Celebrities have them. Corporations hire them. Individuals want them.
Yes you guessed it, a publicist. If you’ve seen the TV series Sex and the City, you will be familiar one of the lead characters is Samantha, a public relations expert who lives a glamorous life hosting exciting events, promoting her clients and occasionally managing damage control (it doesn’t seem like a real job). Real life isn’t like TV or the movies.
…. however there is great importance to the role of publicity for everyone and it’s accessible and isn’t restricted to movie stars and rock bands.
The job of a publicist is to educate their clients ‘publics’ with achievements, good news, upcoming events and act as their cheerleader. Within corporations we need to manage our own publicity program and be our own publicist.
Several leaders assume that someone will notice their achievements and then promote them. Wrong! People are now more distracted and busy than ever, many managers are too focused on trying to achieve their objectives that they may not be aware of that their team is doing (I am not saying this is right, it just seems to be very prevalent in many organizations today).
It’s part of our job to educate our ‘public’ on the achievements of our team (without sounding like we are blowing our own horn or being arrogant). This is an art, not a science.
While employed in the corporate world in Australia, every Friday I’d send the boss five (5) bullets points in an email outlining what the team and I had achieved that week (it’s important to focus on the team and balance the bullet points). This simple strategy ensured every week I was proactively sharing positive news stories, examples and project success. Often my boss would ‘cut and paste’ this information into their own status report for their boss (makes sense, it’s our job to help our bosses look good, right)?
I always had success getting budgets approved, additional headcount and project extensions and believe this is all because of proactively being my own ‘publicist’. It was also helpful when annual performance review was due because I’d confidently march into the bosses office and state the case
It was also helpful when annual performance review was due because I’d confidently march into the bosses office and state my case about deserving a pay rise, presenting the previous 52 weeks of fabulousness (5 bullet points) as evidence – you can’t argue with that!
Could you become your own publicist in your organization and share the successes of your team with leadership, expose their accomplishment to management and share what you have achieved this week? Try it out, begin this week and then let us know how your boss responds here on our blog.
By the way, maybe your boss won’t respond at all, that’s OK, keep doing it. It will be great for them to have a record of your success.
