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PositivityChange Post : Issue 29 : Staying Positive When the Novelty Wears Off

Happy Monday everyone!

I am here giving you a new shot of positivity to carry you throughout this week. I am doing so because the novelty of the second quarter has worn off and the real work begins. We here at PositivityChange.com are invested in doing the real work towards creating positive change in your personal and professional lives. Positive change is tough! It is NOT for the meek or faint of heart!

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Harvard Business Review tackled what happened when the novelty wore. In its article, the Hard Side of Change Management, the publication discussed four ways to measure change. For more information, read here:

Now that things are settling into routine and the mundane, you need to break through this by determining what’s urgent versus what’s important. Urgency demands immediate reaction. Importance can be prioritized. For more information about to how to know the difference:

One more article from the archives: Keeping the Momentum Until You Win. We are in week two of the second quarter and all of the people who were so gung ho about posting their second quarter goals on Facebook and LinkedIn had returned back to the same routines. Here’s how to break out of the mundane. Yes, positive change is hard but you have to still keep the momentum until you win!

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This Week in Positive Change Management : 5 Steps to Brand Consistency

There is a lot of poor branding out there. Every day some talking head is mentioning personal branding. No one talks about brand consistency; however, brand consistency is the way to stay memorable and relevant. Here are my 5 steps to achieving brand consistency:

Do your research

Doing your research is important because what you think your brand communicates isn’t necessarily want the marketplace thinks. Ask people inside and outside of your company and profession what three words come to mind whenever someone mentions you. Remember, the definition of branding is what people think of you when you are not around. If you don’t conduct the appropriate market research, you will never know how consistent (or inconsistent) your brand is.

Write down your mission statement

Your mission statement represents your current brand. To obtain a clear mission statement, ask yourself these two questions:

What do I want my brand to accomplish?
How do I want my brand to communicate these accomplishments?

Your mission statement must answer these questions by writing down 3 action verbs that best communicate them. This statement will serve as your brand consistency’s bedrock.

Define your vision statement. This will be your tagline.

Your vision statement is your optimal future version of your brand. It can also double as your tagline. Vision statements are usually less than 20 words and they communicate your brand consistency. You will be use your mission statement as the foundation to write your vision statement.

Develop a brand communication plan.

Use your mission and vision statements to create a solid brand communication plan. It is essential to control how your brand is transmitted. Although you work in a company, your brand must consistently communicate wherever you go. This is why I have broken down 4 audiences that will receive your brand message.

Below is a graph showing 4 quadrants. The columns represent organizational structure. They are departments (internal) and professional network (external). The rows represent people. They are coworkers and industry professionals (internal) and company employees and regular workers (external).

	Department (Internal)	Network (External)
People (Internal)	Coworkers	Workers in your profession but outside the company
People (External)	Employees outside your dept.	Workers outside both your profession and company

The first quadrant represents your coworkers are both inside your immediate department and whom you interact with on a daily basis. They are the ones whom you communicate the most. The second quadrant represents the company employees work in the same building but not the same department. Although they have the same company structure, their departmental culture may differ from yours. The third quadrant represents the workers in your professional network whom share your occupation but not your company. Your commonality is your industry but they work in different company cultures. The fourth quadrant represents the people whom are both outside your company and profession. When writing your brand communication plan, write for the people in this fourth quadrant. These people are unfamiliar with your industry jargon and company culture. If they understand your brand and what it represents, then you have achieved brand consistency.

Execute your plan and collect feedback.

Once you have created your plan, start implementing it. Roll it out to all four quadrants and await feedback. Collecting feedback is critical towards evaluating your brand’s consistency level. If your industry or company has changed, these changes would be recorded in your feedback. Incorporate it back into your brand to achieve brand consistency for the long-term.

Using these 5 tips would help you achieve brand consistency. For more on this topic and other business strategies, visit http://positivitychange.com/

Evaluating Your Personal Brand Annual Performance

Evaluating your annual personal career brand performance is essential. If you want to realize positive change in your personal and professional lives, you must take a hard look at how you’ve performed this year. Here are 5 things that you should use to evaluate your annual personal brand performance. They are: stickiness, retention, responsiveness to change, tactical planning and strategic planning.

