If you’re aspiring to join the C-suite and beyond, the tips below may help:

Speak effectively about your work

All candidates considered for senior-level roles are qualified. The biggest differentiator is your ability to effectively communicate the work you’re doing. You want to educate others about your accomplishments in a memorable and likable way.  Learn to be a spokesperson for the amazing work you’ve done and share the lessons learned that can help others in the organization. Avoid the trap of focusing only on the pursuit and execution of your goals without communicating the results you’re achieving.

Executive recruiters can’t extract the complexity of what you’ve done from your resume without your narration. Recruiters for senior-level positions expect a healthy list of impactful accomplishments. On-time and on-budget are no longer enough. What grabs their attention is the candidate who can go beyond WHAT they accomplished and articulate HOW they accomplished it.

• Can you clearly demonstrate your ability to bring people along with you?
• Did your relationships deepen after the assignment or did people want to lean away from you?
• How did you drive transformation and what was the specific business impact?

Get personal

One of the board directors at the session mentioned that she was passed up for a C-suite level role because her board didn’t “know her”. She recognized that she only talked about business with the board and skipped the relational stuff, worrying that the board directors were too senior for small talk. Since then, she’s made the time to connect more personally with these important decision-makers and not only did she make it to the top job at her firm, she’s now an independent director on several public and private boards.

Stay connected and be helpful

If you are shooting for a C-suite role, what are you doing to get relevant face time with individuals who are exposed to high-level opportunities? To get in front of key decision-makers, find time to reconnect with senior-level contacts in your industry, grab lunch with executive recruiters, or join a non-profit board. Once you do connect, deepen your impression by finding ways to authentically help the people around you. Sponsors and mentors are also critical. If you don’t have any, that’s a warning sign. According to one executive, if you want others to advocate for you, first, they must like you. Then they must believe you generate good ideas. And lastly, they must believe you can execute.

Take the high-visibility assignments

To get noticed in your organization, work on projects and initiatives that matter. This will probably mean taking a risk that’s outside your comfort zone. Figure out what is keeping your executives up at night and volunteer to help solve their problem. Remember that for senior-level projects, you can’t win by yourself since the scope of your projects will likely be enterprise-wide. You’ll need to work with others to succeed and build a track record of delivering results. What are you doing now to build up your influence structure to succeed across your organization?

Understand and assimilate key trends

In the past, recruiters were looking for leaders who were decisive and could make tough calls. Now, they are also looking for softer skills – the ability to relate to the workforce and think about diversity, to name a few. As an aspiring leader, you should focus on the business impact of prevailing trends. How will artificial intelligence change the profit and loss equation? How do you think through your investments around cybersecurity? How do you leverage international assignments to add value to your company? How does diversity impact your organization?

Focus on Employability as opposed to Employment

When you’re assessing professional opportunities, think about the skills you need to enhance your employability. Don’t get hung up on a particular function, job track, or title. Leverage your current role to improve how you add value and leave the role better than when you found it. Find ways to build core business skills, connect with key stakeholders, and raise your public profile. You want your boss to know that you’re agile and an asset to any employer. Summed up memorably by one of our senior speakers,

“I love you and the organization. But please don’t confuse that with needing you and the organization.” 

Play politics well

In most companies, politics exist because you have limited resources and competing motivations. At the most senior levels, this dynamic is supercharged because ambitions are bigger, and all the players are good at getting what they want. If you’re not willing to play politics, you’ll be a victim of politics. Learn to read the people around you. Are they looking out for themselves or looking out for the organization? What makes them tick?

One board director recalled the importance of asserting yourself without making others look bad. She recounted a time when someone was claiming credit for her work and instead of calling it out, she found it very effective to play dumb. Instead of, “Why are you taking credit for my work?“, she said, “I heard this was represented in this way. Is there anything I can clarify to help you move forward with your goals?” The other person got the message.

Rising to the pinnacle of your organization is not easy but if you can speak effectively about your work, build authentic relationships, and help others achieve their goals, you’ll have a good shot.

Photo by Benjamin Child

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When you are great at something, you’ll find yourself with more opportunities than you have time. Now the previously successful, say-yes-to-everything approach begins to hurt you. Not only will you be overwhelmed, but the more serious consequence is that you’ll end up confusing others about your brand.

To continue your success, you need to build and more importantly, maintain a strong brand.

Brands are the shortcuts people use to make decisions. When you buy Coca-Cola or a BMW, you know exactly what you’re getting. When people “buy” you, how sure are they about the quality they’ll get from you? The more uncertain they are, the more likely they’ll invest their time, money and energy with someone else.

