Managing Your Image and Exposure. Or How I Learned to Toot My Own Horn

He looks at me right in the eye and states it flatly. “You’re not doing anything.” Excuse me? I think I have misheard him. “You’re not doing anything.” At the moment I’m leading six committees, consulting to the executive of the business and designing and facilitating three-hour Diversity council meetings monthly. I protest.

“All that. Yeah. It’s not doing anything.”

I’m on a listening tour, meeting with each of the senior executives in my business to collect feedback. I’m sitting with the head of sales and I have to admit I did not see this one coming. He is one of the most important and vocal executives on the team. I am really confused. And pissed. In this moment he has given me an incredible gift, I just don’t realize it yet.

This when I first learned the importance of carefully managing your image. I really assumed that my contribution would be obvious to anyone who saw me working so hard and doing what I thought was a good job. Not so. I had not packaged my results, nor had I communicated them. I didn’t even know for certain what they were. And that’s on me. 

But I had a sense they were good. Given my outrage at his challenge I was now on a mission to find out for sure. Had all this work made any difference? I pulled out the employee survey results. Our group had close to a 100% response rate.  I had been with this business for the past five years and had a baseline from right before I started. At this company, we all used a 17-question index to measure the impact of Diversity efforts consistently across the firm. Questions about manager effectiveness, fairness, respect. I built a table.

The average increase from baseline was 24 points, with some increases as high as 50 points. Favorable responses on most questions were now above 75%. Not bad, right?

I started to publish and discuss the table everywhere. To the senior leadership team. To the executive. To the Diversity Council. To all the committees. Thank you for your contributions! Look what we accomplished together! That changed the conversation.

What I took away from this is you not only have to measure results, you have to promote them, and give shared credit to all who contributed to wins. Before this I saw that as shameless boasting, showboating, or a waste of my time.

It became clear that, done tastefully, this was to become an essential component of my work. Assuming that everyone would value my efforts and be supportive had become problematic. I would need to be proactive and get out in front it in the future. I saw that if you’re not acting like your own fact-based marketing department, other narratives can and may develop.

The other piece of this that grabs me as I look back on it now is what was my relationship like with this executive that in an information vacuum he decided my efforts were useless? Perhaps he didn’t value Diversity work per se. But I’m sure I could have done a much better job of understanding his agenda and establishing how my efforts supported and aligned with his. That is part of the exposure equation, which points to the scope and quality of your relationships with key stakeholders. It wasn’t on my radar screen at that time to manage these adjacent relationships carefully.

Besides avoiding problems caused by failure to manage image and exposure, which I thought were not bullseye aspects of my work,  there’s a possible upside to my performance that I was missing. Even though the results were terrific, having the explicit agreement of an executive like this would have made a meaningful difference to the degree to which the efforts impacted every person in his organization, which was a huge part of the business.

So the question becomes how to manage all three aspects when my tendency is still to put my head down and just focus on my performance. I know it has to become embedded in my habits, and I still have work to do in this area. See the attached worksheet that I'll be using to better plan my routines to continue to address the all-important image and exposure. I think it will make a difference for you if you use it too. Let me know.