Managing Your Professional Image
Harvard Business School professor Laura Morgan Roberts' article Creating a Positive Professional Image is one of the most popular ever run on HBS Working Knowledge.
Her theme: If you don't actively manage your professional image, others will do it for you. Create your own identity. Take a strategic, proactive approach to managing how others perceive you.
This was written in 2005, just before social networking started to take hold. Today, with so many "yous" spread out over social and professional networks, this advice this is more important than ever.
What is a professional image? Roberts defines it as a set of qualities and characteristics that represent perceptions of your competence and character as perceived by your key constituents -- colleagues, clients, superiors, subordinates.
Managing your image successfully means completing two objectives: build credibility and maintain authenticity. "When you present yourself in a manner that is both true to self and valued and believed by others," she says, "impression management can yield a host of favorable outcomes for you, your team, and your organization."
Here are several takeaways from the piece to keep in mind. Please read the entire interview for a more in-depth look at the topic.
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?
- What are the expectations for professionalism?
- How do others currently perceive you?
- 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)
- Employ appropriate traditional and social identity-based impression management strategies.
- Pay attention to the balancing act--build credibility while maintaining authenticity
- Monitor others' perceptions of you
- Monitor your own behavior
- Use strategic self-disclosure
- Have a preoccupation with proving worth and legitimacy
What about you? Do you actively manage your own professional identity? How do you want others to think about you as a manager?