At some point in our careers, many of us have had to learn the hard lesson that working hard is while really important, doesn’t always equate to career success. There are lots of people that work hard, that unfortunately don’t always get their break or get their shot.
Furthermore, being able to “stand out” in the crowd in your company or workplace is critical to success, but is often difficult to do. This is especially true, when you are new to a role or company. Finally, for those of you who work in large or cross-functional organizations, getting seen or heard at times can seem difficult with so many people and so much going on.
After spending over a decade of working in large organizations, I’ve learned through successes and failures how to speak up and stand out, to elevate and amplify your work, build credibility, and increase your own visibility amongst the crowd, and here are some of those lessons I’ve learned.
1) Focus on Building Trust With Key Stakeholders
As a new employee, people will be excited to have you around, but since you’ve never proven yourself before, one area you are going to need to work on is on building trust.
Trust is critical to the effectiveness and strength of any relationship we have. Without trust, we lose the chance to be effective in our work. How many times have you had a project derailed, or something went off track because the team, or people within the team didn’t have a sense of trust with one another? Furthermore, when others trust us, they will advocate and advance our cause. So much of getting your work elevated happens in a company in rooms or meetings you are not in. By building trust with others, we can amplify our reach.
Additionally, how many times have you held back from sharing something, because of a fear of what could happen if you did? If you don’t have trust, it’ll be more difficult to communicate and coordinate with your peers or colleagues. Furthermore, as you ramp up into your role and take on projects and assignments, you’ll need to rely on others for guidance, support and their efforts. Before they will want to help you or contribute, they’ll want some level of trust.
While it’s important to build trust with everyone, when you are starting in a new role you’ll want to prioritize those efforts. You’ll want to start first with your manager, and then consider any key stakeholders that you have with your project or role.
2) Invest in Relationship Building as a Core Responsibility
As a new employee one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is that you need to get things done with the help of others. Since you are new, this is challenging for two reasons.
- You don’t know people
- You don’t know who you don’t know
In both cases, these are not your fault, it’s simply part of any new onboarding journey into a new role. But In today’s cross-functional, complex and interconnected workplace, having good relationships with your colleagues and peers is critical to succeeding in the workplace.
But like any good relationship, it takes time and effort to build. Which is why investing in relationship building as part of your job is critical to succeeding. This is especially true, if you work in a large organization where you are constantly working on teams, or if you work in a cross-functional role where there are lots of meetings and stakeholders.
Taking time to invest in relationship building with your peers and stakeholders opens you up to new ideas, strengthens trust, and makes you more connected to the work you are doing that is beyond just yourself. And since all of our work is meant to impact something bigger than just what we do, this is helpful context and information that can spur new ideas, initiatives, or simply help you perform better at your job.
Developing habits and practices for building relationships is a small but intentional step toward generating more connection and collaboration in your role. It also opens you up to cultivating relationships that are meaningful and impactful and not just surface level. Everyone has different ways that work for them for how they build relationships but a few ideas include
- Get to know people personally
- Ask for warm intros
- Join ERGs or other community groups
Finally, in the evolving workplace where some people are in the office, some are remote and others going back and forth, making time to intentionally build relationships is critical to fostering positive and strong working relationships.
3) Communicate Your Work through Internal Marketing
There’s a famous philosophical saying that goes like this: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? The crux of the argument is that while the tree failing means that yes, it makes a sound, it doesn’t make a noise. The definition of noise is if someone else hears it, and if there is nobody around, it cannot make a noise.
This philosophical question applies to the work that we all do each and every day at work, and is why internal marketing is important. Said another way: If you work on something amazing at work, and nobody hears about it, did you really do the work?
While doing great work is a prerequisite to success– it’s rarely sufficient. To benefit from your good work, you also need to make sure others actually know about what you are doing and the benefits it’s providing, especially to your manager, and key stakeholders and influential individuals. And that is why we need to do Internal Marketing.
Internal marketing is the act of surfacing and making others aware of your work through documentation so you both can be more collaborative, effective and informed about how you do your jobs. Generally speaking, internal marketing outputs include:
- Powerpoint decks
- Google Docs
- Memos
- Internal or External blogposts (ex: internal wiki, external blogpost)
- Presentations to groups that are recorded (Ex: Zoom Webinar)
Internal marketing means making sure your boss, leaders and other close teams have visibility into your output. Sharing the work you did with other key stakeholders helps you help others, spreads information sharing, helps you build your own credibility, and ensures you get the appropriate citation for the work that you are doing.
