1. Should you have a public persona?
We are standing on the edge, looking out over a vast wide ocean of the unknown. How do we make a good impression?

2. • You're meeting someone new to talk about a leadership role
• You've spilt coffee on your jacket just before you arrive.
• Oh, and without you knowing, your kids have wiped Vegemite on your shirt
• You're a bit nervous, so you stammer your name, and instead of introducing yourself as Chris, they think you've just asked for a kiss.

3. • The interview starts. But their body language is already bad.
• You leave the meeting.
• Well, that didn't go very well.
• I don't think I'll get that job
• I'll probably never get a job again
• Maybe I can move in with mum

4. • Hmmm, that cardboard box looks roomy
• Problem: you’ve walked into meeting cold. Limited credibility and no way to control or claw back that first impression.
But.... if you had built some credibility and visibility before you'd walked into the room, you'd already be in a better place:
• Some expectation
• Control over how it’s presented (but you can’t control how it’s interpreted)
Now I'm pretty clearly in the YES bucket on the question of whether it’s useful to have a public profile and I don't think that will be a surprise to anyone. It is useful to have a presence and some visibility to
help your career along. With networking and some small investment into your public persona, you can build career credibility before you even walk into a room. It's a shortcut, it's easier than ever, and I'm
going to tell you why and share a few tips with you.

5. First, let's step back thirty years, to when my dad was my age (36), and see what he had to do to push his tech leadership career forward.

6. • Professional society like ACS or a user group like the PC User Group, or a SIG, or a club.
• Nothing like today when we have heaps of options for connecting face-to-face.
• Sharing opinions: maybe you'd write a letter to Australian PC User or Your Computer (hope it’s published and it’s not edited to oblivion).
• Maybe have a regular column (hope it’s not edited too much!)

7. • Emerging BBS scene, for cost of phone call you could connect your 300 or 1200 bps modem into a couple of phone lines that host BBS would have.
• BBS might have Fidonet, owner had privilege of paying $100s a month for late night calls to US to pick up messages & public domain software.
• So there were small, thriving tech communities at that time. But it was hard work, there was an amount of hustle needed to connect with other tech enthusiasts, especially if you wanted to
intentionally build some sort of public profile and not just meet people.

8. Fast forward to today and we've got it much, much easier. There are many, many communities you can be part of
I flicked through the attendee list tonight and there was someone here who is a member of over 50 different meetup groups, which I thought was impressive and also insane... then I
checked and I'm a member of 21 - but that just proves how many interesting avenues we’ve got to connect with people.

9. We have Twitter, we have LinkedIn, we have Github, we have Wordpress, we have YouTube, and many many more.
If you want to connect with like minded people, or if you have something you'd like to say, it's never been easier.
It's never been easier to craft an image of yourself to present to the world. But just because something is easy, it doesn't mean it's worthwhile.
In this case: it’s easy AND worthwhile. For me, it's less a question of whether to do it, and more a question of how much effort.

10. How I’ve Done It
Now I’m going to tell you how I’ve done it. Not because I’m a wizard at this, but because of how I’ve had some great results in a really simple way.

11. I am pretty sporadic in my efforts, but over years, with really minimal effort, I've built enough relationships, connections and online artefacts to make a real difference.
Here's how:
• Started attending user groups. I think the first one was JUG in the old Sun building in North Sydney around about 2000. I met a number of people who I still see and connect with in Sydney now.
• Started reading blogs. And I started a blog. I wrote inane technical posts about what I was doing at work. Very few people ever read them. I never read them.
• I kept writing on the blog. Still very few people read it. But I stopped writing about tech minutiae, and started writing about teams and opinions on doing software right. Now ten years later I have
a small but decent archive of coherent thoughts that people will find when they look me up.
• I stayed interested in tech outside of what I was doing at work, and in 2006 started going to the local Ruby meetup when it was just a few people. The Ruby scene had and still has an amazing
sense of community, and I've stayed in touch with and continue to do business with a number of the people I met at that time.

