How people perceive you, impacts your career
There are many advantages to being employed in a large company or a global/multinational enterprise. With the many upsides that make you optimistic, you could also be worried about being and staying obscure. Three ‘P’s are essential for you to build your career – your job performance; the potential you have; the perception people have of you. The last one can be under serious difficulty if your problem is obscurity.
The coming together of three ‘P’s ensure that you can tap into the pool-of-possibilities for career progression, inside your company. However, a large corporation has structures and processes that make it look like a complex maze. One could even feel that the place is impersonal with routines mired in bureaucracy. Therefore, ironic as it is, large corporations guarantee obscurity – thus compromising the third ‘P.’
Here are the things you should consider for stepping up your perception-quotient (‘P-quotient’):
- Be the go-to person in one professional area of expertise. Make sure the subject-matter is tightly linked to your company’s core competencies or its key strategies.
- Volunteer to be the spokesman, presenter, point-person, the representative for your group/team. Do a good job when you volunteer so that your boss feels good about entrusting you with this role.
- Network across your organization. You can think of these simple ways: (a) find mentors for yourself; (b) mentor others; (c) join professional interest groups (d) join the social impact initiatives of your company.
Over and above all else that you do to showcase your performance and potential, be consistent in your efforts to step your P-quotient.
By Sundar Parthasarathy for Zeus
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