Is a Reputation Gap Sabotaging Your Strategic Relationships?
Aligning your brand with your performance and repute, will be key to elevating yourself above the market noise
If there is a reputation gap between how you think your personal brand is perceived and what people are actually thinking—and worse, saying—about you, you are under threat. What can you do to align the brand you project, your actual performance, and the reputation others assign to you through their experience of the value you deliver and the quality of their interactions with you?
Three types of relationships exist in your portfolio of relationships:
- Personal relationships: Discretionary, seldom relevant to our professional lives.
- Functional relationships: Transactional, focused on efficiency and effectiveness, little potential for increased depth or breadth.
- Strategic relationships: Transformative, capable of elevating your thinking, perspective, and performance.
An individual in any of the three categories could be contributing to a reputation gap if that person is conveying misconceptions about you and your professional performance. It’s not just your strategic relationships that can be damaged by a reputation gap—a misperception by a personal or functional relationship can cost you important referrals and connections.
I have identified three behaviors that, taken together, work to prevent reputation gaps from occurring and recover from existing gaps before they do further damage.
1. Don’t operate in a vacuum. You can't do anything about a reputation gap you don't know about, so make sure you know what your relationships think about you. Don’t leave reputation management to chance--ask other people for feedback on your performance. It doesn’t have to be a formal review, just a quick “how’s my driving?” conversation. Ask questions like “Did that last article I sent you add value?” “Have my suggestions worked out?” “Was the referral I made a good fit?” It will provide you with valuable information, and show others that you honestly care about improving your performance and being an asset to others.
To assure that your relationships hold accurate beliefs about you, reveal personal details and look for them in others. Don’t erect a “Great Wall of China” between your personal and professional sides. A good reputation arises from becoming known fully and accurately. People find it easier to evaluate and form a good impression of your performance when they know more about you.
2. Deliver Exceptional Results. To keep a reputation gap from arising, be great at what you do. It’s hard for people to dislike or distrust you if your performance is stellar. Taking time to manage professional performance is one of the most fundamental and powerful habits of successful people.
If you make a mistake, own it and fix it. How you respond to challenges gives others a chance to form a powerful positive impression of you. A reputation for being accountable when stuff hits the fan is a tremendous career asset.
This behavior builds on the first, because other people’s feedback helps you know what great performance looks like to them, and how to deliver it without messing up.
3. When You Shine, Share the Halo. Focusing on delivering a great performance can have a dark side. It is possible—even likely--that your execution will become better than your peers’. Outperforming other people can be uncomfortable for them. It can create worry about increased expectations that for whatever reason, they feel they cannot meet.
The answer is not to hold back your own star power. I would never recommend you do less than your flat-out best. But when you do perform well, particularly if your performance is likely to be noticed by senior leaders or key stakeholders, make sure your whole team looks good. It is hard to imagine a situation in which praising others’ contribution to your performance could diminish your own accomplishments. When you allow your success to reflect well on those around you, others will proactively aim to invest in their relationship with you.
When others experience a success, be quick to share your congratulations. You’ll create a culture in which everyone feels a stake in each other’s outcomes. This will do a great deal to keep reputation gaps from arising without your knowledge. Communication is an effective tool to prevent reputation gaps.
Don’t limit your application of these three behaviors to only your strategic relationships. It doesn’t hurt to give your personal and functional relationships a bit of the same star treatment you give to the individuals you look to for elevating your thinking, perspective, and performance.
Top performers strive to prevent a reputation gap from developing, and if they sense one is widening, they take steps to realign expectations. They seek feedback, get back on track, and get everyone involved in supporting each other’s success.
Nour Takeaways
- Prevent reputation gaps from sabotaging your strategic relationships by asking for feedback that helps you know what great performance looks like to others, and whether you are hitting the mark.
- Being great at what you do is simply the best way to be perceived as great at what you do—including accepting accountability when challenges arise.
- Recognize the role of others in your successful outcomes, and be quick to congratulate others who succeed.
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David Nour is an enterprise growth strategist and the thought leader on Relationship Economics® - the quantifiable value of business relationships. He has pioneered the phenomenon that relationships are the greatest off balance sheet asset any organizations possesses, large and small, public and private. He is the author of several books including the best selling Relationship Economics - Revised (Wiley), ConnectAbility (McGraw-Hill), The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Capital (Praeger) and Return on Impact—Leadership Strategies for the age of Connected Relationships (ASAE). Learn more by following @davidnour.