This is a critical part of every knowledge worker’s job that goes unnoticed, but can often be a huge difference when it comes to getting ideas surfaced, getting projects off the ground and funded, or getting credit and rewarded for the work that you do, for performance reviews, promotions, etc.
4) Cultivate Connection and Integration
We often think that building influence and credibility means that you have to be the loudest person in the room, having the best ideas, or knowing the most senior leaders. While sometimes that can be true, one way to be indispensable and to build credibility is by being a connector and integrator of people, ideas, and opportunities.
Most of us are wired to think of ourselves, and we do this because we need to survive. But when we can also find time to think about others.
In his book Give and Take, psychologist Adam Grant divides people into three groups: takers, givers, and matchers.
Here is what he says: “Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.”
Taking an integrator or connect mindset is very similar to the concept of being a giver – looking for ways to add value without expectation gives you a voice and a seat at the table.
This is helpful for two reasons. First, organizations and teams can get siloed pretty easily. We all have a lot going on. By being able to “zoom out” , see the bigger picture and connect the dots, we can often spot opportunities that can increase our ability to add value versus thinking in lanes and silos.
Second, since most people are not doing this, when we embrace the connector and integrator mindset, we immediately stand out, and build our own credibility and expertise, which can lead to opportunities down the road.
This can amount to connecting people across the organization together because they could benefit from meeting each other, sharing some insights or learnings with another team or business unit that you think would benefit from seeing them, or giving ideas or feedback to others to help them advance their work.
5) Intentionally Position Your Personal Brand
A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or organization at large.
Thinking about how you want to be known for, and then proactively and intentionally going out of your way to talk and position yourself in that way is helpful to making sure others understand who you are, what you do, and the impact and value you can provide to the organization.
Every time you meet a new person or introduce yourself is your chance to position yourself and your brand in the way you desire to be seen by others. Taking the time to come up with a few sentences and practice your pitch is a valuable exercise.
6) Help Others Help You
Getting the help and support of others is critical to getting your work done. While you inevitably must take ownership of your projects and tasks, it is very hard to do something solely on your own. Furthermore, oftentimes, getting feedback, insights, expertise, or ideas from others can strengthen whatever it is you are working on. While some people may think they need to do it all, asking for help is a sign of strength, and demonstrates a willingness to learn and collaborate with others.
One way to practice this is by helping others help you. When you meet people or reconnect with peers, help them help you by letting them know what you are working on or what’s on your mind, and the type of help that you might need. If people don’t know what you are looking for it is hard for them to be helpful, but when they do, it opens the possibilities
#7) Communicate How You Communicate
Communicating effectively is a key skill for any employee, but one step you can take to improve any type of communication is through taking the time to communicate how you communicate, especially to your manager, or any of your peers you work with closely. When other people understand how you communicate, they can learn more about your thought process and intentions, which can help strengthen trust and collaboration. Furthermore, this works the other way – when you intuitively understand how your teammates think and communicate, when you receive a communication from them, you have more context for what they are saying, and why they are saying this.
One way to do this is through creating a user manual – a guide that provides an honest assessment of who you are, what your strengths are, the ways in which you prefer to communicate and ideas for how to best collaborate and work together with you. Given how much people communicate and collaborate within an organization, getting an understanding of this can lead to better awareness and context which can drive greater collaboration between people and teams.
#8) Embrace Co-Creation
Instead of focusing solely on how you will solve the problem or run the project, start the project early by asking others to help, and co-create the solution alongside them. When you involve others, it makes them feel invested in solving the problem and coming up with the solution. In terms of how to go about this, the best co-creation comes when you can be thoughtful and specific about how others can be involved in the process. Instead of simply asking “hey what are your thoughts on x?” try to identify the specific skill, strength, or expertise that individual brings to the table, and ask for their input and feedback on that specific thing.
#9) Build Your Community
Many companies are embracing a “community-led approach” to growing their business by hiring community managers to embrace the enthusiasm of their customers and users, and to bring them together. We can learn from these people by embracing and finding our own communities in the workplace. These can be anything from formal communities, like an Employee Resource Group, or by creating informal spaces and opportunities for you to connect with peers and colleagues who share similar interests. Creating this space for people to come together, to share ideas, questions, and knowledge increases your surface area for opportunities, improves your visibility and helps you been seen in the light of others.
#10) Find Ways to Use Your Strengths
Everyone has a core set of responsibilities for their role and job. Very few people succeed solely just by doing those baseline requirements. To stand out, you will want to find other ways to contribute to your company or team. But how do you know what to pursue or where to look? One place to start is with your strengths. The skills or expertise that you have, that you A) are very good at and B) you really enjoy using and doing.