I was thinking about this as I read Creating a Positive Professional Image (which I found through What Do People REALLY Think? on the blog Marketing Catalyst).
The article was interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which was the framing of something that is essentially old-fashioned common sense into a business process/system complete with it’s own terminology, including acronyms (i.e., SIM – social identity-based impression management). (Is it any wonder business writing is so impenetrable?)
But sometimes you need to do some framing in order to make people see something — it looks like a new idea when in fact it’s really an old one re-worked. New or old, however, is irrelevant. What is relevant is its essential point – “… if you aren’t managing your own professional image, someone else is.”
To me, the most important aspect of all this is authenticity. Without it, people eventually pick up on the fact you’re full of crap. To a large degree, you are who you are. So the key is to first answer this question: who exactly are you?
In Vonnegut’s novel, he explores this in a very dark way. Set during World War II, the main character becomes an American spy working in Germany pretending to be a Nazi propagandist. He is so good at this that after the war he is put on trial for war crimes. The question becomes, was he a Nazi war criminal? Was he so good at his pretence, was the role so true to who he really was, did he become the thing he was pretending to be?
As far as impressions go, as far as how others perceived him, the answer would be yes.
The reverse of this situation is the problem people usually face when trying to manage how others perceive them. In the long run, it’s very hard to present yourself as something you are not. It’s a bit like what Mark Twain said about lying, which was more or less that you should always tell the truth because that way you don’t need to remember what you’ve said.
In this case, being who you are is much easier to do than always trying to remember who you are trying to be.
What you present needs to come naturally to you, or so I believe. This doesn’t mean, however, new behaviours can’t be acquired, or that you can’t rework your personality to some extent.
The HBS article says, “Research shows that the most favorably regarded traits are trustworthiness, caring, humility, and capability.“
If these traits don’t come naturally to you I think that you can fake them for a time. Really. Because I think we’re all results oriented and the positive results that come from demonstrating these kinds of traits, the ways people respond to you, reinforce them over time so that, eventually, they begin to come more naturally and less as a pretence.
Mind you, having written that optimistic bit I also have to admit that an ass is an ass is an ass. Hopefully, that’s not us.
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