To build your brand, take control of how others experience you:

• How you look and make others feel
• What you say and do (and how you say and do it)
• Where you are and are not

Before we look at how you can manage other people’s perceptions in these three areas, you must first be clear on your brand. If you’re not sure, a quick and easy way to get started is to ask yourself:

What adjectives do I want

[my target audience or ideal client] 

to think about when they think about me and my work? 

Take a few minutes and write down 3-4 adjectives you want your target audience to use to describe you. If you don’t have a target audience yet, think about the individuals you enjoy working and interacting with most often. For me, I want high-performing leaders to describe me as practical, focused on excellence, caring and thoughtful.

To build a strong recognizable brand, consistency is key. It’s not enough that you see yourself as the adjectives you’ve chosen, you need others to see you that way as well.

So how do you ensure others will use the same adjectives you chose to describe you?

Below are practical tips based on my work with leaders at Fortune 500 companies and top academic universities:

How you look and make others feel

Think back to an event where you took notice of someone you didn’t know.

The first thing you probably did was to size them up based on what you saw – their dress, their body language and the response they received from others. Processing this visual information, you guessed at their seniority, level of success, job function, etc. This judgement helped you decide whether you approached them to engage and learn more about them.

If you decided not to engage, then your impression is solely based on what you’ve seen. If you do approach them, you further fine-tuned or corrected your assumptions based on what you heard and saw during your interaction.

This automatic tendency to judge based on what we see is natural and a survival instinct. You judge others and people judge you constantly. You want to keep in mind that as you become more successful, the amount of time people have to get to know you at a deeper level drops dramatically. They will judge you based on what they see and the little they know. Unfortunately, in most cases, you won’t be able to correct any faulty assumptions.

Think of your senior executives or the President of your country (if you’re already a senior executive). How much do you really know about them? Probably not too much yet you may already have a strong judgment about the type of person they are.

This is why you need to manage how people see you and look the part you want to play. When people see you, will they automatically assume the adjectives you’ve chosen? How do you match up to what they are expecting? If you show up to Facebook with a dark suit and tie and talk about the work you do with Silicon Valley tech companies, don’t be surprised if people suspect your credibility.

Disney does a great job tightly controlling your experience with them. Everyone I’ve spoken to about Disney, uses very similar adjectives: over-the-top service, awesome experience, and not cheap. For those who haven’t experienced Disney firsthand, there is a high probability that you’ll have a great time when you do go.

When others interact with you, what do you want them to walk away remembering and feeling? How do you want to emotionally connect with them? What would you like them to say to their network about you? Is it consistent with the adjectives you’ve chosen?

To practically influence how others experience you, be thoughtful about:

What you say and do (and how you say and do it)

Your physical appearance, words, and actions make up the experience others will have of you.

We’ve covered what people see, now let’s focus on your words and actions. Do they align with how you want others to see you? Are you using words that resonate with your target audience and does your vocabulary match what they are expecting from you?

How do you say what you say? What does your tone, speaking rhythm, accent, and energy say to others? Powerful people tend to speak more deliberately. British accents tend to sound more sophisticated. Passionate people tend to speak with more energy. These are all ways people can interpret how you talk.

Now for your actions. What activities are you engaged in and do they help others see you the way you want to be seen?

For example, if you take copious notes during a meeting, people will likely see you as being a junior employee (unless you’re Richard Branson).

Other questions to consider:

• When speaking at conferences, what topics are you speaking on?
• What books are you reading?
• Do you take on projects that are consistent with your brand?

Which leads me to the last area of focus.

Where you are and are not

When you’re successful, people want to enlist you to help them. This means countless partnership or speaking requests, special project proposals, and event or board invitations. As a high performer, you’ll be tempted to help especially with requests from those close to you in your network.

Before you say “yes” to any opportunity, ask yourself:

How consistent is this activity with the reputation I want?

When managing your brand, knowing where you shouldn’t be is just as important as knowing where you should be. If you’re building a reputation as an expert on disruptive technologies in manufacturing, it’ll be confusing if others see you frequently speak on investing and personal finance, even if you can give quality advice on those topics.

Again, to build a brand that people recognize, you must be consistent. People have to have a similar experience every time for an extended period before they begin to automatically associate you with your brand.

This means better allocating your limited time by saying “no” to opportunities that won’t allow you to exude the adjectives you’ve chosen. When you attend an event that is either neutral or negative in building your brand, you’re essentially saying “no” to an event or activity that can positively enhance your reputation.

