Green - Think like a brand : a 7-step strategic brand plan to increase your career satisfaction and success

A -Step Strategic Brand Plan

To Increase Your Career Satisfaction and Success

By Pamela J. Green,

MBA, SPHR, ACC

Copyright 2015 by Pamela J. Green

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

ISBN: 978-0-9886804-4-9

First Edition. Printed in the United States of America

Published by: Pamela J. Green Solutions, LLC, Washington DC

Copyediting by Susan Black

Lead Designer, Erin Davis

Art Direction, Evelyn Davis-Walker, www.daviswalkercreative.com

Cover and back copy photography by Valerie Woody, Photographer, www.valeriewoody.com

Jeff Bezos Photo: Jeff Bezos iconic laugh by Steve Jurvetson - Flickr: Bezos Iconic Laugh. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh.jpg#/media/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh.jpg

Sara Blakley Photo: Sara Blakely by Gillian Zoe Segal - Self-photographed. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sara_Blakely.jpg#/media/File:Sara_Blakely.jpg

Misty Copeland Photo: Sam Aronov/Shutterstock.com

Steve Harvey Photo: SteveHarveyHWOFMay2013 by Angela George. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SteveHarveyHWOFMay2013.jpg#/media/File:SteveHarveyHWOFMay2013.jpg

Beyonce Knowles Photo: Kevin Winter/EdStock / iStock Photo Michael Strahan Photo: JStone/Shutterstock.com Taylor Swift Photo: Jason Merritt/EdStock/iStock Photo

Mom and Dad:

For the press of your hand in my back gently pushing me forward....
thank you.

PREFACE

Do you ever:

• Feel overlooked, underappreciated, and undervalued?
• Feel long on frustration, short on career options?
• Look back on missed job opportunities with regret?
• Struggle with what to do next?
• Want more success, but aren't sure how to turn your goals into reality?
• Want to bring your contributions to the attention of your supervisor?

Did you know:
According to research by OI Global Partners, there are two significant reasons people are not getting the jobs and enjoying the careers they desire most:

• They do not sufficiently differentiate themselves from others (selected by 67% of career consultants)
• They fail to successfully transfer past experiences to the current job opportunity (64%)

Additionally, according to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report, they found that most disengaged workers globally are checked out and sleepwalking through their day.

Don't check out, grab the job of your dreams! Don't sleepwalk thru years of a career, do what you love! Take a bold approach and disrupt your traditional career path! Sure, you can innovate your career, transform what you have into something better, but usually this maintains a consistent path. Disruption will move you to an entirely new playing field.

For example, innovative steps in a Marketing career as an Assistant can move you into another Marketing role to pull on your marketing experience. That is good, safe and pretty traditional. We've taken these gradual steps for hundreds of years, and this path can certainly send you sailing into retirement.

However, disrupting your career, deviates from the traditional approach and paves new customized paths to success. This approach is exciting and rewarding because it pulls on all of your talents, not just a few.

I didn't want to waste my career potential. And I certainly didn't want to waste time going down a path that did little to help me explore all that I could offer, or that did not fully leverage all of my talent. So I learned how to borrow success strategies from the best and the brightest disruptors in sports, entertainment, business and the arts to build a scalable career plan that is strategic, congruent with my organization's goals and would lead me to the success I desire and so can you!

What we are embarking on is more than creating an outline or finding your strengths you are going to create a unique template that pushes you to use your strengths to differentiate your brand from others!

I'm offering you a first-of-a-kind approach that gives you more control over your career success. A plan to shift your approach to success that breaks with conformity, that positions you for the type of career and career options you never thought possible a 7-Step Strategic Brand Plan to disrupt your traditional career path and set you on a customized path to success.

Why me?

Three years ago I was an executive for a large global organization. I was traveling 70% of the time. I was putting in 60 hours a week. I was managing a local team and a virtual team. I was responsible for millions of dollars in revenue. I was making a lot of money, and I was exhausted.

I woke up one day and thought to myself, Is this success? On the one hand, I was celebrated for my talent and on the other hand, I was resented, marginalized, and undervalued. I told myself, Enough! Something's got to change. If I'm going to work this hard for someone else, I might as well get something more fulfilling out of the opportunity. It was then and there that I began to work on my Brand Plan.

Now a few years later, I'm happy to say that I still have a boss many of them. But while I help them achieve their goals, I too, get to achieve mine. I get to work for clients who thrill me and appreciate my talent. I get to travel all over the world, doing what I love without restraint, feeling that my contributions really matter everyone wins!

This is why I am so excited to share what I've learned with you so you don't have to do it alone. So you don't have to look back on your career after 10, 20, or 30 years and say Why didn't someone tell me about this years ago? In retrospect, I'm glad it all happened. I'm so thankful for the wonderful experiences I had but also thankful for some of the worst experiences of my professional career. Were it not for those combined experiences, I wouldn't have the7-Step Strategic Brand Plan to share with you today.

Why this topic?

Look at Steve Harvey, Michael Strahan and Sara Blakley. They are not just sports, business and entertainment celebrities and entrepreneurs, they are brands. Brands that disrupted the conventional path they were on, built on their talents to broaden their career options, and now enjoy unconventional career success.

Michael Strahan is a wonderful example of someone who took his skills playing for the NY Giants on the field and successfully converted them to off the field talent. Look at how many athletes go bankrupt according to Sports Illustrated, 78% of NFL players face bankruptcy within two years of leaving the game! Michael read the reports and took immediate action to disrupt that path in exchange for one that not only broke with tradition, but that would expose his other talent. He didn't wait until his career was over to think about, and plan for, his next move and neither should you.

I have had my foot in two worlds; as an advocate for employees and as an advocate for organizations. As a business and HR executive, I saw how other sport, entertainment and art talents were thinking and acting like true professional brands, and I realized, I could apply this same strategy to my career. I saw leaders with great talent who didn't know how to leverage their people's talent, and everyone was suffering. I witnessed firsthand how employees were not managing their professional brands. Organizations were getting frustrated and weren't helping them. Nobody was winning.