In this episode, I'm going to show you how to position yourself as an industry leader. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this - how can we pull forward raises and promotions, or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build, and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show.

Hey everybody, David Ziembicki here from the expert business agency. Today we're going to talk about how to position yourself as an industry leader and we're going to cover three important points. The first is the value of positioning yourself as a leader or why you would want to think about doing that. The second is whether you can be seen as a leader despite where you are in your career. So whether you're just starting out, whether you're midway through your career, whether you can actually be seen as a leader if you're not the world's foremost expert in a particular topic area. And then the third thing we're gonna cover is regardless of where you are in your career, how do you actually position yourself as a leader? What are some of the things that you need to do? And if you stick around to the end, I'm also going to point you to some free training that we have on these topics on how you can position yourself as an industry leader in as little as eight weeks.

So first up was what does it actually mean to be positioned as a leader? What does that actually mean? I mean instinctively you may have a couple of things you can think of there. So it could mean you know, people recognize your name or you speak at conferences or you've written books and we're going to talk about all of that in this episode. But what it really means is, is that when a topic comes up that's related to your industry or to your particular topic space that you cover, being a leader means that your name comes up as one of the first things people think of when that topic comes to mind. So depending on where you are, I mean we cover, you know, the technology industry primarily on this show. So if I throw out terms like cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, IOT virtualization and so on, depending on if you're close to that space, certain names are going to come to mind, right?

And why do they come to mind? Out of the thousands and tens of thousands of people that focus on any one of those areas, there's tens of thousands of cloud computing people. There's tens of thousands of IOT people now. But if you're in that space, the names that are going to pop to your mind probably going to be three, four, five, 10 maybe those are the leaders in your industry. So when we talk about what does it mean to position yourself as a leader, what I mean is what do you have to do? What do you have to know? What do you have to put out there to be one of those three to 10 people that come to mind when somebody brings up a topic in your area of expertise. So now before I lose some of you that are introverts or don't think that you want to be kind of out there and recognize as a leader, just wanted to tell you a quick story about that.

I would consider myself an extreme introvert. Okay. When I first, uh, at Microsoft I had been a pretty senior consulting resource in companies previous to that. But you know, 15 years ago, you know, when I started there, I was an extreme introvert. When I went to internal technical conferences, I would go sit in the sessions, but as soon as it was done, I would go back to my hotel room. In fact, I would even hide in my hotel room, you know, not wanting others to see that I was there having to talk to anybody. So I was very anti networking, you know, extreme introvert and social situations and so on. And so I was far from being, you know, known at all or seen as a leader or anything like what we're going to talk about in here. So you'll see an evolution of that as we go through this episode and some of the stories.

But just realize, you know, the starting point for a lot of us is we're not comfortable with this topic at all. The reason why I bring it up though is because of the huge benefits both financially and in terms of career growth and, and, uh, accelerating your career that can be found if you are able to position yourself as an industry leader. So that's why we're going to cover it in some depth here. And that's why again, at the end there'll be some additional training on this just because of how much of an impact that's had both on my own career and in a lot of people that I work with and that I've mentored over the years. So I wanted to bring that to you and that is the reason regardless of your starting point, it is possible to get to that leadership position in some ways that might surprise you, which we're going to talk about.

So first up is why is being a leader or being positioned as a leader in your industry or in your area of expertise, why is that important? Why is that worth pursuing? Well, again, when you think about a topic and you think about the names that come to mind in that topic, think about when those people are going to be selected or what opportunities are going to have whenever jobs come up, right, new jobs, new career opportunities, you know, new positions that open up in your company for strategic projects, who tends to get those positions? The people that are already known as leaders in their particular area. And by that, I don't know, I don't mean managers, right? You don't have to be managing a hundred people to be a leader. I mean technical individual contributors who is going to be the lead architect on the next project, right?

When the flagship deal gets signed by the CEO and you're going to go implement something or design something or deliver for a customer, the people that get selected for those are the ones that are known as experts known as leaders in those areas. So both within your company in terms of different projects, different positions that might open up. That's valuable. Obviously if you have to move between companies, if you're getting a new job or you know want to do a change in your, in your career or something like that, if you're already a known leader in one space, it's going to be a lot easier to move over to another space. Um, if you're on your own, if you're an independent freelancer consultant or something along those lines, for sure. Being known as one of the experts in your field is going to allow for the bigger deals.

The more important deals to come in for you to be able to grow your business. Okay. So in almost all cases it is better to be known and positioned as a leader in your field then otherwise. Right? If you look at any of the technical areas like we've talked about, um, let's just take cloud computing. You know, by now we're many years into this trend, tens of thousands of people are in cloud computing, right? How many of them can you name? How many of them are actually visible? It's a tiny slice. It like the top one or 2% in any given topic area that are really out there and known and visible. And that is really one of the key differentiators. Now is that because those people are smarter? No. Is that because those people are more of an expert than you in a particular area? Probably not.

The main difference is they're actually putting in the effort to make sure that what they are doing is known to the rest of the world. Okay. Most of the people that I work with, super intelligent people, highly capable people inside of large technology companies are completely invisible in their industry. Nobody knows they exist. Nobody knows about their work. Nobody knows about their results. Why is that? Because they never tell anybody about it. They never put themselves in a position to be recognized or to have their work be noticed. Okay? That's what positioning yourself as a leader is all about, is setting in place the right pieces of the puzzle to make sure that your results and the value that you can provide and deliver are known within your company, known within your industry, and establish you in that leadership position. So what I mean about positioning yourself as a leader is not that you have to position yourself as the absolute top, most expert in your industry.

Depending on where you are in your career, that may or may not be possible, or it may or not make sense for you to do. But if you think about every level from you and appear at work to the project that you're on to the division that you're in at your company, to the company that you're in within your industry, at each of those levels, you can start positioning yourself as a leader using some of the techniques that we're going to cover here in the rest of the show, and by doing that at the first level, it starts to prepare you for the next level. Okay. Once you're recognized as a leader, just within, let's say your project or the group you work at at your company, now you can think about, well, how do I position myself as a leader more broadly over, let's say that whole topic within your company?

Okay, how do you branch outside of your company and say, okay, how do I start getting known and visible out in the industry? These are some questions that you can ask and you can always demonstrate and establish leadership regardless of where you are in your career and what position you are in your career there as well. I mean, again, quick personal example, I mean pretty much as soon as I graduated college, I was into the consulting ranks at Deloitte. So you know, one college graduate kid, you know out of hundreds or thousands that they, they hired in that season. But it didn't take that long to start positioning myself as a leader just within the four person team that I was put on inside of a a team of a hundred at our first customer. Okay. Was I known to the, the leader of the whole project? Not in the beginning but within a year for sure.

I was right. So just within the me and the peer that I was working with, then within that team of four, then within our work stream then within our project, right. So you can start doing these things and you can start establishing some of these, these leadership positions pretty early on, no matter where you are in your career. And then just keep building that up over time. So if you've tuned some of our previous episodes, you'll know that we've covered this topic in a couple of different ways. And at this point when I talk about positioning as a leader, when I talk about becoming known and so forth, a lot of us in technical fields or in professional fields, we don't like the idea of self promotion. Okay. We don't want to be blasting out on social media. You know about all of our accomplishments and no look at me and how great I am.

Okay. A lot of us aren't comfortable doing that. A lot of us don't want to do that. A lot of us realize that if we did do that, it wouldn't have the results that we want. We wouldn't be seen as leaders. We would be seen as you know self-promoters. So one of the things that I talk about a lot and then I teach pretty much in all of our programs is positioning yourself as a leader is all about providing instead of promoting. And what I mean by that is you can demonstrate leadership and expertise by providing value, sharing your knowledge, helping others not through, you know, shameless self promotion and look at me posts and things like that. So when I talk about positioning yourself as a leader, it's all about figuring out how do you provide that value instead of doing self promotion. And we're going to cover a couple of examples of that here.

So the way that I want to cover that is basically a case study or an example. So the idea here is is how do we position ourselves as a technical expert and a leader in a particular topic area. And so I want to break that down a little bit. You know, this is kind of my, you know, base level definition of leadership and what that is all about and what I think leadership is all about is first collecting information, being a consumer of all that's going on in your particular industry or in your topic area. And then starting to form an opinion on the direction of your topic or your technology or your area of expertise. And what I mean by that is what's working today in that area? What are some gaps? What are some things that need improvement in your topic space in order for it, you know, and customers or users of your technology to be successful.

Okay. Forming that opinion is actually the biggest differentiator I see between leaders and non leaders across all of the companies that I've worked for, the thousands of people that I've trained and mentored and you know the hundreds of customers that I've been to and and projects, there's a small group of people that usually understand they need to form an opinion to help set a direction and that's where their leadership derives from. A lot of people just float. They don't really have an opinion. I don't know. I just work in tech, you know, just work in cloud. I'm just trying to, you know, figure out how to make the virtual machines work or you know, monitor something or backup something and so forth. They're not taking a look at, well what's working about this versus not? What is the, you know, the next a hundred companies that are going to go into this space.

What challenges are they going to encounter? How do we fix them? That forming an opinion of your space, your industry, your area of expertise and where it's going and how to get there faster is really the most critical first step. And again, you can do this at any level of granularity. So even if you're like a junior member, you know, two years into your career, just on your project, just narrow up the scope. You know, if you're there to just configure a network switch, start thinking about well what works and what doesn't work. What's hard about doing that? Now this can work at any level of granularity like we were talking about. So if you're the junior member on a project team, and let's say you're just there to help implement a network switch or something like that, you can start forming an opinion. So what I mean by that is think about your activity.

I need to configure a network switch. What's easy? What's difficult about that? Is there software that makes that easier or harder? What's the difference between how it's done now, how it was done a year ago? How is it going to be in the future? Okay. So you might think, why it even this whole idea of configuring an individual network switch, maybe that's going to go away because this management software lets us do it across a whole bunch of different ones, right? Maybe your company or the group that you work for doesn't have something like that in place right now. So you can provide leadership. I doing some studying up on that and saying, well, Hey, uh, talk to your manager and say, Hey, you know, I was looking at this software, um, you know, if we use something like this, it means we don't have to manually configure these things anymore.

Think it would save some time. Um, yeah, the software costs 10 grand, but you know, look how much time we're spending on this. We might have a payback of, you know, an or a return on an investment in six months if we buy the software implemented and then we can move on to higher level tasks that we never get to. Like, you know, backups or recovery or something like that. Right? So that's something even super early in your career, you can start taking initiative, forming an opinion, providing some leadership. Okay. Further into your career. Same thing, just on a wider scale, right? So in my career a lot of times this is something that I've done and it's consistently been one of the differentiators that that's really helped me accelerate. And that is taken a look at the state of the industry. So I've always been in the it infrastructure world and take a look where is the cost, where is the challenge, where are the top complaints by users?

How do we fix those things? Okay. So you know a bunch of different examples there. I've used a few in previous episodes, I've done this in the virtualization space and in the cloud computing space where you look at those and like early on they were just kind of neat technology. But then as you started to think about it and how it was going to dramatically change how it could be delivered and how costs could be reduced and so on, forming early opinions there and starting to inspire that direction is a key aspect of leadership. So again, getting back to that definition, the first step is forming an opinion. Take in the data, use your experience, figuring out where this industry is going or where it should go form that opinion. And then what you want to do to start doing is you want to start talking about it.

You want to start writing about it. You want to start inspiring others to agree with that opinion and want to help you in getting there. It doesn't mean you want to inspire followers. Like I don't think leadership is defined as just, Oh, you just a desire for people to follow you. Real leadership. True leadership is about inspiring people to align with the direction, the mission, the objective that you've put out there and have them want to join you and want to help you not follow and you know, take orders. Yes sir. Yes ma'am. But more want to actively help you. And then as a group you move forward towards that goal. So again, continuing on with this example. Let's say you formed an opinion about where you know this technology space that you're in is going to go. Next step is writing it down. Write a white paper, write some kind of a, a blog post.

Write a position piece that lays out your thinking. Make it logical, make it have a progression, have a story, but outline what your vision is. I think the industry is going here. Here's why. Here's what we could do to accelerate how to get there. And if we get there first, here's how we can be a leader in that particular area and at minimum, kind of get the thoughts down on paper or get them in a video. You know, whatever format makes sense to you, but put that vision out there so that you can then start showing people that, sharing it with them, asking them for their thoughts, and then that will start attracting towards you. The people that agree with your vision that want to go make that a reality, that want to be part of a team that's going to do that, and that automatically starts establishing your leadership position.

The next thing that you can do is now that you've written that down, be on the lookout for any opportunity to actually test out your vision. So if you're in a company and a kind of a corporate or it world, then start listening for, Hey, when's the next time we need to implement that technology? Or is anybody in a company having a challenge with that because you actually want to put your ideas to a test. Can you go do a minimum viable product somewhere and try out your ideas? Okay, so in that networking example, it could be, yeah, let's go select the software, getting an evaluation account. Let's bring it in. Let's try it out. Let's see if it actually saves time. Try and get to a minimum viable product as quick as you can to start proving your ideas out or not. Being a leader isn't always about being right, so you're going to form an opinion.

Sometimes they're going to be right and sometimes they're going to be wrong. Um, the true test is how quickly do you change your opinion once, once the facts change. And you know, I like to say to people, uh, you know, it wouldn't be my opinion if I didn't think it was right. But then it also wouldn't be fair to say, be stuck in an opinion. When you get more information, you don't change your mind. It's not about being belligerent or stubborn, it's about being adaptive, but always having that forward looking view there. So in this case, if you've done a minimum viable product, let's say it proved out your vision and say, yeah, this did save time, this did earn an ROI. Um, we think this should be rolled out more broadly. The next step is again, trying to bring more people into this effort that you're doing.

Teach people how to use that software, teach them how to implement it, teach them how to leverage it. Start scaling out the number of people that are operating in this particular space. Again, by helping others and providing that value to them. You continue to establish yourself more and more as the leader in that particular space. The next thing you want to do is think about it more broadly than just your work group. Are there other divisions within your company? Are there other customers within the client base that you serve that can basically be get some advantage from this particular solution? So starting to make it repeatable, starting to package it up so that you can offer up this solution to others is the next step in establishing that leadership. Now you're spanning out into your whole company. During that time you're going to encounter other experts and again you can build up this base of support where you're continuing to be seen as the leader because you're the one actively trying to pull the company or push the company into that particular direction.

It's not because you're out there self promoting or anything like that. It's like you are just delivering value and then you're pulling people into that to keep up the momentum and they'll come along with you. Then the final step is, well maybe this direction that you're starting to pull your company is relevant in the broader industry that you're in. So what you might do is to start writing, you know, public blog posts or you know, submitting papers to, you know, to industry journals or submitting for sessions to speak at industry conferences to talk about this solution or this, you know, this innovation that you're doing in your particular area. This is what really starts separating you from everybody else. Because I guarantee no matter what company you're in, less than 1% of people are doing anything like this, trying to speak at conferences or getting known out in the industry.

So the more you can do that and the more that you can serve those audiences and serve those customers broader than your individual company, that is now the path to establishing yourself as an industry leader. So, you know, it's a pretty simple example and we went through it relatively quickly. But imagine yourself, wherever you are in your career at each step of those paths, how can you either be the leader of those or how can you be the second or third tier of leadership, you know, that is helping your company or your team go into that particular direction. These are different ways that you can establish that leadership. And then it's all about, you know, providing that value instead of the self promotion that none of us really want to want to get into. Okay. So that's a quick example, but it's really key and what I'm hoping that does is connect with you regardless of where you are in your career because these opportunities are there but only as tiny amount of people will actually take advantage of them.

