Building your brand - Being visibile in a cross ranking environment

Your personal brand and reputation are the most reliable tools for succeeding and being perceived as succeeding in an organization. A lot of people rely on their nearest manager to do the heavy lifting. That can become a single point of career failure. They may move or be moved. They may not have the personality for ratings combat. A better plan is to help them help you when it comes time for new opportunities, promotions, and compensation.  

Cross-group rankings are objective, in theory, but are really a cage match of discussions between management where they put everyone into a pool and rank them against each other.  This means management speaks up about their people to increase perception and question other management about their staff to create doubt about their people's relative position. The best way to come out on top of this is to have strong management and to be visible to others to create familiarity before the process.  This is especially true in environments where the people still around at the end of the year are forced to fit into some type of curve with a fixed percentage at each level of rated competency.  


Your management and others push and question each other when it comes time to make retention, compensation, and retention discussions. You need as many others on your side as you can get. The best people will be buried if they have a weak manager and their capabilities are not well known.  A great manager may not be enough to offset someone invisible.

The workplace is a competitive cooperative environment. It is a cooperative environment because the organization only succeeds if people work together towards the same goals.  It is competitive because promotions, money, and opportunities are based on perceived capabilities and motivation measured in absolute values and relative to other staff.

Building your brand

Building your brand means 
  1. Having a roadmap of today's and tomorrow brand building actions.
  2. Excelling at work on your team in a way that is visible to others.
  3. Helping other teams in cross-functional areas so that their success is partially because of you.
  4. Being visible in management discussions and cross-team communication and projects.
Your manager should help you create a personal brand and become more visible.  It makes them look good and makes it easier in any cross-team discussions. Ask your manager
How can I build my brand?

What can I do to become more visible to others? 

Some situations may be outside your control. Reorganizations or executive leadership changes can disconnect you from those that respect your work.  That can result in a situation where you have to start over. I've been able to move into another group because of a good brand and then had that all vanish as part of turmoil and turnover.  

Contractor life can be different.  They need to impress a smaller set of people to be renewed. 

Video

Identifying good and bad leadership

I had two managers for the same position in the same organization. One of them got promoted quickly but had no direct reports promoted in the two years I tracked them.  The other one asked us regularly 
What are you doing to build your brand to help me push you up at year end ranking time?

The former got mad when we asked questions outside our group. The latter had people follow them to other companies.

Revision History

Created 2024 01

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaults to a maximum RAM size of 5
Read more

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Update Driver  does  not  install the RNDI
Read more

DNS for Azure Point to Site (P2S) VPN - getting the internal IPs

Image
I wanted to access all my Azure resources without making any of them visible to the Internet.   The easiest give my local machine access to everything on my Azure Virtual Network (VNET) was to connect to it over VPN. It turns out creating Azure VPN gateways and connecting to Azure VPN endpoints is easy.  There are some subtleties in getting DNS name resolution to work that can confuse when first starting out. Setting the Stage There are a few ways to get to Azure endpoints and resources that are blocked from the internet.  We can  Create a Point-to-Site connection from our local machines to Azure Network Gateways Create a Site-to-Site network connection from our local networks to Azure Network Gateways. Use Bastion Hosts Use Cloud Shell Leave everything open to the internet. I chose a Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN connection that connects from my laptop to a VNet Gateway.  That joins my laptop
Read more