How to become the one they notice without becoming someone you're not
I took this picture in my garden this weekend. It's September in Colorado, which means my tomatoes have realized there's a deadline. The very cool nights and early mornings are not exactly ideal for the magical trip from green to red on the vine. For weeks they've all hung there growing, assuming they had as much time as they needed to reach their full potential.
Because my professional world revolves around who is hiring, what they are hiring for, and how we can deliver the red tomato. That fully ripened, prepared-to-be-picked candidate that just stands out from the bunch naturally. My goal with this week's article is to offer some words of wisdom around the importance of authenticity.
If you're the type of leader RPA works with, you're not struggling because you lack experience. Quite the opposite. You have 15 or 20+ years of impressive experience. You've led teams, fixed problems, grown companies, survived restructures, launched products, made difficult decisions, and accumulated enough accomplishments to fill a couple of pages on a resume easily.
Then you enter this turbulent, unknown, and reportedly tepid job market full of people who can say many of the same things: strategic leader, results-driven, transformation, growth, operational excellence, innovative, customer-focused. After a while, everybody starts looking a little green.
THE PROBLEM WITH TRYING TOO HARD TO BE THE RED TOMATO
Realizing you must "do something" to stand out, and suddenly feeling like you're supposed to productize yourself, you manufacture a clever tagline and post things you would never actually say. You make a dramatic move to stuff your LinkedIn profile with skills, and tell everyone you are a visionary, a thought leader, a disruptor, and maybe add a little stretch on EBITDA metrics for good measure.
This is a big however. The humans who eventually sit across the table from you in the hiring process are usually remarkably good at sensing when something doesn't quite match the person they're looking at. A gap between expectation and truth can kill a hire and conclude an opportunity.
Wayne Dyer made this case throughout Unstoppable Me!: what carries you forward isn't the version of yourself built to impress a room; it's what's genuinely singular about you. Differentiation built around someone else's idea of impressive is exhausting. Differentiation built around what is already true is much easier to sustain.
WHEN DOES STANDING OUT AND FITTING IN BENEFIT YOU MOST
Your professional brand has to do two hard jobs at the same exact time. It needs to give people enough familiarity to understand where you fit and enough distinction to remember why you're different.
Maybe you're the person companies bring in when growth has outrun infrastructure, or you can walk into an organization where sales, operations, and technology barely speak the same language and get them moving together. Maybe you're exceptional at turning around teams without clearing the building and starting over. Or perhaps you see patterns in customer behavior before the numbers make them obvious. Those things are considerably more memorable than "proven executive with a track record of driving results," and more importantly, they give someone a reason to say your name when you're not around.
THE REAL TEST OF A PROFESSIONAL BRAND
Can someone else explain you?
We sometimes make personal branding much more complicated than it needs to be. Ask five people who have worked closely with you what you're unusually good at, then listen. Don't stop them, correct them, or give them any input prior to asking this question. Listen for patterns and repetition.
Then ask a better question: when would you recommend me to someone? This inquiry forces them to put you into context. When a company needs this, or a CEO is dealing with that. When a team has fallen into this pattern or when an organization is trying to get from here to there. These answers are probably much closer to your actual professional brand than the paragraph you spent three hours writing for LinkedIn.
AND THEN YOU HAVE TO LET PEOPLE SEE IT
This is where you might get uncomfortable, because it feels like bragging. It isn't.
Kid Rock has a line in the song Cocky.
They say I’m cocky and I say what?
It ain’t bragging mutha f#*!er if you back it up.
Tell the story and share what you now know to be true about you as a professional (as proven by five of your past comrades).
The temptation is to figure out what the interview room is gonna want and pretend to be that person for an hour. But the more complicated work happens before you ever get the interview. You simply have to know what makes you a red tomato. What do you bring, where does it matter, and do you have the stories that prove it? Get comfortable enough with your own experience that you don't have to perform it.
BACK TO MY TOMATO
I have absolutely no idea why that particular tomato ripened first. Sunlight, genetics, its position on the plant, maybe just luck.
But I know why I noticed it. It was different enough to catch my eye and familiar enough that I immediately knew what I was looking at.
The simple truth about a professional brand is: You don't need everyone to notice you; you simply need the right people to recognize you, so that when they're looking at a group of qualified candidates and asking, "Which one?" you've already given them an outstanding reason to pick you.
If you're not sure your positioning is doing that work for you right now, that's exactly what a Clarity Call is built for. It's a straightforward look at how you're showing up in the market and where the gap is.
Recognition · Insight · Clarity · Action
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