By Lisa Martin

Showcasing your leadership style will ensure that you are seen as an all-star performer in your organization and career community. So what does “showcasing your leadership style” mean, and how can you learn to communicate your accomplishments and project the clarity, confidence, and charisma it will take to achieve the success you want?

Hard work alone is not enough to get you noticed.

You have to realize that your professional advancement depends on your ability to be recognized for your achievements, so you should not be shy about broadcasting your accomplishments. That’s because if none of your colleagues or leaders are aware of them, you could miss out on being promoted or otherwise recognized. Remember, the last thing you want is to be the best-kept secret in your organization, which is what could happen if you don’t speak up.

A lot of high-potential individuals work really hard, believing that their efforts will bring them accolades, which is not necessarily true. In fact, quite often, the rewards go to those who don’t work as hard, but do make a point of promoting themselves. In other words, it’s important to be clear and consistent about communicating your efforts, outcomes, and results, because that’s what will get you noticed.

Unfortunately, however, too many people are like the employee who says, “Well, if my boss can’t see how great I am, then that’s her problem.” In reality, however, it is your responsibility to be sure that other people, including your leader, are aware of your results and your successes. Why should others have to dig around to find out what you’re doing, when it’s really your responsibility to promote your best self? Remember, if you don’t sing your own song; there is no music. So, where do you begin?

1. Document, Document and Document Your Accomplishments

To showcase your leadership style, you must first learn to document your accomplishments. Too often, people are so focused on completing projects, checking them off a list and moving on, that they fail to record the things they have accomplished.

There are several reasons for recording your successes. In addition to helping you build a resume, listing your achievements gives you a better idea of what you have accomplished in any given time period. Everyone looks for external validation at least some of the time. But building your own internal recognition system is an integral step in being able to better communicate your wins.

So start keeping a record of the things you have done, especially those you have done well. You could make a list of everything, both large and small, you have accomplished in the past 12 months, and then continue to add to it. Some people go beyond list keeping to filling portfolios with newspaper articles in which they are mentioned, letters of commendation, photos of events they planned, etc. This sort of material documentation will definitely help you begin to become more aware of your accomplishments.

2. Define Your Unique Skills and Traits

The next step in showcasing your leadership style is to define clearly your unique skills and traits. To determine what it is that makes you special, ask yourself if you were a superhero, what would your super powers be? In other words, if you could summarize your unique skills and traits, what would be the phrase or word that captures who you are and what you do well?

Maybe you are good at negotiation, organization or all kinds of communication, including building relationships. It might be that you are able to motivate your team members and inspire other people to be successful. Perhaps you excel in leadership roles. What are your best traits? Maybe you possess a unique sense of humor that you use well in your personal and professional lives. It could be that you are very patient or you are able to influence others in a diplomatic fashion, making it easy to resolve problems and defuse tense situations.

Most people take their core talents and characteristics for granted instead of making time to define and list their skills and traits. For example, feeling frustrated when someone you’re working with is organizing an event but can’t seem to pull it together probably means you have high organizational skills, a natural trait you take for granted. In other words, if you think something is easy and presume everybody else can do it well, it’s probably because that particular trait is one of your natural talents.

3. Recognize and Enhance Your Strengths

As you define and recognize your traits and skills, you will begin to understand that they are your strengths and it is important to enhance them. Unfortunately, this does not happen very often in a work environment. For example, think about a typical performance review session, during which someone spends eighty-five per cent of the time telling you where you need improvement, what your weaknesses are, and how you can do better. After that, the other fifteen per cent of the time he or she tells you what you do well.

Of course, we should be made aware of our weaknesses. And it’s important to build teams and have people around us who can support us in those areas. But what if the time that was devoted to pointing out your weaknesses was spent instead on discussing your strengths? What a difference that would make in terms of motivating you to work harder at building your career!

If you’re still uncertain about what your unique skills and traits might be, ask someone you trust to list your talents for you. Often, other people can see your talents much more clearly than you can, because you have become so used to doing things in a certain way all the time. But, whether you can pinpoint your unique traits and skills or need someone else to do it for you, once you are aware of them, you can begin creating and developing your career brand.

