Archive for June, 2005
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by Laura Morgan Roberts
People are constantly observing your behavior and forming theories about your competence, character, and commitment, which are rapidly disseminated everywhere. It is only wise to add your voice in framing others’ theories about who you are and what you can accomplish. |
What is the professional image?
Your professional image is the set of qualities and characteristics that represent perceptions of your competence and character as judged by your key constituents (i.e., clients, superiors, subordinates, colleagues).
Desired and Perceived Professional Image
It is important to distinguish between the image you want others to have of you and the image that you think people currently have of you.
Most people want to be described as technically competent, socially skilled, of strong character and integrity, and committed to your work, your team, and your company. Research shows that the most favorably regarded traits are trustworthiness, caring, humility, and capability.
Ask yourself the question: What do I want my key constituents to say about me when I’m not in the room? This description is your desired professional image. Likewise, you might ask yourself the question: What am I concerned that my key constituents might say about me when I’m not in the room? The answer to this question represents your undesired professional image.
You can never know exactly what all of your key constituents think about you, or how they would describe you when you aren’t in the room. You can, however, draw inferences about your current professional image based on your interactions with key constituents. People often give you direct feedback about your persona that tells you what they think about your level of competence, character, and commitment. Other times, you may receive indirect signals about your image, through job assignments or referrals and recommendations. Taken together, these direct and indirect signals shape your perceived professional image, your best guess of how you think your key constituents perceive you.
Impression Management
Despite the added complexity of managing stereotypes while also demonstrating competence, character, and commitment, there is promising news for creating your professional image! Impression management strategies enable you to explain predicaments, counter devaluation, and demonstrate legitimacy. People manage impressions through their non-verbal behavior (appearance, demeanor), verbal cues (vocal pitch, tone, and rate of speech, grammar and diction, disclosures), and demonstrative acts (citizenship, job performance).
Positive Distinctiveness
Using verbal and non-verbal cues to claim aspects of your identity that are personally and/or socially valued, in an attempt to create a new, more positive meaning for that identity. Positive distinctiveness usually involves attempts to educate others about the positive qualities of your identity group, advocate on behalf of members of your identity group, and incorporate your background and identity-related experiences into your workplace interactions and innovation.
Social recategorization
Using verbal and non-verbal cues to suppress other aspects of your identity that are personally and/or socially devalued, in an attempt to distance yourself from negative stereotypes associated with that group. Social recategorization involves minimization and avoidance strategies, such as physically and mentally conforming to the dominant workplace culture while being careful not to draw attention to identity group differences and one’s unique cultural background.
Successful impression management can generate a number of important personal and organizational benefits, including career advancement, client satisfaction, better work relationships (trust, intimacy, avoiding offense), group cohesiveness, a more pleasant organizational climate, and a more fulfilling work experience. However, when unsuccessfully employed, impression management attempts can lead to feelings of deception, delusion, preoccupation, distraction, futility, and manipulation.
Credibility and Authenticity
In order to create a positive professional image, impression management must effectively accomplish two tasks: build credibility and maintain authenticity. When you present yourself in a manner that is both true to self and valued and believed by others, impression management can yield a host of favorable outcomes for you, your team, and your organization. On the other hand, when you present yourself in an inauthentic and non-credible manner, you are likely to undermine your health, relationships, and performance.
Most often, people attempt to build credibility and maintain authenticity simultaneously, but they must negotiate the tension that can arise between the two. Your “true self,” or authentic self-portrayal, will not always be consistent with your key constituents’ expectations for professional competence and character. Building credibility can involve being who others want you to be, gaining social approval and professional benefits, and leveraging your strengths. If you suppress or contradict your personal values or identity characteristics for the sake of meeting societal expectations for professionalism, you might receive certain professional benefits, but you might compromise other psychological, relational, and organizational outcomes.
How to Manage your Professional Image
First, you must realize that if you aren’t managing your own professional image, someone else is. People are constantly observing your behavior and forming theories about your competence, character, and commitment, which are rapidly disseminated throughout your workplace. It is only wise to add your voice in framing others’ theories about who you are and what you can accomplish.
Be the author of your own identity. Take a strategic, proactive approach to managing your image:
Identify your ideal state.