The same idea extends to the people you associate with and your environment. You will be judged by the company you keep and where you spend your time. If you spend a lot of time with innovative people, others will assume you’re innovative. Some people assume Googlers, Google employees, are smart and quirky despite never working at Google or meeting a Googler. Others assume those in labor-intensive roles are less-educated.

Look closely at where you’re spending your time and who you’re spending it with. Would your surroundings make a strong case for your desired image or is it something you need to hide?

Take time to architect your brand.

One tip is to study characters on TV or film. Great actors believably take on different character roles. The way they do it is by understanding what people expect from a certain character and matching their look, feel, actions and environment to the mainstream expectation. Professors wear tweed, sport beards and drive Toyotas. High-powered businessmen wear custom suits, gel back their hair and have chauffeurs. Bankers wear ties. Consultants don’t. The list goes on.

Decide on the brand you want and find an actor or actress that believably exudes those qualities. How does he or she look, act and make others feel? How is their environment portrayed? Get specific on the behaviors and mimic them.

It’s not easy to build a brand. That’s why the good ones are worth so much.

Photo by Vadim Timoshkin

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The answer to this question has nothing to do with your job title and everything to do with your approach to your work and the experience you give to others.

So, how do you know if you’re a professional?

Ask yourself, “Do the key traits below describe me?”

Professionals:

Recover quickly from setbacks

When a professional makes a mistake, they don’t let it ruin their next shot. They have a strong ability to “reset” and clear their head to continue the performance. Some refer to this as GRIT. Are you able to bounce back quickly or do you let your first error spiral into many others?

Perform at a high-level no matter how they feel or where they are

World-class snipers train through exhaustion so they can perform under sub-optimal conditions. Can you deliver excellence despite being sick or under imperfect condition?

Professionals try to create perfect conditions through preparation and early arrival but are flexible and ready to perform under any condition they encounter. If you need everything to be perfect to perform well, unless you’re performing a death-defying stunt, you’re probably not a professional.

Strive for mastery and think about their craft

Professionals think about their craft from different angles and find ways to keep sharpening their skills. At first, they apprentice by copying the greats. Once they master the fundamentals, they push the outer limits of their craft and step into their own style and technique. How much do you think about HOW you do WHAT you do? What have you identified as areas of development?

Get paid well for the value they offer

Professionals are recognized and rewarded for their value. People pay doctors and lawyers a good fee for their services. Are you getting paid a wage where you can sustain both your living needs and wants?  If not, you’re not a professional, yet.

When learning, look for metaphors as opposed to memorize

I’ll let Seth Godin explain this one.

So, are you a pro or still an amateur? 

Photo by Sasha Kargaltsev

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“You have to be more visible.”

If you’re an introvert, you might have heard these two pieces of feedback before. And if you’re a high performer, they can be especially irksome. Speaking up just isn’t something you do. But be that as it may, failing to make your voice heard at pivotal moments might be hurting your career.

Most high-performing introverts tend to have good reasons for staying quiet during meetings and other situations where sharing their views would be helpful. In those cases, it first helps to figure out which of your assumptions are preventing you from contributing to the discussion.

Here are three of the most common reasons, and how to overcome them:

“I want to be respectful.”

Good intention: When you’re invited to a senior-level meeting, chances are you’re one of the more junior employees in the room. Your natural tendency might be to defer to those more senior to you and soak in the conversation since it’s not your place to talk. This deferential inclination is especially strong for individuals raised in cultures that respect and value hierarchy.

Unintended impact: Your deference causes you to become invisible in the meeting. When no one knows you, they don’t know what you can do and will not think of you come promotion time. After you reach a certain level, the number of senior executives who know you and have a good impression of you will directly correlate with your career success.

Practical Fix: Prepare to say something at the meeting. One senior executive shared with me that for every meeting he goes to, he’ll ask the person who invited him the following questions: who is going to be there, why has he been invited and what will we be discussing? He then takes time to prepare how he’ll add value to the conversation.

Understand that you can share your viewpoints and still be respectful. As long as you can contribute something substantive without overstepping your bounds or reaching beyond your knowledge base, you’ll be fine. For every meeting, strive to say at least one thing – you can ask a question, play back what you’ve heard or comment on what’s being said.

“I have nothing else to add.”

Good intention: Everything that needs to be said has already been shared. You hate it when others waste time saying nothing in meetings, so you refrain from talking for the sake of talking. If you’re a good listener and have a tendency to let others speak first, or if you’re on a team with a few dominant personalities, you’ll most likely fall into this category.