And that's a shame because there's plenty of leadership opportunities to go around. Um, I'm now kind of in a management position within Microsoft. And one of the things that we really struggle with is even amongst the company that has an incredible set of talent in there is the people that are willing to take that initiative, put their reputation on the line, set a course, start going after it and try and inspire people to follow them. Only a few percent really actually do that. And uh, you know, the opportunity is there for a lot more to do that and then to reap the advantages that come from being seen as that type of leader. So now that you understand how to start actually being a leader, the positioning part is the last thing that I wanted to cover in this episode. And again, what I mean by that is getting it known that you are doing these activities and they're, they're being successful but without being very self promotional about it.

And so again, the number one way to do that is to teach others how to have the same success and results that you're having. Sharing that knowledge shows that you're confident enough to put that out there. You're not trying to hoard that knowledge. You're not trying to make yourself be the only expert in this particular thing to the exclusion of everyone else. It just shows confidence and a giving attitude to be able to put that knowledge out there. Okay, so think of it more like an open source type of scenario. You discovered something, you proved that it was successful, you're going to share it out with the community. You're not going to hoard that knowledge because now you're going to move on to the next thing. You're going to stay a leader by constantly evolving and looking at, okay, what's the next step after the direction that you just pulled everybody towards?

So again, a lot of the different ways to do this. Yeah. Really need to think about it. Like we've talked about in previous episodes of your expertise as a business that you are cultivating, and what I mean by that is businesses have marketing departments, they have technology departments, they have support departments and so on. You need to think about your career in that perspective. Who is the marketing department in your career? Most of us have zero. Okay. The successful people out there actually look at it that way and they, maybe they do all the marketing themselves or what's increasingly starting to happen is people are starting to build up teams that support them from a personal marketing perspective to accelerate their careers. Okay. It's a lot of work to have a blog and a website and to keep social media up to date and to have a YouTube channel and to create courses and to do all of this knowledge sharing that I'm talking about.

But there are a lot of people doing that now that are very successful. I just did some research in the last month and I've collected out 25 examples of technical professionals that have incredible personal brands and presence out in the industry that is establishing them as leaders and basically separating them from their peers that aren't doing any of those things. So from websites to blogs to YouTube channels to tutorials and courses that they build and sell or give away for free. Um, I'll include some examples in the, in the links and in the comments below of of those. But that is what is the state of the art today. Thinking about your career as a business and in addition to having the engineering and the technical department, which is where most of us focus our time, cause that's our job. Also think about what is the marketing department, what's the support department?

How do I help answer questions that people have within my company or within my industry by answering those questions that again, positions me as that leader. There's a number of different things that you can do there. That's something that we're going to talk about in the free training that I mentioned at the top of this show. It's going to go step by step of how to build that marketing team around your career that really is going to accelerate things for you. So if you're interested in that, if you're interested in learning how to accelerate your career, how to establish yourself as a leader in your industry or in your area of expertise, how to get that positioning done, how to build that expert personal brand. Then what I want to invite you to do is go on over to expert brand system.com and on that page I've got a free 15 minute video that's going to show you step by step, a nine step process for establishing that marketing department, establishing that personal brand and beginning to position yourself as an industry leader in as little as eight weeks.

So you can go from zero to very well established, very high levels of assets and design and value being provided out to the industry in as little as eight weeks. So again, I'd invite you to head over to expert brand system.com. Check out that free video and um, I'm pretty sure that you're going to find some things that you have not seen before that the leaders in your industry, in technology are doing that you can easily replicate. It's just a matter of putting in the effort and putting the time into it. And then you can do the same and then you can reap some of the same awards as a, as those of us who have already done that. So I'll invite you over to check out that video and thanks for joining us today and I hope to see you in the next episode.

Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success.