- What are the core competencies and character traits you want people to associate with you?
- Which of your social identities do you want to emphasize and incorporate into your workplace interactions, and which would you rather minimize?
Assess your current image, culture, and audience.
- What are the expectations for professionalism?
- How do others currently perceive you?
Conduct a cost-benefit analysis for image change.
- Do you care about others’ perceptions of you?
- Are you capable of changing your image?
- Are the benefits worth the costs? (Cognitive, psychological, emotional, physical effort)
Use strategic self-presentation to manage impressions and change your image.
- Employ appropriate traditional and social identity-based impression management strategies.
- Pay attention to the balancing act – build credibility while maintaining authenticity.
Manage the effort you invest in the process.
- Monitoring others’ perceptions of you
- Monitoring your own behavior
- Strategic self-disclosure
- Preoccupation with proving worth and legitimacy
From HBS Working Knowledge
June 22nd, 2005
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Many people have been asking me why I prefer openBC as an online business networking portal: although I have answered and given my two cents in personal e-mails, I just had to think some more and enumerate adn articulate my thoughts and those features of openBC that make it truly valuable. |
SEARCH
Not only does it provide drop-down categories, it also allows keyword searches. Makes it easy to narrow-down my search – so even though there is a limit for viewing only 200 members per search result, you’ll never have a problem.
“Haves” and “Wants”
This allows the user to match profiles with other users who might require what they have to offer and vice versa. There isn’t any other online business networking portal with such a powerful and accurate search criteria.
Maiden Name
People who marry and take on the last name of their spouse can still be searched under their maiden name. One reason I personally did not change my name after marriage was because I wanted to keep the recall value that my name had in my business circle!
No bias based on people with the maximum number of contacts
The person on the network, who has the maximum connections, also gets the maximum requests to connect. Connections attract connections – while that might be a good thing for name collectors, openBC discourages that practice because it goes against the basics of business networking, which is to build relationships. So there is no search criteria or listing where you search your network giving the option of “number of connections”. Quality more than quantity and hence the quantity you build will be the best quality.
It might not tell other members how you’re faring, but it does tell you what your “rank” is in terms of connections – but only within your own country!
Search categories:
- First name [and similar] [keyword]
- Family name [and similar] [keyword]
- Universities [keyword]
- Other interests [keyword]
- Organizations [keyword]
- Status [(all), Entrepreneur, Employee, Freelancer]
- Company (now) [keyword]
- Company (previous) [keyword]
- Industry [keyword]
- Title (now) [keyword]
- Title (previous) [keyword]
- Person has [keyword]
- Person wants [keyword]
- City, business [keyword]
- Country, business [(all) - drop-down]
- Zip code, business [keyword]
- State, business [keyword]
- Member since [(all), less than 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days]
And you can search in:
- Your languages only
- Your contacts only
- Your contacts up to 2nd degree
- All of openBC
Search Agents
You can create up to 20 different search agents and carry out periodical searches using the same and even have the results delivered to your personal inbox via e-mail!
Pre-defined searches – Power Search
- Members who visited your contact page recently
- Members whose contact page you visited recently
- Members who clicked your company homepage recently
- Members who clicked one of your former companies’ homepage recently
- Members who recently viewed your “about me” page
- Random contacts of my contacts
- All contacts of my contacts
- Next birthdays of my contacts
- Random contacts in my vicinity [geographically]
- Co-workers: same former company as you
- Members of the same organizations as you are
- Members who attended the same universities that you did
- Members whose “wants” match your “haves”
- Members who “haves” match your “wants”
- The newest members
- Members logged in recently
- Random members with an “about me” page
LANGUAGES
Options to network in the language you want. Currently caters to:
- English
- Dutch
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Nederland
- Svenska
- Suomi
- Japanese
- Chinese
- Russian
- Korean
- Polish
- Turkish
BIRTHDAY REMINDERS
No need to depend on other software platforms to get birthday reminders – you can see them on your homepage whenever you login. Also the weekly statistics e-mail that openBC send out to all its members (if they choose to receive it) give a list of people whose birthday it is in the week.