4. Develop Your Career Brand

A career brand is your promise of value that you deliver to your organization. It defines what you are and want to be in a single sentence that answers two questions: what you are best at (your unique skills and traits) and who you serve (your audience).

In order to develop your career brand, you need to start thinking about what is representative of you and what you do. Understand that you already possess a personal brand or reputation based on your strengths, passions and skills. Now you need to think about the defining characteristics that differentiate you from everyone else.

Begin by asking yourself these questions: What kind of reputation do I have now? What do I want to be known for? How widely known am I? What do I want others to say about me? And then ask yourself the most important question: What do I want to accomplish with my career? For example, do you want to be known as a quick learner and someone who is expedient at getting things done? Do you want to be branded as extremely focused on details or as being able to see the big picture? Do you want to be known as the kind of person who can run an existing organization, or as someone who’s really good at starting up businesses?

With these things in mind, it’s time to complete this sentence: “I am [blank].” Here’s a sample career brand:

“A loyal and focused leader, I offer the curiosity and wisdom to maximize business growth by inspiring teams to top performance and cultivating profitable, trusting, long-term customer relationships using my easy going sense of humor to bring out the best in everyone.”

Your personal brand statement should become part of your online/offline, and verbal and written career marketing communications.

5. Communicate Your Career Brand

Now that you’ve started to develop your brand, it’s time to learn how to communicate up, down, sideways, backwards, and everywhere in between, so you can showcase your leadership brand and make certain you are not a best-kept secret. First, you have to become comfortable about speaking up and standing up for who you are and what you do, which includes distinguishing between bragging (speaking without substance) and acknowledging your accomplishments (offering documentation of what you’ve done).

Remember that communicating involves projecting confidence and professionalism, which comes from being clear in what you say and how you say it, whether you are in a one-on-one situation, speaking to a gathering of thousands, connecting through social media or writing emails and position papers. These seven techniques will allow you to communicate better both inside and outside of your organization, so you can gain recognition for who you are and for your accomplishments:

1. Always communicate results and solutions. When you’re talking about a project or communicating your brand promise, mention the results you are achieving or the solutions you are using and save the other details for later. And remember to speak in “headline style,” which means simply and directly.

2. Use the three Ws of communication. This means telling people why they should listen to what you’re saying, showing people what is in it for them, and then telling them what they should do about it.

3. The wow! factor involves having a witness to your work, which relates to documenting your accomplishments. Using your documentation as proof, you can ask someone else to share that information for you, either up the ranks or on your level.

4. Use “flagging” to get to the point, as in: “We need to hire more people in our organization.” Once you have people’s attention, you can explain the reasons (“why”s) of the situation. (“Because I have just signed a number of new clients.”)

5. “Hooking” will ensure that people are interested enough to question your opening statement. For example, if you open with, “We have a serious issue here,” a listener’s response would likely be, “What is the issue?” And your response to that would be, “We need to hire more people because I just signed a number of new clients.” which goes directly to the solution and your career brand message.

6. “Bridging” will allow you to take what someone else is saying and bring it back to your main career brand point. If someone mentions a profit statement, you could say, “Yes, that’s really important, and I’ve been focused on building profitability by signing a number of new clients.” In that way, you successfully “bridge” the subject back to your main point.

7. It’s important to be your career brand, inside and out. This means promoting yourself by demonstrating how your brand can help, not hurt, the company. Use synergy and consistency to represent yourself in terms of how your brand is connected to and supports the long-term goals of the organization. What you don’t want to do is compete with or work against the organization. One way you can make sure this doesn’t happen is to align the work you do inside and outside of the organization with causes and projects that support your brand, as well.

Summing it All Up

First, never forget that the path to showcasing your leadership style begins with documenting your accomplishments and realizing you cannot be shy about communicating them to others. Then, take the time to define your unique skills and traits so you can put more effort into building your strengths as opposed to focusing on your weaknesses. Once you discover and define what you do best, it’s time to create a career brand that represents your talents, your reputation, and where you want to go with your career. And, last, always use strategic communication tactics to showcase your newly developed leadership style.

© Copyright 2011. Lisa Martin. All rights reserved.