If the shoe fits ...

Use these three lessons to create your brand, develop your unique professional identity and navigate your career journey.

My career journey has been a wonderfully long and winding road through incredible roles in a wide range of industries. I’ve audited, investigated and led large global teams of people whose services kept businesses running, including IT, finance, human resources, marketing, procurement and more. I’ve been lucky enough to work with leaders and teams that have inspired me to learn crucial career lessons along the way. As I think about those lessons, I’ve distilled them down to my top three.

But before I share those lessons, I’ll give you a sense of where my journey started. I got my degree in accounting and landed a plum position in one of the big public accounting firms. It was a dream job. As vice president of my school’s accounting society, a staff auditor in a big firm was the quintessential position that I’d been working towards throughout my academic career. However, I was a bit of a rebel growing up, and I have a deep-rooted curiosity about everything. So, the one thing that I didn’t bargain for was a requirement to conform.

As I navigated those early years, the messages that constantly flashed before me were clear: conformity was the key to success. Keep your head down, don’t rock the boat. I struggled to find my way through the sea of neutral-colored skirt suits and pantyhose. One of my best coping mechanisms was to wear the craziest socks that I could find with my sneakers for my long commute, before switching to painful pumps as I walked in the door to work.

Aside from the constraining attire, what I remember most about that time in my career was the constant feeling that being unique or different — right down to the way you did your work or the questions you asked — came with a penalty. The expectation seemed to be that I should be just like everybody else. But if I believed that, then it was hard to give my best.

Thankfully, those days are gone, and organizations around the world are beginning to recognize the tremendous value in diversity of thought and contribution. Disruption is happening all around us in every industry, and the winning organizations recognize that conformity stifles bold new thinking and shuts down any attempt to drive change.

Lesson No. 1: Meet people where they are

I left public accounting hoping I’d be liberated from pantyhose and heels only to find that corporate jobs had similar expectations of how women were to dress in the workplace. In my early corporate roles, I frequently traveled to places around the world where the people I worked with or investigated didn’t dress like me. Often, I’d find myself in a factory or remote office and notice people staring at me as I walked the floor, looking like a fish out of water. The people I had to work with weren’t collegial, open or forthright, which made the auditing or investigation work that I had to do extra hard.

Several years into my career, I landed an audit director role at a music company. Despite the diversity in the office dress, I intently wore my suits, believing it was the only way to be taken seriously in the workplace as a woman. An audit team was having a difficult time getting cooperation from local management at a record company and couldn’t complete its work. My boss asked me to fly out from New York to California the next morning. It was there that I learned how to dress for success.

I checked into the hotel, put on a suit and met the team in the lobby. We were equally horrified at each other’s choice of attire. The team was in jeans. After silently looking at each other for a few moments, a brave person on the team confronted me. “You can’t go to the office dressed like that. They won’t let you in!” they exclaimed. We argued back and forth a bit, and then they asked, “What clothes did you fly in wearing?” I told them that I wore a black pair of jeans, a black t-shirt and a pair of Dr. Martens shoes. They said, “Put them back on, and we can go.”

Whether we know it or not, we each have a brand that people attribute to us.

Eventually, I gave in and was never more grateful to that team for teaching me a very important lesson about meeting people where they’re at. The office was filled with people in jeans, t-shirts, shorts, sandals and sneakers. I wouldn’t have made it past the reception desk in my suit. More importantly, without the armor of my suit, I realized that people were interacting with me differently. I was more approachable and real, and that was incredibly liberating.

When I got back to my office in New York, I decided to be brave and lose the suits. My work changed, I stood out and people took notice. My black t-shirts and Dr. Martens put on a lot of mileage in those days, including my trip to London to receive my promotion to vice president.

Lesson No. 2: Own your brand and control your narrative

Whether we know it or not, we each have a brand that people attribute to us. The impression that we make on our bosses, co-workers and colleagues stick. Those impressions are communicated many times when we aren’t even in the room — in day-to-day meetings or the all-important talent reviews.

Several years after leaving the music business, I was doing consulting work and got a call from an old colleague. He said that he had a tough project that he knew I could help him with. He explained the work to me, and I felt that he was asking me to do something outside of my wheelhouse. I asked, “Why me?” He said that one of the things he remembered most about me was that I was able to “get people to do things they don’t want to and even buy into the fact that they are great ideas.” I chuckled and agreed to meet him, but before we hung up he said, “I’m looking forward to seeing you and your Dr. Martens.” I was flabbergasted. He remembered my shoes, but more importantly, I had a brand!

Over the years I learned that it’s always a good idea to reflect on what you and others are conveying about your brand. I find that developing a personal mission statement can be a helpful way to think about your purpose, what you stand for and how you want to be perceived by others.

Next, consciously show up as you, then routinely check how others define your brand to see if it aligns with how you want to be perceived. If the words you hear from others are things like, “cop,” “black and white,” “risk adverse,” “corporate” or “boring,” and that’s not the brand you want to be associated with, ask yourself why. How can I change your perception? Remember, if you aren’t the author of your narrative, someone else will be.

Lesson No. 3: Navigate your career journey

As a leader and a mentor, I see many women who keep their heads down and work really hard, only to feel disappointed when they’re passed up for promotions or new opportunities. What I’ve come to learn is that achieving career success is a delicate balance of confidence and competence.

Many women focus on building deep competence throughout their career without ever addressing the confidence issues that plague us all. If we just do great work, we hope that others will notice and shepherd us along in our career. The truth is that some get lucky with bosses that take notice and reward awesome contributions. I’ll admit that some of my career success was achieved that way. In fact, some of my promotions led me to believe that a few of my bosses had actually read my mind. It wasn’t until I was way into in my career that I learned how dangerous that assumption was — they don’t.

My bosses and other leaders made assumptions about where they thought I wanted my career to go, which stuck me on tracks that I really didn’t want to be on. The game changed for me when I showed the confidence to take control, have a frank conversation and openly declare my career goals with a plan to get me there. I even used that confidence to experiment to change my footwear from my famous Dr. Martens to a wild collection of Converse high tops, making me more of the authentic leader I wanted to be.

Navigating my own career gave me the power to demonstrate that there were many skills that I already had for the roles I wanted. I then came up with creative ways to bridge any skill gaps through experiences that sometimes weren’t even related to my day job. Balancing confidence and demonstrating the competence landed me in the C-suite in leadership team positions that I never would’ve achieved by just keeping my head down and doing great work.

In the end, it’s important to realize that we’re all on our own unique journeys. Be yourself; there’s no one else you can be. And wherever your journey takes you, remember: It’s all about the shoes, if even only figuratively. If the ones you’re walking in don’t quite fit, kick them off and get yourself a new pair.

Bethmara Kessler, CFE, is a global thought leader, lecturer, consultant and advisor to businesses on the topics of fraud, audit, compliance, enterprise risk management, shared services delivery strategies, process transformation and is on the ACFE Faculty and Advisory Council. Contact her at linkedin.com/in/bethmara-kessler.