WEEKLY STATISTICS NEWSLETTER
- List of birthdays in the week – from your contacts only
- Short list of newest members who joined openBC
- Statistics about the number of hits your contacts page on openBC received in the particular week. Average number of hits on an openBC contacts page in that week.
- News of latest features on openBC
- Short list of members who visited your contact page on openBC
- List of your events in that particular week
PRIVACY
Various options under this allow you to control:
- Who can send private message to you via openBC: [only direct contacts, your contacts' contacts, your 3rd degree contacts, contacts associated by up to 4th degree, all of openBC]
- Who may view your list of contacts: [nobody, only your direct contacts, your contacts' contacts, your 3rd degree contacts, contacts associated by up to 4th degree, all of openBC]
Other options include:
- Whether you would like to have a guest book on your contact page
- Whether you want others to see your activity meter
- Whether you would like to be listed as a suggested contact in the weekly statistics newsletter
- Whether you would like Search Engines to index your page
- Whether you want other members to see what Forums you are a member of
- Whether you want your forum articles to be available to Search Engines and RSS
TELEPHONY
Use openBC to make calls!
They send you detailed bills and there’s an option to specify whether you would like to see the last three digits of the numbers you’ve called – to check whether the calls have been billed correctly.
INFO BOXES
You have the option of altering what your start page looks like and what information you would like displayed there – any three options from the following:
- Show 5 new members on your start page [you can also specify whether you want to see new members from your country or all over the world]
- Show 5 random contacts of your contacts
- Show upcoming birthdays of your contacts
- Show a quick search form
- Show the latest 5 public forum articles
- Show your last 5 forum articles
- Show next 5 events
- Show next 5 events in your city
MESSAGING
The best part about openBC is that even though you might not have opened your e-mail id to your direct contacts – they can still get in touch with you! So you do not necessarily have to show your e-mail id to everyone to correspond you’re your contacts!
You can have a record of the e-mails you have sent and the e-mail you have received on openBC – there’s the inbox and the outbox. You can even search for names of your contacts within the inbox and outbox.
There’s a drop-down box with a list of names of your direct contacts – for sending a direct e-mail to them – you don’t need to go searching your address book! Of course you can download vCards of each of your contacts.
And these are only the functions that I use regularly!
If you too are convinced about openBC then take the advantage of free premium membership for your first month by joining my network of more than 1100 professionals!
June 20th, 2005
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“The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious. It came to him after hearing an Indian software executive explain how the world’s economic playing field was being leveled. For a variety of reasons, what economists call ”barriers to entry” are being destroyed; today an individual or company anywhere can collaborate or compete globally. |
Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ”Now,” Gates says, ”I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.” “
From NewYork Times – “The World Is Flat: The Wealth of Yet More Nations“
While answering the question “What created the flat world?”, Friedman stresses technological forces. “Paradoxically, the dot-com bubble played a crucial role. Telecommunications companies like Global Crossing had hundreds of millions of dollars of cash — given to them by gullible investors — and they used it to pursue incredibly ambitious plans to ”wire the world,” laying fiber-optic cable across the ocean floors, connecting Bangalore, Bangkok and Beijing to the advanced industrial countries. This excess supply of connectivity meant that the costs of phone calls, Internet connections and data transmission declined dramatically — so dramatically that many of the companies that laid these cables went bankrupt. But the deed was done, the world was wired. Today it costs about as much to connect to Guangdong as it does New Jersey.”
Thanks to online business networking portals like LinkedIn and openBC, the world is wired for me too, as an individual. Friedman is right when he attributes these changes to technological forces. Today, using e-mails, instant messaging software like Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger, voice over internet protocol software like Skype, video conferencing and tele-conferencing, broadband internet and blogging software, I can communicate with anyone from anywhere on the planet, provided of course that they too have the same communicating capability.
I no longer need to depend on an established organization / company to provide me employment so that I can earn by providing services to people who want their work outsourced. I can, on my own, as an individual, establish my credibility by using online business networking portals like LinkedIn and openBC and get business from clients overseas. I provide my services online and offsite and get paid by a simple bank transfer (which is usually economical only for large payments) or by using money transfer facilities like Western Union Money Transfer. (I have not had a chance to use PayPal because they still do not allow me to withdraw cash and a cheque is time-consuming. They also need me to necessarily own a credit card so that my account can be verified for me to withdraw upwards of USD 500.) What PayPal does not offer, Western Union Money Transfer does – easy, economical even for small amounts, fast and convenient for both the service provider and the client.
