Two Steps To Cultivate Your Reputation

In a career, reputation is your greatest asset.  I’m going to give you two quick and very practical thoughts on how you can enhance your reputation responsibly and gain more influence.

First, a disclaimer about where reputation comes from, courtesy of the 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln:

“Character is like a tree and reputation is like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

So the disclaimer is that for the advice below, we are not ignoring the tree.  Character gives birth to reputation.  If you have a lousy character, stop reading and go work on that.

OK.  Here’s my first observation about reputation:  Don’t wait for applause.

All of us have been around people who resemble a guy I once heard described this way:  “after he says something he sits back and waits for applause”.

Think about someone in your work or personal life who you admire.  You’re likely to think of someone who doesn’t need a lot of affirmation.  You’re likely to think of someone who is smart, competent, and self assured.  Their very self-assuredness, their ability to get things done with minimal fuss, may be a big part of your good impression.

And yet you noticed.  That’s the key.  The lack of applause doesn’t mean those around us don’t notice.  It means they are quietly putting a little tick mark in the “good” column of the mental ledger they keep on you.  And your reputation grows.

Second observation:  For your reputation to increase influence, you need to extend your network.

It is well and good for your reputation to be golden among the six people you work with most often, or the 80 people in your office, but just as viruses now spread more easily since the invention of commercial air travel, good (and bad) reputations spread more easily since the invention of social media.

Important:  When I say “social media” in context of reputation, I’m not talking about the normal blah-blah-blah 140 character tweet/Facebook likes and so on.  I’m saying that people talk to each other more and expand their network more.  I live in the midwest but have primarily worked for west coast tech companies my entire career, so I really have more friends on the west coast than I do in the midwest.  That’s the nature of our world.

So my advice is this:  make sure you’re cultivating your network outside of the people you have to work with on a daily basis.  One of the great ways to do this is to ask someone who appreciates your reputation for an intro to someone they know well.  The introduction to someone new that carries with it the introducer’s stamp of reputation approval is like gold.  When I get introduced to someone new by a person I deeply respect, and am told that my friend believes this person to be a person I would enjoy and respect, the ensuing conversation starts at a deeper level and proceeds from there.

Don’t wait for applause.  Expand your network.

Good luck!

(Note:  If you like quotes like the Abe Lincoln quote above, subscribers to this blog receive an ebook of quotes like that one that I reflect on.  Your contact info will always remain private, so consider signing up and joining the club!)