember that it is a tool and not a toy.  You are going to get all kinds of invitations to participate in a variety of goofy things – just ignore them.

For now, you should also ignore that little box at the top that says “What’s on your mind?”  Please realize that no one really cares.  That box is called a status update and in professional branding, it should be used to consistently contribute value associated with your personal brand.  I’ll talk about how you can do that via Twitter in another post soon, so stay tuned!

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For Bret’s Class from Modite on Vimeo.

Rebecca Thorman is one of my favorite bloggers. I follow her blog Modite, and I’ve written about her previously here. Her content is very good, but it’s not strictly the leadership and management stuff I write about here. What I like about Rebecca’s site is her process, especially how she incorporates video into her articles and how she respects and engages her audience. 

She is the only blogger I follow that I asked to speak to my Entrepreneurial Psychology class. Her schedule did not permit her to talk to us live via OOvOO, but she was kind enough to take the time to make this video especially for my class.  My students are working on creating their personal brands, and blogging is a part of that process as far as I am concerned.  Rebecca’s message adds real value to what we are doing.

Beyond blogging and personal branding, Rebecca’s message is one of authenticity and self-responsibility.  Even if you think you are not interested in blogging or personal branding, I urge to listen to what this remarkable young woman has to say.

Rebecca, you are a class act. I sincerely appreciate your time and effort and I know my students will as well.

Wow, it has been a LONG time since my last blog entry. The end of the semester is crazy busy. That’s an excuse, I know, but I’m sticking to it.

The fifth intentional activity from The How of Happiness is developing social support. Recall from my earlier blog that it’s these intentional activities and habits that can account for as much as 40% of our happiness. The first intentional activity was expressing gratitude, the second was deliberate optimism, the third was to stop overthinking and comparing ourselves to others, and the fourth was practicing acts of kindness.

Developing social support means having an adequate stock of people that you can call on to help in times of need and stress. There is a large body of research that shows it is one of the most effective coping mechanisms available. We can get social support from friends, family, colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, professionals (e.g. our doctor), or spiritual advisors (e.g. our minister).

And the relationship between friends and happiness is reciprocal. People with friends are more likely to be happy; likewise, happy people are more likely to have friends. We are most likely hard wired to seek out and maintain strong, stable, and positive interpersonal relationships.

Here are a few suggestions for developing friendships:

· Make time. Be available to others so you can offer support and encouragement if needed. Consider creating rituals (e.g. coffee breaks, lunch) where you can get together and stay in touch on a regular basis.
· Communicate. Be a good listener, but don’t neglect sharing of yourself. Be transparent with no hidden agenda and nothing to hide. If asked, be prepared to give your honest opinion.
·Watch your motives. There is no substitute for caring. We trust people that have our best intentions in mind. When we have a chance to influence others, it will always come down to a choice between favoring our self-interest or the interest of others. Over time, our words and deeds paint a very clear picture of us and people can tell if we do or do not care.

In my opinion, while it is good to be friendly with everyone at work, I think we should develop most of our closest friendships outside of work. This is especially important as we assume the privilege of leading others. The best leaders consult a wide variety of people – friends as well as foes – before making important decisions, and they do the right thing regardless of what their friends might think.

We have to be caring and authentic while remaining absolutely fair. Impressions are powerful, and even the slightest impression that we might play favorites at work can undermine our credibility.