The Self-Promotion Backlash - NYTimes.com - 0 views
op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-self-promotion-backlash
self-promotion careerism career satisfaction supervision reputation collaboration excellence
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From “building your personal brand” to “stepping up your social media presence,” we’re constantly inundated with advice about how to promote ourselves
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David Zweig profiles a group of people whose jobs are behind the scenes in some way (a guitar technician and a United Nations interpreter, for instance), and who derive satisfaction not from public recognition, but from the internal sense of a job well done. These “Invisibles,” as he calls them, are often extremely fulfilled in their careers, and they may have something to teach
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The Invisibles offer “an alternate path to success” — they got where they were not by courting attention, but by working quietly and extremely carefully toward something bigger than themselves. “The work they do is always in service of a larger endeavor,”
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they show that at least for some people, “when you focus on excellence and good work, that actually does get recognized in the end.”
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Many Americans, he said, feel “this pressure to have more of a presence online and just in the overall corporate environment to be promoting themselves more, when they really would be far better off focusing on their work.”
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many people he’d talked to while working on the book expressed “anxiety and even resentment about a work culture today where it’s expected of you to really be pushing yourself in a promotional way.” His book, he said, “gives them permission to step off the wheel” of self-promotion and go back to their actual jobs.
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Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, of Higgs Boson fame, said he wouldn’t make it as an academic today because he wouldn’t be considered productive enough. There’s no time to think.”
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“When building an individual’s reputation takes precedence over the common good, it creates troubling distortions. One of them is that scholars and scientists are encouraged to produce as many measurable units of publication as possible.
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Those who feel more comfortable working in a collaborative way should do so — “the people in my book show again and again that that has brought them to success.”
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“When so many people are competing for attention, getting attention becomes a full time job with dispiriting results (and is highly annoying to everyone else).”
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Overall, she said, “there’s not a lot of evidence that self-promotion works. It’s exhausting both for the people doing it and their audience
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“It could be argued that a culture of recognition dovetails with a culture of excessive supervision. If the expectation of recognition for nearly everything we do becomes increasingly normalized, what affect does that attitude have on our relationship to privacy, in particular to employers, corporations, and governments overseeing much of what we do?”
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“One thing that organizations and managers might think to do is create an environment where it’s frowned upon or not as prevalent for people to constantly promote themselves.”