“The next blow in this one-two punch was the dot-com bust. The stock market crash made companies everywhere cut spending. That meant they needed to look for ways to do what they were doing for less money. The solution: outsourcing. General Electric had led the way a decade earlier and by the late 1990′s many large American companies were recognizing that Indian engineers could handle most technical jobs they needed done, at a tenth the cost. The preparations for Y2K, the millennium bug, gave a huge impetus to this shift since most Western companies needed armies of cheap software workers to recode their computers. Welcome to Bangalore.“
Online Business Networking portals like LinkedIn and openBC, indeed make the world a level playing field for me. The world being flat is no longer a metaphor in Friedman’s book. It is no longer limited to large firms like Infosys and Wipro. As an individual, I have the whole world open to me with opportunities galore. I do not necessarily have to work with Infosys or Wipro to be part of this metaphor!
“People in advanced countries have to find ways to move up the value chain, to have special skills that create superior products for which they can charge extra. The UPS story is a classic example of this. Delivering goods doesn’t have high margins, but repairing computers (and in effect managing a supply chain) does. In one of Friedman’s classic anecdote-as-explanation shticks, he recounts that one of his best friends is an illustrator. The friend saw his business beginning to dry up as computers made routine illustrations easy to do, and he moved on to something new. He became an illustration consultant, helping clients conceive of what they want rather than simply executing a drawing. Friedman explains this in Friedman metaphors: the friend’s work began as a chocolate sauce, was turned into a vanilla commodity, through upgraded skills became a special chocolate sauce again, and then had a cherry put on top.”
Although Friedman constantly says that America (using it as a representative of the developed world) should outsource everything that is lower in the value chain to India (using it as a representative of the developing world), I believe that because of the online business networking portals that I am part of, I can today, move into the role of the “illustration consultant” like Friedman’s friend did in the example above. For example, if someone wants transcription services outsourced (for a workshop on creativity and innovation) and wants a good job done – not only can I deliver transcription services, I can move up the value chain and give the person suggestions about improving their speech delivery techniques, I can give suggestions about where they can find out more information about a certain aspect of innovation and creativity that one of their audience member asked them about and they were not able to answer convincingly, since I am an avid networker, I could even put them in touch with the CEO of a company who wanted to inculcate an innovation culture in his organization – would mean a potential client for the outsourcer!
And I can do so by asking a premium, which would be above the normal rate for a “regular” voice to data transcription service.
In our race to share the wealth of the developed world, people in the developing world, more often than not, undermine themselves and their capabilities. We think “Oh well! I am an MBA, I have a management consulting background, I have a fantastic command over English, I watch all these English movies so I can get the accent. So why can’t I provide transcription services? After all, for 5 hours of voice, which will work out to 25 hours of data, will pay me almost half a month’s salary!”
The point here is that people in developing countries are open-minded about doing anything, but in that process, we undermine our actual potential. So instead of providing a cut and dried transcription service, I throw in a value-added service. I will be of course doing an outsourced job, but I will get paid what a person in the developed world would have gotten paid for doing the same job. All clear?
June 15th, 2005
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Not that I want to promote the thought or the idea behind the BusinessWeek post (“Is social networking broken?“), just that I wanted to share the various “comments” that have been made at the end of the post. |
MY COMMENT ON THE BUSINESSWEEK ARTICLE:
First of all, LinkedIn cannot be considered as a “social” networking site. It is an online business networking portal. Secondly, as others in their comments have pointed out, the post made by Adam Kalsey is old.
I am not much of a Social networker – not because I have not been inclined to use the social networking portals like Orkut, but because I have used them and found that unless I really have a lot of time to waste, I have no real “benefit” participating on these portals.
However, not only do I see innumerable benefits of being part of a business network on portals like LinkedIn and openBC, I have actually experienced the benefits which range from thought-provoking discussions, new associates and contacts, to actually making money and doing business. And even though I am based in Bombay, India, 90% of the business that I have generated from participating on online business networking portals like LinkedIn and openBC, has been from overseas clients.
