Joe Paterno passed away over the weekend.  You probably know this but he was the football coach at Penn State for the past 46 years.  He has more wins than any other coach in Division I college football.  He was known for running a very clean program with no recruiting violations or scandals.  Besides building a winning football program, Joe did a lot for Penn State, giving millions of dollars to the university to expand the library.

I’m a Penn State alum.  Joe was the head coach when I arrived there in the Fall of 1968.  I was always proud to be a Penn State alum.  I was especially proud of the football program and is reputation for fair play.

That all changed for me last Fall when one of Joe’s longtime assistant coaches was charged with several counts of child sex abuse.  You probably know the story.  In 2002, one of Joe’s assistant coaches, Mike McQueary observed Sandusky, who was retired but still had access to the Penn State football facilities, raping a young boy in a shower.  McQueary told Joe, who reported the incident to the Athletic Director.

Sandusky was never barred from the Penn State training facilities, and it is alleged that he continued to abuse young boys up until his arrest last Fall.  Many people, myself included, feel that Joe Paterno should have done more to follow up on what McQueary told him.  Make no mistake, he did what was required of him by law – he even testified at the Grand Jury investigating the allegations.  But doing what’s legal, isn’t necessarily doing what’s right.

Joe Paterno will forever be regarded as a great football coach, but one who gave tacit approval to child sex abuse.  And that’s the career success point of this post.   Your personal brand and reputation are important.  Guard them with all your might.

Last Friday, I was doing an interview for my membership site with Van Horsley, President of the Colorado operations of a large national bank.  I do these interviews to give my members inside advice on life and career success from successful people.  If you would like to see what the membership site is all about, go to http://www.MyCorporateClimb.com.  In our interview, Van concluded his remarks by saying, “Your integrity is an asset.  And once you spend that asset, it’s gone forever.”

As I listened to the coverage of Joe Paterno’s passing, I was reminded of Van’s remarks on integrity.  Joe Paterno spent his integrity when he didn’t follow up on the allegations about Jerry Sandusky.  By not doing so, and by continuing to let this man have access to the Penn State athletic facilities, Joe lost his integrity – which is too bad, because by all accounts he is a man of high integrity.

But that’s the way it goes.  It takes a long time to build a reputation as a person of integrity.  One foolish move can destroy all that.  All of the coverage on Joe’s passing said he “was a great football coach, BUT…”

Tweet 62 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Your personal brand should be unique to you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well-known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called, There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and I believe integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the time – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Here’s a story to illustrate this point.  Cathy, my wife, was a flight attendant for 36 years.  Seniority is a very important thing in the airline industry.  It governs how you bid for trips, positions on the airplane and vacations – almost anything important to a flight attendant’s quality of work life.

Cathy was very active in her union.  And seniority was one of the union’s most sacred principles.  A few years before she retired, Cathy’s airline made a big push into the international market.  International flights were plum assignments; they went to people with high seniority.

However, the airline realized that it would be to their advantage to have some flight attendants who spoke the language of the country to which they were flying on these international flights.  Most flight attendants in her airline spoke English only.  The airline proposed putting two “language speakers” on each international flight.  Many people, including Cathy, were upset with this arrangement as they felt it violated the seniority concept.

Cathy used to fly from the US to London.  One day I said to her, “This whole language speaker issue doesn’t really affect you.  You fly to London; there are no language speakers on those flights.  Why do you care so much?”  She said, “I believe in the concept of seniority.  It doesn’t matter if I’m affected by language speakers.  It’s the principle of the thing.”  That’s consistency – and integrity — in action.

And that brings us back to Joe Paterno.  Here was a man with an incredibly strong personal brand.  He was known for doing the right thing in a business where too many people don’t do the right thing.  Sadly, his legacy is forever tarnished, because of what he didn’t do at a moment of truth.  I’m not writing this post to pass judgment on Joe – enough people have done that already.  I am writing it however, to reinforce my point of building your personal brand on integrity.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is one of the competencies all successful people possess.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.  Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Follow the advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”  As the sad ending to Joe Paterno’s career and life demonstrates, even a momentary lapse in your integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.

That’s the career advice I take from the sad ending of Joe Paterno’s life and career.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site last September.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  You can find out about the membership site by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

I’m in Spain doing some work for one of my multinational corporate clients this week.

But I write this blog post with a heavy heart.  If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that I am a Penn State alum.  Recently some nasty allegations about a former football assistant coach there, Jerry Sandusky, have popped up.  Mr. Sandusky is accused of sexually abusing very young boys.  He has been retired since 1999, but is still closely aligned with the Penn State program.

The Penn State Athletic Director, Tim Curley and Senior Vice President Gary Schultz have been indicted on charges of perjury for allegedly lying to a Grand Jury about their knowledge of the situation.  Mr. Curley is on an administrative leave of absence.  Mr. Schultz has resigned.  Penn State president Graham Spanier has lost his job.