12. I joined Twitter in 2008 and after an initial flurry, have settled into a rhythm of tweeting just a few times a week, next to nothing. I've got a relatively modest number of
followers, but I don't particularly care. I try to tweet interesting things every now and then, but I'm not chasing social media relevance - but I am interested that over time
I’ve got a good representation of who I am.

13. I have no idea when I joined LinkedIn, but I keep it up to date, and have posted a couple of things to their publishing platform (which gets your content in front of people
much better than an isolated blog)

14. • I go to conferences, and meet ups, and talk to interesting people, and say hi next time I see them.
• I'll present at meet ups or conferences a couple of times a year.
• I reach out to people I haven't met but have heard of and ask to meet up for coffee. I probably do this once every month or two. This is an awesome way to build your network.
All of this is really basic, and without much effort or planning, I'm really confident that there's a clear message of the sort of person I am.
In the last two years I've hired over 80 people into my teams, and I've lost count of the number of people who've told me at our first meeting that they researched me ahead of the meeting, so they've read my blog, followed me on
Twitter and checked out LinkedIn.
And whether they've planned for it or not, I've done the same to them. If we're both doing it and we both have stuff out there, then even though we've never met before, we now have a decent understanding of what to expect from the
other person and how to engage with them.

15. Is this a distraction? If taken to extremes. If you are punishing yourself to write every day, or go to multiple meet ups a week, yes, I could see it being a distraction.
But I've just shown you how a person bordering on lazy with their efforts can string together something that helps their career.
There's absolutely no reason this needs to be a distraction to getting things done. And you don't even need to do all of the things I've done to get a benefit.

16. I didn't worry about this stuff being a distraction, but likewise, I didn't start out doing any of those things with a grand plan in mind. In fact, I had many false beliefs about
my career:

17. I used to believe that it was just the quality of my work that counted.

18. BUT … <pause>

19. The truth is while being able to do quality work is critical, it's just part of the picture for how you're considered and for the future opportunities available to you.

21. I used to believe that being the best programmer possible would mean I was never out of a job

22. BUT … <pause>

23. That may be true, but we've seen some amazing programmers, and we’ve turned them down, because they had no perspective. They'd never invested in any part of
themselves apart from technical skills and often couldn't communicate well, and couldn't understand the business context they worked in.

25. I used to think that other people would be able to understand what sort of person I was before they'd even met me just based on some words in a CV.

26. BUT … <pause>

27. I assumed too much. I was just a name on a page. Interacting with others, even fleetingly, and having an easily discoverable version of yourself, is how people form an
opinion of you.

28. What do you do next?

29. Think about how you want to present yourself. Who are you?
For me, I present a reflection of what I'm like day to day.
I'm serious about trying to be great at management and building great teams. I'm serious about learning. I'm generally positive and light hearted about life. And I try not to complain about things in public forums.
That's a really simple outline of me, but you'd be hard pressed to find any of my online of offline presence that contradicts that.

30. Think about the sort of people you'd like to connect with. Who are they?
There are so many meet ups, and you can't go to all of them. Who are your people? But don't just stop in your comfort zone, push yourself to meet people with different professional backgrounds too.
For some of you that's coming to a leadership meet up like tonight before you're in a leadership role. And I applaud that.

31. • Think about what you have to say to the world.
◦ Lots of technologists, like myself, are introverts. We don't want to rock the boat. Meeting people can be hard, we don't want to also disagree with them.
Offices and working life can be hard enough. But if you want to get the most out of your outside life, and want to follow the simple steps I'm talking about to help with
your leadership journey, you'll be best served if you have some opinions. You don't need an opinion on everything, but you won't be an interesting person for others to
connect with if you have a vanilla approach to your interactions. Similarly though, if you’ve ever been called “opinionated” in the past, then make sure you tone it down
and keep it positive online.

32. 1. Start a blog, or post to LinkedIn
2. Review a professional book on Goodreads
3. Sign up to Twitter. Now. #SydTechLeaders
4. Update LinkedIn. Think Value & Competencies.
5. Attend a meetup or conference (tick!)

33. I'd add that doing the small amount of work to build a profile and make connections outside your direct work is your machete, and the best time to get started is right
now.