Unintended impact: Imagine seeing yourself from another attendee’s perspective. Even if you have the best ideas, someone who doesn’t know you will reasonably assume you don’t have any ideas as long as you don’t share them. Worse, you might be perceived as someone who doesn’t care. Neither one of these misperceptions will help you in your career, and it’s up to you to set them straight.

Practical Fix: Speak up earlier. If you wait until the end of the meeting, chances are someone else will already have shared your idea. Make it your goal to be one of the first two people to speak in the meeting. You might also want to observe those who speak up first, and note what they say and how they say it.

“I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

Good intention: You don’t want to appear incompetent in front of people who will judge you and have a say in your career. If you’re with a client, you may not want to say anything to jeopardize the deal or damage the relationship. Why not let your more senior and experienced colleagues handle it? Isn’t that why they are there in the first place?

Unintended impact: Your client sees you as the scribe or assistant and you never build the working relationship you need to get to the next level. For internal meetings, your boss thinks you don’t have a mind of your own and sees you more as an order-taker than an influencer.

Practical Fix: Before the meeting, ask your more senior colleagues what they want you to cover and how they want you to participate. This will help you decide when you can jump in during the meeting. You might also ask your senior colleagues to help pull you into the conversation for certain topics.

During the meeting, for every question that’s asked, come up with you answer silently and compare it to what your more senior colleagues are saying. As your answers begin to consistently align with what you hear, you’ll gain the confidence to speak up knowing that your responses will be on the right track.

Being invited to a senior-level meeting or a high stakes pitch are rare windows of opportunity showcase yourself. Don’t waste it. Prepare diligently for the meeting and be clear on the value you can add to the conversation. When you do share your views, make sure it’s concise, articulate and focused on the topic at hand. There is nothing more annoying than to hear someone trying to impress others or prove how smart or how hard-working they are.

Speaking up effectively is a delicate balance. If you don’t talk, no one knows you. If you talk too much, people begin to wonder, “Who do you think you are?”

To fine tune this balance, get feedback after a meeting wraps up. If your manager or mentor will be there, share with them beforehand that you’re working on speaking up and ask them to give you specific feedback and feedforward (suggestions for improvement) after. They’ll let you know if you need to speak up even more, or if you’re going overboard.

When it’s between speaking up or staying quiet, your habit will be to let others talk. Consciously take the risk to speak up whenever you can – the upside is tremendous and the downside is fairly limited.

Original version first published by Fast Company.

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When you show that you sincerely care, your clients can tell and will appreciate you for it with more business and referrals. Unfortunately, in most interactions, the natural tendency is to think more about what you want than how you might be able to help and care for your client.

Some quick ways to recognize when you’re more focused on yourself are:

• Impressing others by deliberately showing them how hard you work or how prepared or smart you are
• Hiding a mistake or blaming others to protect your image of perfection
• Defaulting to silence as opposed to asking a “dumb” question when you really don’t know
• Shying away from the dirty work that’s beyond your level or pay grade

To become memorable to your clients, you want to overcome three main fears that Patrick Lencioni outlines in his book, Getting Naked:

Fear of Losing the Business

No one likes losing business. That’s why it’s so natural to shy away from being the bearer of bad news even when it’s necessary. To set yourself apart, you want to focus less on your needs to win or keep the business and more on what will help your clients reach their outcomes. Let the goal of helping guide your actions. This may mean speaking up when you know something is wrong or sharing your best ideas even at the risk of your client/prospect using it as opposed to hiring you.

Fear of Being Embarrassed

Rarely will you find someone looking to embarrass themselves. That’s why we laugh at jokes we don’t understand when others are laughing and we stay quiet and nod when someone says something that we don’t fully understand. Those who are self-confident, know that it’s better to ask and be clear than to feign understanding and assume with uncertainty. Although you do run the risk of certain people judging you for a “bad” question, your clients are better off when you clearly understand what’s happening as opposed to appearing to understand.

The same goes for when you share your ideas as well. Better to suggest them and run the risk of it being shot down than not to share at all. Now if your ideas are constantly being criticized and rejected, you may have a competency issue.

Fear of Being Inferior

As a high-performer, you prepare hard to avoid mistakes and to rise above your competition. That’s why it’s difficult for you to be placed in a situation where you’re taking the blame for your client or doing the nitty-gritty work that you feel is beneath you. When it comes to serving your client, the main theme that helps you overcome all this fear and all of the other fears is to focus on your client. What does your client need from you right now and how can you give that to them.

One guiding principle that stuck with me from a Disney leadership workshop I attended is :

“It may not be our fault, but it is our problem.”

If you’re wired to look for and solve your client’s problems above all else, they’ll remember you for a long time.

Photo by Christopher Michel

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