Introvert’s Playbook for Professional Branding

This is one in a series of articles from Waymakers on how to make our way in the Age of Continuous Optimization, untethered work, and unforeseen career pivots.

TL;DR?

Individuals, who self-identify as introverts, can begin to attract their ideal clients, employers or partners today by following The Introvert’s Playbook for Professional Branding.

It starts with gumption: “I'm just gonna do this. I’ll figure it out, one miniscule challenge at a time. In an epic sense, this has already happened.”

Two-second sutra on professional branding of introverts

It’s not about ME, it’s about THEM!

Waymakers

Waymakers constitutes a collaborative “we/us” project of Chris Heuer and Michael Jay Moon as well as Bill Lennan, Bill Leider, Dhillon Welsh, Don Oehlert, Heather Nuanes, J.S. Gilbert, John Gonsalves, Matt Weeks, Shera Gleason, and Steven Gans PhD.

Each Thursday, we meet in a collaboratory to peel the onion of the possibilities for an intentional being human in the ruthless, dehumanizing and disruptive Age of Continuous Optimization.

Our recent Waymakers session we started with an inquiry.

What constitutes an introvert?

And by that choice of the verb, constitutes, we framed the ensuing discussion to reveal the constitutive context of individuals who self-identify as introverts, who have a professional standing, and want to expand the number and quality of engagements (or make more money doing things that they love doing with integrity, impeccability and the full expression of their super powers).

We landed on the conclusion that the distinction of introversion or “I am an introvert” constitutes an outsider’s description of someone else’s infinitely rich and indescribable inner world and sets in motion a freight train of undesirable consequences: cascade of self-imposed limiting beliefs (“akin to a blind man with an Uzi”).

We discarded the term introvert as a useful frame of self-reference and adopted the advantaged perspective that each of us has something of value to contribute and that it’s each of our job to discover / learn by trial and error the particulars of our particular mission, vision, values in action and ways of working.

This led to the next question.

What constitutes a professional brand?

Professional brands elicit a recognition of trust, a possibility for an intelligent exchange of value, and an inferred alignment of missions, visions, values in action, and ways of working.

The figure below depicts an updated version of the Trust Equation from The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, et al.

This Trust Equation calls attention to the counterintuitive trust factor of Intimacy and the multiplicative factor of self-evident Intelligent win-win arrangements.

Using the shorthand of this equation, Intimacy is the willingness and capacity to disclose something both consequential and hidden or not generally accessible about oneself as well as the other. The willingness to share emotional access or vulnerability signals “I trust you enough to share this” and engenders a reciprocal disclosure, especially in your ideal partners, employers or clients.

The term Intelligent derives from the antithetical form of The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla:

• Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
• The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
• A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
• Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
• A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Unlike mass market brands, professional brands repel and under some circumstances antagonize stupid employers, clients and partners.

Professional brands capture the curiosity of their ideal customers.

Professional brands work in a manner akin to the pivotal scene in the movie, Gerry McGuire, spoken by Renée Zellweger “Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at hello.”

This hinges on “just showing up” with what you have and listening to both implicit and explicit dimensions of the conversation for what’s possible and needed.

Professional brands presence the implicit dimensions of trust and communicate the explicit aspects of a professional’s value to be realized, including one's

• Economic identity or institutional/cultural role;
• Mission or stand to bring a singular gift to the world;
• Vision or vivid depiction of how the gift transforms the experience of life of those who receive that gift;
• Values in action or the offsetting pairs of moral actions by which you as a professional unlock the value and meaning of your contributions, including “sacred” and “taboo” behaviors;
• Jobs to be done in satisfying a client’s / partner’s persistent concerns such as profitable growth, customer satisfaction and a company culture of co-ownership, freedom and accountability;
• Methods & milestones by which a client / employer envisions accomplishing mutually agreed conditions of satisfaction; and
• Performative contexts (people/social, process/workflows, place/workspaces that unlock the full expression of one’s talents, skills, capacities and super powers.

A lengthy discussion ensued about the need for professionals to disclose those social, physical, digital, and procedural contexts that either enhance and thwart their productivity and wellbeing.?

We arrived at the conclusion that it is one’s (employee’s, constant’s) moral responsibility to discern the performative contexts of one’s “best work” and one’s relative fit to the contexts enabled or provided by the employer, client or partner.

This also revealed a tantalizing insight: the context of engagement exerts a huge underappreciated influence on success, on earning and keeping trust, and how otherwise ideal clients, employers and partners follow through on, “You had me at hello.”

Thus professionals design their brands to fit with defined contexts of engagement ... that act as a catalyst for your best work and fluid expression of you talents, skills and superpowers.

What constitutes the presencing of a professional brand?

Our Waymakers collaboratory on professional branding introduced the distinction of effective presencing must be experienced as intelligent, intimate and authentic self-disclosure (from Oren Klass, Pitch Mastery):?

• You know, I like you.
• What you propose sounds about right.
• Upon finalizing the details, let's start on Wednesday of next week.

And while most professionals obsess on the details, the intellectual content, precise wordings, and packaging of the brand and marketing materials, we all tend to under-index on the most crucial aspect of how otherwise ideal clients, employers and partners experience your presence and offerings.

Customers bestow trust in someone or a provider first in accordance with their urgent as well as persistent concerns.

If they just sprained their ankle or lost a key account, it’s not likely they will even see your presence or give it a moment’s notice.

How their particular world “is occurring” shapes and energizes a customer’s desire, willingness and capacity to trust an external provider.?

As in comedy, timing is everything.

This called attention to a trust-eroding mistake that many otherwise trustworthy professionals make: they promote when they should be making themselves more easily found.

“Introverted” professionals activate warm referrals by their fans and advocates who, in turn, set up “You had me at hello opportunities” with your ideal customers.

So we concluded with a guiding principle, originally attributed to Steve Martin,

Be so good they can't ignore you.

Waymaker Webinar

I cordially invite you to our next Waymakers Webinar, Professional Branding for Introverts

Wednesday 1 Sept 2021 10 AM PDT (GMT -7 Pacific) / 17:00 GMT | Free | Sign up for the recording

About Michael Jay Moon?

Michael is a Business Shaman, IP Catalyst and Transformational Speaker

Michael owns GISTICS Inc., a Silicon Valley-based innovation think tank that he has run since 1987. Over the course of his career, Michael has contributed to $7.5B of positive economic impact, including direct contribution to $2B in technology provider revenues.