When was the last time you retrospected about your positioning in the eyes of others? Think of it, through various conversations, email, chats you must had some adjective labelled with you. Describing your positioning. What others perceive you as?
Smart, curious, adventurous, risk taker, storyteller, entrepreneur, persistent. These are some of the adjectives used by people around me (work + personal life combined). That is my position in the minds whom I interact daily.
Once positioning is set in someone’s mind, it is generally very difficult to change that. At least changing that in a short term is sometimes next to impossible.
Let me give you an examples.
I joined Milestone Internet in May of 2022. After 10 years of doing business and scaling the team to 8+ individuals doing a revenue of 1CR+ I decided I wanted to see how the world of business works outside of Kolkata.
I joined as a CSM. Basically you are given a set of accounts, whom you need to managae the relationship with, so that over period of time, the business relationship gets stronger. That is, you end up making more money from the set of accounts.
I delivered on the expectations. Managed clients successfully, growing the book of business and swiftly getting promoted to handle the #1 enterprise account of the organisation. Everyone in the organisation, started to see me as a person who is very good in managing clients and growing revenue. He is a wonderful “client facing individual”.
Yet, no one is able to see the other aspects that I bring to the table. The analyst who not only understands where data needs to be collected from, but extract the right data, visualise with tools (by learning them) and then finding insights that can impact direct company bottomline.
What about others not able to recognize that I am a through and through Product Manager with skills to observe what in the product can get added which provides the most delta is customer happiness when using the product.
How about others not yet noticing my business accumen, to see how we can start utilizing a UGC based video lifecycle marketing to drive enhanced LTV. Or how about the work in Product Marketing. Have a drip campaign designed end to end until new user in platform reaches a predefined MAU. I’m not even going and acting as the Insider Branding and L&D aspects of HR I bring in. I will write a story about going to office.
Everyone still sees me as a person who manages clients really well. You may ask why? Let me tell you. Positioning is extremely difficult to change. Very very very very and put in a 1000 more very’s. It is that difficult.
But, there’s a silver lining. You can change your positioning. Just that you need to be a little more strategic about it.
Create an impactful event. That event would jolt everyone off their seat. Narrate your new positioning. Act like your new position. It is at that point when everyone starts looking at you in a different way. Not because they are magically able to see all your abilities. No. Because once you get their attention, narrate your new positioning. Act like your new position.
And hurray!!!! Everyone starts interacting with you differently. The conversations depth changes dramatically.
That’s what a change in positioning can do for you.
Next time, in a conversation with a client, co-worker try noticing. If they still talk to you as a “project manager’ when in fact you have already got yourself elevated to a role much more than that, do a intro-retro-spection.
You may need to work on your positioning.