Joe Paterno, the Head Football Coach is not facing criminal charges –also lost his job.  He wanted to finish the season, but the Penn State Board of Trustees has severed all ties with him.  He won’t be the Penn State coach for the final three games of the season.  I’m sure this isn’t the way he expected to end his career.

This is disturbing to me on a number of fronts.  First, young boys were victimized by a Penn State football coach.  Second,  my university’s reputation has been sullied.  Third, I have always admired Joe Paterno.  Joe has always been known for running a clean program.

Here’s what I can tell from watching the news coverage of this situation.  Several years ago, a graduate assistant told Joe that he (the graduate assistant) observed Mr. Sandusky engaged in anal sex with a young boy in the shower at the Penn State football complex.  Joe reported this to the AD.  He was asked to testify before a Grand Jury about what he was told.  He testified that he reported the incident to the AD, so he is not implicated in a criminal case like Mr. Curley.

But was that enough?  In my opinion, if Joe knew about this egregious conduct by Mr. Sandusky, he should have taken more action – not just report it to the AD and hope that it goes away.  Joe did nothing to follow up on the situation.  I can sort of understand that, as he didn’t want to hurt the reputation of his football program.  But in so doing, he lost his integrity.

It appears that Joe Paterno — the Mr. Clean of the college football world, the coach with more wins than any other Division I coach — tacitly participated in cover up of not only a crime, but of something terrible involving innocent children.  I’m sad about that.  I’m a little angry too.

Consider one of the stanzas of the Penn State alma mater…

May no act of ours bring shame,
To one’s heart that loves thy name.
May our lives but swell thy fame,
Dear old State, Dear old State.

Jerry Sandusky — by his horrible actions, and Joe Paterno  –  by his inaction, have brought a lot of shame to my heart, and the hearts of Penn Staters worldwide.

That’s my rant.  I bring up this whole sordid mess here only because of the career advice that can be gleaned from it.  Joe Paterno’s brand was Mr. Clean.  He ran a successful football program that never was in trouble with the NCAA for recruiting violations.  Tweet 62 in my career success book Success Tweets says, “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

In this case, Joe did the right thing – sort of.  He reported the incident to the AD, and he testified truthfully at the Grand Jury hearing.  But he did little else to get to the bottom of it and bring someone who most likely is a pedophile to justice.  That’s over 46 years of brand building down the drain.  And that’s too bad, for Joe Paterno, the children who were molested, the Penn State Football program, the entire university community, and for the thousands of people like me who held Joe in high esteem.  I have even written favorable blog posts about him.

This story has career success implications for every one of us.  It’s simple.  While your brand should reflect you and your uniqueness, it has to be built on integrity.  Right now, Joe Paterno’s integrity is in question.

According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well-known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called, There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.  I now wonder how true Joe Paterno has stayed to himself.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and I believe integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the time – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Joe Paterno is a great football coach, and a good man who, in my opinion got caught up in a tough situation that he handled poorly.  Sadly for him, his integrity is now in question.  This is a sad way to end his career.  His legacy will that of someone who protected a child molester.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is an important career success competency.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette. As I suggest in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets, “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”  As the whole mess at Penn State demonstrates, a lack of integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.  Now, lots of people are looking at Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program, and most people don’t like what they’re seeing.  So take a lesson from here.  Build your personal brand on integrity.

That’s the career advice I have that is prompted by the terrible situation at Penn State.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

I’m in Spain doing some work for one of my multinational corporate clients this week.

But I write this blog post with a heavy heart.  If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that I am a Penn State alum.  Recently some nasty allegations about a former football assistant coach there, Jerry Sandusky, have popped up.  Mr. Sandusky is accused of sexually abusing very young boys.  He has been retired since 1999, but is still closely aligned with the Penn State program.

The Penn State Athletic Director, Tim Curley and Senior Vice President Gary Schultz have been indicted on charges of perjury for allegedly lying to a Grand Jury about their knowledge of the situation.  Mr. Curley is on an administrative leave of absence.  Mr. Schultz has resigned.  Penn State president Graham Spanier has lost his job.

Joe Paterno, the Head Football Coach is not facing criminal charges –also lost his job.  He wanted to finish the season, but the Penn State Board of Trustees has severed all ties with him.  He won’t be the Penn State coach for the final three games of the season.  I’m sure this isn’t the way he expected to end his career.

This is disturbing to me on a number of fronts.  First, young boys were victimized by a Penn State football coach.  Second,  my university’s reputation has been sullied.  Third, I have always admired Joe Paterno.  Joe has always been known for running a clean program.