The classy business networking portals like LinkedIn and openBC provide ample amount of control on who I want to connect with and what information I want to reveal to each person on my network. These portals empower the users. What might be considered as Spam by me might not be considered so by someone else. Of course, if one signs up on Orkut and displays a personal e-mail to everyone, like someone mentioned above, “dense” would be the appropriate word to describe the person. But we are learning, albeit slowly.
If I send out Spam on my business network, it will not be overlooked. Not only will I stand to lose professional contacts that I have put in effort to connect with, I will also lose credibility for future requests to connect. Also, I might lose membership to the business networking portal altogether. I send out an e-mail to all my network contacts (more than 1200 people and growing) every month. Till today only three have sent me personal e-mails and asked to be removed from the e-mail since they did not feel that it suited their needs or requirements. Business networking makes that possible.
As for unwanted contacts, online business networking allows us to say “No”. And if we do not say “no” when we feel that the contact is unwanted, we will complain how our connections list is growing larger with “unwanted” contacts.
Online business networking is not limited to just reading profiles on the networking portal and writing a monotonous request to connect. Everyone has links to blogs or websites on their profiles and we can find out more about them using those links. Read: Request to Connect
Strangers are friends we have yet to meet. Unless we connect with people we do not know, how can we ever hope to know them?
ALSO THE CNET POST ABOUT “Why social networking does not work”. Do not miss the TalkBack section.
MY COMMENT ON THE SAME:
LinkedIn is not a “social” networking portal. It is an online business networking portal as you have rightly pointed out.
On your point 2. “It takes too much time” – LinkedIn and openBC (another trail-blazing online business networking portal) are definitely more useful than social networking sites. However, I do not believe that they are less information rich. LinkedIn and openBC profiles of people who are members of the portals have links to the blogs that they write or frequent and their websites. People who are there for the business networking, constantly update their profiles with new developments. These portals are one of the best way of finding out more about a “person”.
In point 4. “Strangers kind of suck (or, put nicely, the social hierarchy is really not that attractive)” where you say “Sure, business networking is valuable, and it’s great to have a lot of resources who might know someone who can help you with…something. But that argument gets a little thin when you’re suddenly bombarded with date offers or all-too-frequent postings about the unsavory or just plain uninteresting habits of the strangers you suddenly know.“
It seems like you are confusing business networking and social networking. Business networking is not based on the premise that we connect with people we already know and the connections made are not for seeking dates or sharing quirky habits. You are right, instead of sending them (people I know) an e-mail or sending them a message via IM, I might as well meet up with them for coffee. But why should I restrict myself to people I know? I, personally have not only participated in thought provoking discussions and built relationships with people I have never “spoken” to, let alone meeting them, I have done business with them and made money and am constantly giving back to the network by helping other networkers. Even though I am based in Bombay, India, 90% of my clients are from abroad. Online Business Networking allows me to do that.
As for point 5. “And I can probably find it faster using Google than I can by e-mailing one friend who’ll e-mail another who’ll e-mail another while my deadline slips away. Sure, it’s helpful–once in a while. But once I have all these folks in my address book, I won’t be much help in terms of ad impressions.“
Agreed that Google is great, I swear by it myself, but how will you know that the person you have found is who he/she says he/she is? How will you ensure that (once you have found their e-mail id online) your e-mail to them survives their Spam filter? One of my professional contacts recently asked me for help with transcription services that she required. Within 6 hours, I had sent out e-mails to various e-groups on Yahoo where I am a member and I had sent out half a dozen e-mails to other connections on the same networking portal and I had 5 quotes for providing the service. Within a day, the originator of the search in the US had decided on whether she had better opportunities at cost-savings in India or in the US – and this is assuming that I was the only peron she asked. Try contacting a stranger who you find on Google and see if you can repeat this. I am not saying that it will not work – it just might – but when online business networking portals like openBC and LinkedIn provide me the facility with better, faster and more secure results, why should I rely only on Google? Why shouldn’t I combine the power of all the technology available to me, optimize it to my needs and strive to live in a truly global village?
June 14th, 2005
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