Every day we leave our brand footprints for others to follow or wipe away. Do you leave footprints that others will follow to your next accomplishment? Or do you leave footprints that others prefer to wipe away from their futures?

Every action we take at work brands us to the advantage or detriment of our futures. Here are three common, daily office activities that leave brand footprints. Will others want to follow your footprints or wipe them away?

GOSSIPING

Tolerating negative gossip about co-workers is equivalent to management’s paying to have dysfunction spread throughout an organization. It steals time and money, creates distrust and suspicion, destroys reputations and chances, and embeds absenteeism and turnover. Most importantly, it comes back to bite the offenders, as their negative focus on others crowds out the potential of their minds.

PLAYING MUSIC IN AN OPEN AREA

Noise dramatically reduces efficiency. One person’s music is another person’s noise. No matter how low or loud, the rhythm of one person’s music can be irritating and nerve racking to another person. In the age of earphones and iPods, there is no need for anyone to have to tolerate another person’s music at the office, but management beware, listen up:

A sixteen year old, David Merrill, conducted an experiment to see how different music affected mice. He divided his mice into three groups: He fed rock music to the first group; Mozart to the second; no music to the third.

Three times a week, he put each mouse through a maze, which had taken all the mice an average of ten minutes to complete before the experiment.

During the period, the Mozart Group shaved its time by eight-and-a-half minutes; the No Music Group, by five minutes. The Rock Group added twenty minutes to its time.

But here’s the real kicker: he had to cut his experiment short, as the Rock Group mice killed each other off.

MULTITASKING

As Dave Crenshaw has pointed out so well in his book, “The Myth of Multitasking,” there is no such thing as multitasking; only switchtasking. Switchtasking sucks every ounce of efficiency out of an employee and an organization.

Switchtasking includes attending to e-mails while meeting with someone else, answering the phone during meetings, reading and answering e-mails as they come in, stopping a task to answer the phone, completing two reports at a time – you get it – a culture that is inadvertently glorified in most offices.

Switchtasking fractures concentration, diminishes excellent results, and sends a message that those subjected to it are unimportant. It is generally impolite and a classic symptom of disorganization.

Next time you gossip negatively about a co-worker, play your favourite music in an open area, or multitask, think about the brand footprints you are leaving behind.

Network, network and network some more. That is what the experts have told you. That is what you are doing. You regularly attend networking events, razor-sharp pitch at the ready. You have met some interesting people – many not. You’ve collected hundreds of business cards. You have followed up with some; others are still sitting in your desk drawer. Your LinkedIn network is growing, but the names are random, and you can no longer attach faces to them. Your sales remain static.

Is your Return on Networking Investment in negative territory? Are you caught in an overwhelming frenzy of other people’s pitches and flurry of after-event spam? Are you tired of attending entrepreneur nights for like-minded people only to meet a stream of secure jobholders who have no intention of risking their jobs to follow their dreams?

You are not alone. Out of frustration, many miss the next event; bring their networking down a notch; and finally phase out of networking altogether.

If any of this rings true, your networking is in dire need of a paradigm shift. Networking is not broken. Your understanding of it is broken. The goal of networking is not to sell your products and services immediately; it is to create relationships – better yet, strategic relationships. Networking activity belongs in your Public Relations Department; not in your Marketing and Sales Department. It can eventually translate into huge sales dividends, but that is secondary.

WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?

Most people are fuzzy about the reason for networking. Their goal is to find potential customers. They are not interested in your pitch. They are at an event for one reason only: to promote their own pitch. A roomful of people intent on selling to each other adds up to a monumental waste of precious time and money.

The goal of networking is not to make your next sale; not to spam new connections. It is to build long-term strategic relationships with the potential to square your business or secure your career down the road.

CHANGE YOUR NETWORKING PARADIGM

Don’t give up on networking. Change the way you network. It is not a business choice. It is a business must. It is a personal must. Your network can catapult your business into success. It can carry you through business and personal downturns. Networking should be approximately ninety-percent adding value; ten percent promoting.

Move from general to specific networking. If you sell jewellery, pitching your designs to a roomful of entrepreneurs with little money is unlikely to be fruitful. A fashion fair is far more likely to lead to strategic connections and ultimate sales.

Become the chased instead of a chaser. Chasing connections is time consuming and has no guaranty. Become the keynote speaker instead of a paying listener. Create the networking events instead of attending them. Become the expert instead of the student. Look forward to accepting LinkedIn invitations, instead of sending them.

Become a strategic networker. Define your networking goals, know your target market, and be ruthless in only attending networking events where you will meet leaders who can help you meet your goals, interested people who want your services, strategic partners with whom you can leverage your business, like-minded individuals with whom you can share relevant ideas.

Networking without results is expensive. It eats up precious time and money. Shave down your networking events. Who you know, not how many you know will take your Return on Networking Investment into positive territory.

Personal Brand

Your personal brand is your identity, your core.  It is the packaging, management and marketing of you.  You can proactively create your brand or reactively be branded by others.  Either way, you will be branded.

Why Brand Yourself

Self-branding is your entry into a secure future; a direct flight over dysfunctional and difficult job markets directly into your next dream job or career.  People who recognize your brand will return your phone calls and e-mails, seek out your expertise, attend your functions, follow what you are up to, visit your website, read your blog, purchase your products, or employ you without résumés or recruiters.

In the era of Web² your brand will determine whether you ever land up depressed in a reactive job market again.  Building a proactive brand isn’t a choice anymore.  It’s a must; the sooner the better.  Stop now and build your brand.  Be clear on your values and where you are going; become your brand and wrap it around your destination.  Start today.

Identify Your Brand

Hone in on who you are:  List your values, passions and strengths.  These will be the cornerstones of your brand.  List the things you have always wanted to do but haven’t got around to doing yet.  You can build these into your brand and follow your passions.  Make a separate list of your dislikes.  Avoid chaining your life to those dislikes.  Are you in a job you hate?  Then it’s time to move on.

Create your future picture:  Write down your long-term goals and sort them under personal categories such as career, finances, family, interests, hobbies, etc., incorporating your values, passions and strengths and leaving out your dislikes.  Work backwards, turning your long-term goals under each category into medium-term goals, then short-term goals.  Commit to breaking down your short-term goals into daily goals.

Now that you know where you are going, you can define your brand and start to develop and market it.

Your Unique Selling Proposition:  For your career goals (family or commercial) pinpoint what differentiates you from the crowd and what you uniquely offer to your family or market niche.

Summarize Your Brand:  Write a few paragraphs describing who you are across the categories of your future picture – an overall description of who you are and the value you offer.  Focus in on the paragraph about your career; fine-tune it into a summary of your brand:  what you do (now; not in the past); how it is different from what anyone else does (your USP); the promises you make; your target market; and the value you deliver.

Shave your brand into a pitch:  Shave your brand summary down to less than twenty words:  your brand tagline and pitch.  Have your pitch ready at all times to let people know how you can uniquely help them.  Create an identity (logo and look) to complement your brand.  Your brand should be an idea with a promise attached to it.  Think of Nike’s brand as a guideline: its idea of athleticism, competition, victory and celebrity; its logo swoosh; its razor-sharp “Just Do It” pitch; its name, Nike, the Greek goddess of victory; its consistency of urban fashion across all Nike product lines.

Develop Your Brand

Work in progress:  Your brand is a constant work in progress, consistent yet flexible and authentic, as your life, projects and work evolve.  Take time to develop your brand across all platforms – virtual and actual.  Weave in consistency with your logo, pitch, standards, values and delivery, but surprise your audience with innovation within your consistency.

Become an expert:  Become the best at what you do; an expert in your field.  Complete that unfinished degree, sign up for must-have night courses, sign up for online courses, follow and interact with the top online gurus, give seminars and workshops, teach classes.

Image:  Your image reflects and brings authenticity to your brand.  If your brand reflects your core, taking the time to dress and present yourself appropriately will be second nature.

If you are head of interior design at your firm and meet clients dressed in 1980′s shoulder pads, your clients won’t trust you to pick their drapes.  If you are an executive and meet clients dressed in a grimy suit with a button missing, they are liable to sign up with the more prosperous looking executive across the street.  You get the drift.

Face-to-face networking:  Despite the growing importance of online social networking, don’t forget face-to-face networking.  A cyberspace associate might hesitate to take action on your behalf, despite your impressive profile and connections, because he/she doesn’t actually know you.  An actual business friend or associate, on the other hand, will take action on your behalf, because he/she knows and likes you.  Emotional connections are the best, and they tend to be people whom you have actually met.  Incorporate continuous face-to-face event networking into your routine to earn high dividends.

Create an Online Presence:  Leap from Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 into Web², virtual cloud interaction.  Walk into your fear about privacy concerns and become tech savvy.  Join LinkedIn for professional connections.  Join Facebook to interact with family and friends.  Join Twitter and figure out how to use it effectively within your market niche.  Start a blog and create a website.  Learn how to fill them with rich key-word content.  Be a social networking front-runner.  More and more, it is your online presence that is likely to land you your next great job; not your plain vanilla résumé rotting away in a virtual data graveyard.

Shine at Work:  Commit to going the extra mile for your company.  When your brand is aligned with your company’s brand, you will follow your passion every day.  Your passion will create your luck. 

Final Word:  Brand yourself to develop a unique portfolio of real-time projects (rather than a cookie-cutter résumé of inflated and remembered accomplishments); land yourself a dream job through your connections (rather than handing over your weakness on a platter during fruitless job interviews); follow your passions (rather than shuffling into a job you hate day after day); associate with leaders and other recognizable brands (rather than heading to office martini night to gossip about co-workers); gain the respect you deserve at work (rather than battling broken work relationships); secure your financial future by avoiding long periods of unemployment.

Transfer your identity from your position and title at your employer’s company to your position as CEO of You – Brand You – temporarily leasing your expertise to your company in a win/win relationship of mutual benefits even after you have parted ways.

Rely on your employer and the government for your future at your own peril.  The millions of people currently unemployed have been jolted into a keen awareness of that truth.  Are they taking the steps to make sure they don’t end up in the economic wilderness again?

It’s time to lock up your security and grab success by taking control of your future, your brand, your company, You.  Loyalty to a lifetime employer went out of style a long time ago.  You owe your loyalty to you.  Lease your brand, strengths, experience and actions to your current employer.  During the term of that lease of aligned aspirations, reap the benefits together but never stop building your own brand.

How do you do that?  Self-branding.