Here’s what I can tell from watching the news coverage of this situation.  Several years ago, a graduate assistant told Joe that he (the graduate assistant) observed Mr. Sandusky engaged in anal sex with a young boy in the shower at the Penn State football complex.  Joe reported this to the AD.  He was asked to testify before a Grand Jury about what he was told.  He testified that he reported the incident to the AD, so he is not implicated in a criminal case like Mr. Curley.

But was that enough?  In my opinion, if Joe knew about this egregious conduct by Mr. Sandusky, he should have taken more action – not just report it to the AD and hope that it goes away.  Joe did nothing to follow up on the situation.  I can sort of understand that, as he didn’t want to hurt the reputation of his football program.  But in so doing, he lost his integrity.

It appears that Joe Paterno — the Mr. Clean of the college football world, the coach with more wins than any other Division I coach — tacitly participated in cover up of not only a crime, but of something terrible involving innocent children.  I’m sad about that.  I’m a little angry too.

Consider one of the stanzas of the Penn State alma mater…

May no act of ours bring shame,
To one’s heart that loves thy name.
May our lives but swell thy fame,
Dear old State, Dear old State.

Jerry Sandusky — by his horrible actions, and Joe Paterno  –  by his inaction, have brought a lot of shame to my heart, and the hearts of Penn Staters worldwide.

That’s my rant.  I bring up this whole sordid mess here only because of the career advice that can be gleaned from it.  Joe Paterno’s brand was Mr. Clean.  He ran a successful football program that never was in trouble with the NCAA for recruiting violations.  Tweet 62 in my career success book Success Tweets says, “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

In this case, Joe did the right thing – sort of.  He reported the incident to the AD, and he testified truthfully at the Grand Jury hearing.  But he did little else to get to the bottom of it and bring someone who most likely is a pedophile to justice.  That’s over 46 years of brand building down the drain.  And that’s too bad, for Joe Paterno, the children who were molested, the Penn State Football program, the entire university community, and for the thousands of people like me who held Joe in high esteem.  I have even written favorable blog posts about him.

This story has career success implications for every one of us.  It’s simple.  While your brand should reflect you and your uniqueness, it has to be built on integrity.  Right now, Joe Paterno’s integrity is in question.

According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well-known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called, There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.  I now wonder how true Joe Paterno has stayed to himself.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and I believe integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the time – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Joe Paterno is a great football coach, and a good man who, in my opinion got caught up in a tough situation that he handled poorly.  Sadly for him, his integrity is now in question.  This is a sad way to end his career.  His legacy will that of someone who protected a child molester.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is an important career success competency.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette. As I suggest in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets, “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”  As the whole mess at Penn State demonstrates, a lack of integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.  Now, lots of people are looking at Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program, and most people don’t like what they’re seeing.  So take a lesson from here.  Build your personal brand on integrity.

That’s the career advice I have that is prompted by the terrible situation at Penn State.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

I’ve been in Ireland for the past 10 days.   I’m back in the USA now.  While I loved Ireland, I’m happy to be home.  I didn’t do any career advice blogging last week because I was very busy with some consulting work and I was having difficulty with my internet connection in the hotel.

In this post, I want to go back to two Saturday’s ago when something big (in my world at least) happened.  Joe Paterno, coach of my beloved Penn State Nittany Lions won his 400th game.  Penn State was losing 21 – 0 against Northwestern, but scored 35 unanswered points to get Joe his 400th win.  That makes him the winningest coach in BSC football history.

Joe Paterno was the football coach when I arrived at Penn State in 1968.  He’s still the coach today.  Joe is quite a coach, and quite a guy.  Most of his players graduate.  He’s given several million dollars to the university.  Many schools have athletic facilities names for a coach.  At Penn State, we have the Paterno wing of Patee Library.  Joe Paterno is an icon and someone I respect and admire.

Like most Penn State alums I have a Joe Pa story.  It highlights some really great career advice – remember and use people’ names.

If I were writing Success Tweets today, one of the tweets would be “Remember and use people’s names.  That’s the best way to start building strong relationships.”

Several years ago, I was in New York.  It was the day after the ESPYs had been held at Radio City Music Hall.  I was walking along Sixth Avenue when I came face to face with Joe Paterno.  He had won an ESPY the night before.

I looked him in the eye, and said “Joe.”  He stopped.  I introduced myself – “Bud Bilanich, class of ’72.”  He said.  “How are you doing, Bud?”  Our conversation lasted about 10 minutes.  Joe probably used my name at least 10 times in that conversation.  He said things like, “You know Bud…”, and “When was the last time you were in State College Bud?, and “What are you doing in New York Bud?”

I know that he was repeating my name so that he could remember it.  And at the same time, I felt good about the fact that a famous football coach not only took the time to chat with me on a cold windy street corner in New York, he went out of his way to remember and use my name. 

