Book Rec: Unforgettable Presence, by Lorraine K. Lee
Unforgettable Presence:
Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career
by Lorraine K. Lee
In every career development course I teach with my Northwestern MSLOC faculty colleague Margaret Sullivan, several students express feelings of reticence about personal branding and networking. Each of them knows that we all have a personal brand and reputation, and they know we all have and need networks, whether we are focused on them or not. What they (understandably) push back against are the feelings of inauthenticity, opportunism, competition, comparison, and commercialization they get from so much career advice that transforms each of us, and our productive capacity, into a product to be bought and sold.
Lorraine K. Lee’s new book, and her EPIC framework for career branding, give us threads that slide through the needle’s eye between standing in our full humanity and selling ourselves as a solution to an employer’s problems. The EPIC—Experiences, Personality, Identity, Community—Framework puts each person in the center of their own career brand, then encourages us to explore about where it aligns, and conflicts, with how we intend others to experience us.
This philosophy carries through to Lee’s discussions and counsel for how to frame conversations with and presentations to executives. “Executive presence” is another concept that often rightfully garners resistance from career developers, for reasons ranging from its reflection of patriarchal and white supremacist norms to a lack of clarity (be it intentional or unintentional) about what it means or includes. In her chapter on “Making Yourself Unforgettable to Executives,” Lee instead gets very clear about how to determine the specific kinds of communications and approaches that allow us to be heard and understood by the humans we work with, including those who are in positions of professional power and influence.
Read This Book If You Want or Need:
Prompts and tools to reflect and work on your career brand, professional relationships, and networking from a foundation of authenticity and mutual awareness
Practical, actionable advice for improving your professional communications, ranging from how you use your LinkedIn profile to how you show up on video calls, from building influence to designing and delivering presentations
Frameworks and methods for shaping your professional relationships across all levels and types: managing up, managing down, managing laterally, and engaging with executive leaders and clients
I am in a mentoring and networking group (Northwestern’s Council of One Hundred) with Lorraine and I had the pleasure of hearing her talk about the book live at a recent meeting on campus in Evanston (IL). I am grateful for her generosity with her ideas—the tools in and accessible from the book are terrific, and I know I will use many of them myself and with my career coaching clients.
