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The Future After COVID: How to Project Leadership After COVID-19

Jason Schenker

Futurist | Economist | 1,200x Keynote Speaker | 36x Author | 15x Bestseller | 27x #1 Bloomberg Forecaster | 1.2 Million Online Learners | Board Member | CSIS Adjunct Fellow | Forbes Contributor

发布日期: 2020年5月4日

Projecting Expertise

A critical part of becoming a leader is projecting your experience and expertise. You may have learned a ton, you may know everything about your industry, and you may be a genius in your field.

But if no one knows, it doesn’t matter.

This was true before the COVID-19 pandemic. And it will be true in the post-pandemic world as well.

Projecting your expertise is critical and can help you significantly augment your experience. It can also help you leverage the time you have committed and the work you have done.

In addition to the experience you get at your job and the experiences you have outside work that are directly or tangentially related to your profession, you need to project your knowledge and expertise.

Actually gaining experience is the tough part, and it requires time. Projecting your experience helps you further monetize the hard work you have already put into your career.

The most important thing to know about projection is that there are internal and external projection elements as you build spikes. Both are important for your career — and for your advancement to becoming recognized as a leader.

On the one hand, the internal projection piece is important for building your support and reputation within your company. This can impact your promotability, your compensation, and the opportunities you have to convey your expertise externally.

External Projection

External projection of experience and expertise includes speeches, books, articles, videos, podcasts, radio interviews, press articles, press releases, and television interviews.

In general, these fall into established venues, traditional media, social media, and other new media, which is a mix of social and traditional media.

The easiest of these perception platforms to use is projection on social media. For professional purposes, LinkedIn offers the greatest projection potential, although some people use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to project experience, expertise, or otherwise cultivate the perception of their experience.

The next easiest of these perception levers to obtain is projection in new media, by writing articles on Medium, LinkedIn, or Quora. There are no barriers to entry and, if you write something significant, other people in your field may take note.

Projection can also occur in established venues, such as speeches at internal company events, industry conferences, and publications of your research in magazines for your profession or trade.

Projection on traditional media is the most difficult to obtain, and it often involves the use of press-relations firms to acquire what is known in the industry as “earned media.” This is the most impressive to the average person; it includes press quotes, radio interviews, and television interviews.

The final critical type of external projection that can have a significant impact on your professional development is projection with books. Books are a more time-consuming, significant, and comprehensive way to project your expertise.

The good news with publishing and sharing your knowledge is that there are fewer limitations than ever before. There are fewer rules, but source attribution remains a critical element of securing respect through your projection.

It is also important to consider that there is a potential for content overlap between projection platforms. This means that you can also reuse content across platforms.

Internal Projection

As with external projection, there is also an important need to convey expertise within your organization in order to advance your career.

Some of the ways you project expertise internally are likely to be similar to the ways you project expertise externally.

As with external projection, information sharing and dissemination are the most important parts of projecting expertise internally. And internal corporate projection is absolutely critical because many people’s assessments of their colleagues are driven by perception. After all, in many corporate structures, people aren’t there very long.

In fact, they are only likely to be there for three to four years.

To support this point, I would highlight the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows that the average tenure for a job is 4.2 years for all workers over age 16. Furthermore, for younger workers, the tenure is much shorter. For workers age 25 to 34, the average tenure is only 2.8 years.

For this reason, perception of expertise becomes the de facto ersatz for actual exposure to someone’s work. And the perceived expectations replace actual peer-to-peer awareness of expertise.

This dynamic is particularly pronounced in the consulting world and in project-based work environments.

For example, in the consulting world, where people may only work directly together for a few months, I have seen on more than one occasion that someone who was involved with just one project was considered an expert.

Similar dynamics can be present in project-based environments, where people may only work together for short periods of time. In such instances, perception of experience and expertise can be just as important as actual experience.

In order to accelerate your path to leadership, you need to project experience both externally and internally. The better you are at projecting your experience, the more rapidly you are likely to find yourself in increasingly important leadership positions.