Management Strategies
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Impression Management Strategies Can Benefit Your Career
What Is “Impression Management” and Why Is It Important?
Impression management is a contemporary technique that helps professionals improve their careers. At first glance, it might appear to be frivolous, lacking substance, or even meaningless. However, impression management has become an important component to career success.
There is some confusion about the true definition of the term. Impression management is the attempt by people to control and influence the perceptions that others believe about them. Impressions are highly important in all life areas. You’ve heard about “first impressions,” “lasting impressions,” and all manner of “impressions.”
Implementing effective impression management strategies at the workplace can strongly influence your career, whether or not you are a manager. Effective impressions are important for the manager-to-be also.
Typically a combination of both conscious and subconscious actions, personal impression management is similar to that which is used by the company for its branding and image efforts. Establishing your professional identity as by making the right impressions is critical to your career development. Creating the impression you want is effective in the long-term if you maintain the strategy.
Your continued actions should always reinforce the image you’ve chosen to establish. Peers and superiors will come to believe in and expect you to behave in a certain way—the way you’ve established through your impression management strategy. Committing to a professionally helpful impression management policy creates the workplace image you desire and gives you the foundation to accelerate your climb up the corporate ladder.
How to Use Impression Management to Improve Your Career
Tips to creating a winning impression management strategy include using the following components in ways that benefit you.
- These include your appearance, behavior, and overall workplace demeanor. For example, should one of your impression management components be creating an image of a leader, behave like one in all workplace situations. Take the initiative to volunteer for tasks large and small. Make decisions (within your authority level) at every opportunity, regardless of how important the situation or issue might be.
- Verbal methods. Monitor your grammar, diction, pronunciation, tone, and rate of speech to establish the impression you’ve chosen. Far beyond just the quality of the words you use, verbal components of impression management involve every aspect of your spoken communication. After choosing the image you’d like to project, learn about all aspects that apply to the verbal activities of others who have created this impression. Research their tendencies toward certain voice pitch, tone, and speech patterns. Practice and internalize these commonly accepted traits.
- Demonstrative character activities. First, maintain a high job performance level at all times. Enhance this professional impression with a consistent display of strong character during all of your activities. Understand that strong character is more “felt” than “seen”. It generates good results for you personally and all other workplace climate and performance factors.
- Self-presentation techniques. This is another often misunderstood component of impression management. Self-presentation is directed at two objectives. One is to influence others to support you and your position. The other is to clearly express the attributes of the image you are creating. This is often called the “expressive” factor of impression strategy. It is self-oriented, but when performed correctly it affects others—and your company—positively.
- Display valuable personal aspects. Like other components, displaying your valuable qualities is accomplished over time. Spend some private time taking inventory of your positive personal aspects, be they physical, emotional, intellectual, or psychological. Integrate your environmental, background, educational, and life experiences into your impression management strategy to make it clear—albeit subtly—that you embody the image you are projecting.
- Downplay personal traits that have little or negative value. This key component may pose a challenge, but commit to achieving success. First, be honest with yourself. The next human to be perfect will be the first perfect human being. Learn the aspects or traits you have that tend to be negative or of little value to others. Then work on suppressing these tendencies to create some distance between these personal aspects and the image you are building. Your commitment needs to be strong. However, over time, you will internalize this modification and the workplace will only see your valued traits on display.
Successful impression management generates value and multiple benefits for you personally and your employer. Typically, you’ll enjoy a measurable career boost, better relationships with your peers and supervisors, and documented improved team performance. The apparent selfish nature of impression management is really self-directed, but a technique that benefits everyone around you, too.