We all like to hear our names.  Successful people know and use this bit of career advice.  Using someone’s name shows that you respect them.  It’s a great way to build relationships – and as you know by now, strong relationships are the key to creating the life and career success you want and deserve.

And that’s the common sense career success coach point here.  Successful people build strong relationships with the people in their lives.  Remembering names is a great way to begin the relationship building process.  People are flattered when you remember their names.  They want to interact with you.  They want to engage with people who take the time to remember their names.  So the next time you meet someone new, follow the career advice in the example of Joe Paterno, the coach with the most wins in big time college football history – remember and use other people’s names.

That’s my take on the career advice on the importance of remembering other people’s names.  What’s yours?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud

My latest career success coach book, Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less is about to go into its third printing.  That really pleases me.  It has become a greater success than I thought it would be.  You can pick up a copy of Success Tweets at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com.  Better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com. 

I’m in the home stretch of a series of blog posts that further explain the career advice in Success Tweets – just 31 more to go.  Today’s career advice comes from Success Tweet 110…

Remember and use people’s names.  Look for common ground with the people you meet.  Find out about them, their hobbies and passions.

If you want to create the career success you want and deserve, get good at networking.  Learn how to engage others quickly and leave a positive, lasting impression.   Dressing well and paying attention to your appearance is a great start.  However, great networkers know that looking good is only one piece of the puzzle. 

The second piece is simple.  Remember people’s names.  Check out what Dale Carnegie has to say about remembering names…

“If you remember my name, you pay me a subtle compliment; you indicate that I have made an impression on you. Remember my name and you add to my feeling of importance.”

That is great career advice. 

Shakespeare also chimes in on the importance of remembering other people’s names…

“What a disgrace it is to me to not remember thy name.”

That’s true too.  We disgrace ourselves when we don’t remember other people’s names.  It shows that we value them very little.  I work hard at remembering people’s names and using them. 

If you read my blog, you probably know that I went to Penn State.  Joe Paterno was the football coach when I arrived there in 1968.  He’s still the coach today.  Joe is quite a guy, and he is good with names.

Several years ago, I was in New York.  It was the day after the ESPYS had been held at Radio City Music Hall.  I was walking along Sixth Avenue when I came face to face with Joe Paterno.  He had won an ESPY the night before.

I looked him in the eye, and said “Joe.”  He stopped.  I introduced myself – “Bud Bilanich, class of ’72.”  He said.  “How are you doing, Bud?”  Our conversation lasted about 10 minutes.  Joe probably used my name at least 10 times in that conversation.  He said things like, “You know Bud…”, and “When was the last time you were in State College Bud?, and “What are you doing in New York Bud?”

I know that he was repeating my name so that he could remember it.  And at the same time, I felt good about the fact that a famous football coach not only took the time to chat with me on a cold windy street in New York, he went out of his way to remember and use my name.

Remembering people’s names is an important networking tool.  People who are a career success are good at networking.  They know how to engage others quickly and leave a positive, lasting impression.  

Here are my four best ideas on becoming a great networker…

Stay focused on the person with whom you are in a conversation.  Many people let their eyes wander – especially at networking events.  When you do this, you are sending a message to the person with whom you are speaking that he or she is less important than someone else you might spot in the crowd.  It’s not only polite, it’s good business sense to focus on the person in front of you.  Exchange business cards before you move on to speak with someone else.

Listen and respond appropriately to people you meet.  Maintain eye contact.  Ask questions if you don’t understand what they say.  Paraphrase what they say to make sure you understand.  Above all, respond appropriately – don’t take the conversation in a new direction until the topic under discussion has been exhausted.

Build relationships with people you meet by being helpful.  Take the initiative.  Give them leads that may help them.  Last week, Helen Whelan CEO of SuccessTelevision.com sent me an email letting me know about a public relations opportunity.  I thanked Helen and followed up on the opportunity.  I also sent it to two people I know who may be better suited than me.  Why?  Because I wanted to strengthen my relationships with them – and what better way to build strong relationships that by giving something of value to other people.

Learn from as many people as you can.  Everybody has something to offer.  With some people you have dig a little more deeply than with others.  Regardless, treat every conversation as a learning opportunity.  The more you listen, the more you’ll learn. 

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Successful people create positive personal impact.  Networking is a great way to create a powerful lasting impression.  When you are networking follow the career advice in Tweet 110 in Success Tweets.  “Remember and use people’s names.  Look for common ground with the people you meet.  Find out about them, their hobbies and passions.”  Besides remembering people’s names, you will create positive personal impact in networking situations if you: 1) stay focused on the person with whom you are engaged in conversation; 2) listen and respond appropriately; 3) build relationships by being helpful; and 4) learn from as many people as you can.

That’s my take on the career advice in Success Tweet 110 and the power of using people’s names to create positive personal impact and build relationships.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud