It isn’t enough that you are brilliant. You perhaps are the world’s best-kept secret, if you have ever thought:
“How did they get that job? It should have been me!”
“I just get results, I don’t play the game other executives do.”
“I worked so hard last year, yet I still didn’t get promoted.”
How many times have you been shocked when someone you know was promoted, hired into a dream job, or received public recognition for his or her perceived success? In these cases, you are likely witnessing people who are brilliant at demonstrating their brilliance.
“There is absolutely no way he should be a CEO, Val. He has jumped companies, never delivered, and can’t possibly be a CEO,” said an executive I was working with. He was telling me about someone he had known for many years—a person who had been a peer and then went on to be a CEO. I told him that the sole reason he was frustrated was because he was seeing someone who was brilliant at demonstrating his brilliance. In fact, the point was that this person could even be masking his inferior brilliance because he was so good at talking about what he thought he was good at.
I created the Brilliance Barometer that identifies the ten ways exceptional leaders demonstrate their brilliance consistently:
1. Find it easy to talk about results
2. Share stories that demonstrate quantifiable impact
3. Concisely communicate
4. Have a strong positive inner voice
5. Are great storytellers
6. Shamelessly speak
7. Use metaphors and analogies
8. Appropriately talk about their enviable inner circle of advisers
9. Are happy to laugh at themselves
10. Share and learn from their mistakes
Which of these come naturally to you?
Dedicated to growing your business,
Val