GUERRILLA INTELLIGENCE.

Emotional Intelligence and Your Career Portfolio Anita Martel, RGR

Having an up-to-date emotional intelligence a.s.sessment has become one of your greatest a.s.sets in your job search strategy. Why? Because by doing so you've reduced the risk the hiring manager has in hiring YOU YOU.

An emotional intelligence a.s.sessment gives you concrete and valid evidence that complements your resume and provides tangible proof to a potential employer. Hiring managers are risk averse, and by making their job virtually risk free you have just given yourself a leg up on the compet.i.tion. The added plus to having your emotional intelligence a.s.sessed is that you can speak with complete confidence during an interview. You gain valuable insight that you can use to your benefit. By knowing your strong points, you can further build on them and use them to position yourself advantageously. In addition, by knowing your weaker points, you can specifically concentrate on improving them. It is strongly recommended that you retake the test at 2- to 3-year intervals to reevaluate your progress over time.

In the workplace, an ever-increasing number of employers are choosing to use emotional intelligence a.s.sessments to ensure a greater fit of potential and current employees within their company culture. It is becoming more and more obvious to today's companies that their workforce can no longer be managed in the traditional style. That is, today's employee is no longer just a part of the puzzle that completes the big picture but has become the process with which to do it. Organizations are now filled with highly educated knowledge workers that as a team have become this process. This is in essence what will give one company a distinct compet.i.tive advantage over another, and today's companies are specifically looking for that edge.

On the personal side of things, none of us live in a vacuum, and we can clearly see how our personal life always ends up trickling into our professional life at one time or another. We develop relationships with everyone around us. How well we manage those relationships can have a significant impact on both our professional as well as our personal lives. Having vibrant, healthy relationships has become the core compet.i.tive advantage in today's workplace.

So what exactly is emotional intelligence? "Emotional intelligence is the unique repertoire of emotional skills that a person uses to navigate the everyday challenges of life" (Multi-Health Systems, 2008). It is the awareness of one's emotions and the ability to use those emotions to strengthen one's performance. Simply put, emotional intelligence is often referred to as common sense or street smarts.

Research has demonstrated that an individual's emotional intelligence is often a more accurate predictor of success than that person's IQ. No matter how intellectually intelligent someone is, their success is still governed by how well they can communicate their ideas and interact with their peers. As opposed to IQ, which is said to be set early on in life, your emotional intelligence can be substantially strengthened and developed with appropriate training and thus can be improved considerably. Since emotional intelligence is elastic, those who lack it can gain it, and those who have it can augment and develop it further.

Many emotional intelligence tests exist on the market and all claim to be the best. I have researched a great number of them and keep coming back to one in particular. The BarOn EQ-I a.s.sessment is by far the most comprehensive on the market. It a.s.sesses interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, stress management, adaptability, and general mood with many other areas within these categories. Several different reports can be generated including a leadership one, and its versatility allows individuals to track and work on their emotional intelligence. A company wanting to have an accurate predictor of best performers or a comparison/fit for potential employees can also use it. It is used worldwide, can be produced in several different languages, and has been scientifically validated. It can be taken online and completed in about 40 minutes. You receive a clear and easy-to-read written interpretation of your results, recommendations on what to do to increase your emotional intelligence, and a debriefing session with a certified administrator.

Remember, you are creating your career portfolio and whatever you can add to it that will put you a step ahead of the compet.i.tion is essential. All good career portfolios include a summary resume, a thorough detailed resume, a number of references, and an up-to-date emotional intelligence a.s.sessment.

Anita Martel is a partner of Perry-Martel International and a Certified BarOn EQ-I administrator. She is devoted to helping leaders, individuals, and teams increase their effectiveness and attain their full potential. For more information or to take the test, e-mail

Part I

Your Guerrilla Mind

Chapter 2.

Personal Branding Guerrilla Style

Shape Up Your Brand with Att.i.tude

If Christopher Columbus had turned back, no one would have blamed him. Of course, no one would have remembered him either.

-UNKNOWN AUTHOR

Embrace this fact: it's rarely the best qualified person who wins the most coveted position. Instead, it is often the person who "packages" themself best to meet the needs of employers. This all comes down to how you look on paper initially and the att.i.tude you bring to your job search. You have 100 percent control over both. We'll discuss branding guerrilla style first, then your att.i.tude.

"YOU INC."-YOUR PERSONAL BRAND

More than ever in our history, huge value is being leveraged from smart ideas and the winning technology and business models they create. In the years to come, as companies strive to hire fewer but better people, employers will try harder than they ever have to attract and retain smart, boldly entrepreneurial overachievers. In the new world of work, value is not salary-not for the employer, not for you. With millions of dollars at stake, an employer's search for an employee will be value-focused, not salary-driven.

As a job hunter, you need to comprehend that the production of value is the most important criterion for an employer when hiring. Articulating your value is your key to successful job hunting; it separates you from all the other job hunters. Understand, value is not salary; worth does not flow from a job t.i.tle. Knowing what's important to a company means looking beyond job descriptions and compensation tables, especially today when sudden changes and uncertainty are the norm.

You need to comprehend: * What value is a company expecting from an employee's contribution?* How do you communicate your value to an employer?

Especially for management and senior positions, companies are rarely looking to fill in a box on a standard employee recruitment form; they are looking for something nebulous and more important. They are searching for a person who can deliver a quality, not a quant.i.ty, someone who can explode outward from an open-ended initiative-driven s.p.a.ce.

Qualities are difficult to find, measure, or test, and you don't find these qualities by searching for specific salary levels-the qualities that make up the new value table are money-resistant, as initially explained in Career Guide for the High-Tech Professional: Where the Jobs Are Now and How to Land Them, Career Guide for the High-Tech Professional: Where the Jobs Are Now and How to Land Them, by David Perry (Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2004). The new value table ( by David Perry (Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2004). The new value table (Table 2.1) goes beyond skill sets and resumes.

In its simplest form, Table 2.1 Table 2.1 represents the base elements of your personal "brand." Building your brand-making a "name for yourself"-need not be expensive. represents the base elements of your personal "brand." Building your brand-making a "name for yourself"-need not be expensive.

Create Your Brand Guerrilla Style

Personal branding is not about projecting a false image. It is about understanding what is unique about you-your accomplishments, experience, att.i.tude-and using that to differentiate yourself from other job hunters. Your brand is your edge.

Do you buy generic beer, clothes, cars? Do you buy any no-name large ticket items at all? Not likely. If you are like most people, you buy a brand because of the security and peace of mind that come from the quality and reliability of a known brand. Employers do the exact same thing when they hire people.

Table 2.1 New Value Table New Value Table

[image]

Personal branding is critical for guerrilla marketers because: * Employers are looking for results.* Your results demonstrate your qualities, which satisfy an employer's value requirements.* Employers won't buy generic employees.* Employers will buy the intangible qualities implied by your brand (you are like Nike, too).

How to Create Your Brand

Personal branding is about making yourself stand out so that people trust you and are interested in you. Guerrillas do this by leveraging their previous employers' brand (names, slogans, and logos) to create an ident.i.ty that is memorable and desirable to the people they want to reach.

For your cover letter, this means naming the projects you worked on or the clients you sold to. Be specific. Be detailed. Sell the sizzle and and the steak. the steak.

For your resume, it may mean taking the logos (with permission, of course) of the companies you worked for or the product you developed and placing them on your resume for extra punch. Nothing will get an employer's attention faster than a well-known brand's logo, especially if it is a compet.i.tor or a coveted account (this reaction is known as the "halo effect").

What would make the person reading your resume take notice of you? Could it be your training at another company? Might it be the companies you have sold to? Were you responsible for a major product that the employer might recognize? There are likely thousands of images you could use. You only want to put in 5, so choose the 5 your reader is most likely to be interested in. Putting in more than 5 makes it too crowded.

Table 2.2 is a list of suggestions for you to use in choosing your images. is a list of suggestions for you to use in choosing your images.

Let's get right into how to choose your most marketable skills and write about your accomplishments to reflect your brand. We will use the output you produce in this section with the clever design of your resume(s) in Chapter 5. You will reuse the info in LinkedIn, Facebook, Mys.p.a.ce, and blogs.

EFFECTIVE BRANDING IS ABOUT SELLING WHAT MATTERS

This section is designed to help you do 2 things that are essential to branding yourself: 1. Determine your marketable skills, and2. Find achievements that prove your claims.

The data you a.s.semble here will help you write your Guerrilla Resume later (in the Chapter 5). DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! In fact, if you can't find the time to do these 2 things, please stop reading now and ask for your money back-this book will be of no use to you.