Stickiness

Stickiness is how well people remember you. Let’s ask a question: do people remember you for something? It can interpersonal skills, programming, project management, HR or marketing? Is there a trait that whenever someone mentions your name, that person immediately says ‘blank’? If so, then you’ve achieved stickiness.

Now let me ask a deeper question: have you attained subject matter expert status in your discipline? www.ISixSIgma.com defines subject matter expert as ‘individual who exhibits the highest level of expertise in performing a specialized job, task, or skill within the organization.’ Becoming a subject matter expert is the highest level of stickiness. When you’re at this level, whenever someone asks for an expert, they think of you. You are exploiting your core competency when you are a subject matter expert. If you have achieved this status, document the process then list the 3-5 steps towards maintaining your subject matter expert for next year. It is one thing to get there. It is another thing to maintain your status. You want to increase your stickiness in the New Year.

Retention

Retention is indispensable towards leveraging your personal career brand. You retain people based on delivering high quality work. Ask yourself this question: have people continually returned to you for a particular thing? Retention is the next step after stickiness. Once you’ve reeled them in, do they stay? Evaluate if you are retaining your clientele. If there are less people coming to you to solve their problems, then you should reexamine your personal career brand. Furthermore, if you are retaining more people then take these lessons learned and use them as inputs for next year’s plan.

Responsiveness to change

Change is inevitable. It is the only constant; and, your personal brand must be responsiveness towards it. Ask yourself how flexible are you? Rigidity hurts your career brand. Don’t fear changing your plan because you are not the same person on January 1^st as you will be on December 31^st. Your personal career brand must incorporate the latest industry changes in order to stay relevant next year.

Tactical planning

Tactical planning is short-term planning that supports strategic (long-term) planning. It’s used for non-annual planning (quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily). With tactical planning, you have to evaluate how your personal brand has performed this year. Has everything you planned for resulted in above-average performance? Has your brand gained more momentum with each successive quarter? Which things have worked for you? Conversely, which things haven’t gone accordingly to plan? When you dissect underperformance, has these things been corrected during the next quarter? If you cannot improve, then drop it this year. Answering all of these questions are crucial towards measuring the effectiveness of your tactical planning. If your tactical planning has exceeded your expectations, then document 3-5 steps per your time metric (quarter, month, week, day) to improve your personal career brand for next year. These steps will be the inputs for your strategic planning.

Strategic planning

Strategic planning is long-term. It is the high-level planning that you do when you start the year. The first objectives that you’ve drafted serve as a guide throughout the year. The tactical planning objectives support the strategic planning ones. The question you should ask yourself is has this year’s strategic planning positioned you towards a better New Year? If it hasn’t then what steps are you taking towards guaranteeing that you’ll sidestep the pitfalls? If it has, then document 3-5 steps per your time metric (quarter, month, week, day) to strategically improve your personal career brand for next year?

You will use these variables to examine the effectiveness. If you are underperforming or ineffective in any of these places, then you can correct these problems now instead of letting them follow you into the New Year.

Don’t Wait Until 2016 to Be Honest

This is the final quarter of 2015. Ask yourself a question: what do you want to drop for the New Year? Think about it. Okay, well why wait until January 1, 2016? Do it now in October 2015. Why stay miserable for another 80 days? Liberate yourself from the things that weigh you down because this kind of honesty saves time and money.

Time

You have a finite amount of time on this earth. Why waste it? Honesty improves time management and eliminates waste. Stop throwing good money after bad. Honesty helps time management. You sharpen your focus on what you truly want. Directed, intentional focus always increases productivity. Increased productivity means increased visibility. Increased visibility could mean increased promotions. Right now is the time to strike because everyone is preoccupied. People are already on mental autopilot with Halloween parties and setting up discount flight alerts for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Why wait until 2016 to be honest with your time?

Money

How much money have you wasted going in the wrong direction? I admit that I have spent a couple thousands of dollars pursuing another certification because I thought that it would differentiate myself from others. Although this additional certification would distinguish me from my competition, I’ve found another certification that more closely aligns myself with my future goals. Yes, I’ve wasted money but I’ve stopped digging and realized that I am going in another direction. I am better for it.

Conclusion

Instead of waiting until 2016, why not use this fourth quarter of 2015 to gain momentum towards your new goal. Remember, insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different result. Stop this madness by being honest with yourself now in October 2015. Your future self will thank you for it.