How to enhance your reputation

Ultimately, it’s all about reputation.

Professional communicators seek to improve the reputation of their business or their clients.

CEOs, spokespeople and leaders want to enhance their own reputation.

Those in Public Relations (or PR) are in the business of building and protecting reputation.

Reputation is, however, a notoriously tricky thing to influence or measure. Still less to ‘manage’ – whatever that means.

None of this has stopped ‘reputation management’ growing into a multi-billion-dollar global industry.

Reputation and trust are inseparable concepts. Both are required for the economy to function. We trust people, companies and individuals because of their reputation.

We are then prepared to buy from them, sell to them, invest in them and work for or with them.

So, reputation is important to say the least. But how should advisers and leaders try to strengthen it?

Here, I must give thanks to Rupert Younger, co-founder of Finsbury (the international communications agency) and Director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation. 

His interview on my podcast, based largely on the material in his excellent book The Reputation Game, really straightened out my thinking.

According to Younger, is that there is no such thing as having a single ‘reputation’. Every person or company has multiple reputations for different things.

We might have a great reputation for organisation, but a poor reputation for loyalty. Or the other way around.

A company might have a good reputation for its products, but a bad reputation as a place to work. Or the other way around.

And so on.

Do you want to be a rock-solid leader or an edgy visionary? Do you want to have a reputation for putting customers first or for controlling costs?

Of course, you can do and be more than one thing. But companies and individuals don’t and can’t have a reputation for being brilliant at 100 different things.

The next problem is that reputation can’t be directly controlled by you. That is because reputations are conferred on you by others. You can, though, try to influence things in a positive way.

According to Younger, there are three main drivers to reputation. 

1)     Behaviour – what you do sends signals about who you are

2)     Networks – reputation flows through networks (which might be a tight family unit, within a company, between industry groups, through media and digital channels)

3)     Narrative – how you talk about yourself (your story) matters

For individuals and companies wanting to communicate more powerfully and effectively, there are then a few questions to consider:

·        What do you want to be known for and why?

·        What actions have you taken/could you take that might influence reputation positively in these areas?

·        How can you construct a story that shows how these actions fit together into a coherent arc?

·        Who do you want to tell this story to, how and when? Which networks (media, industry groups, teams etc) will you use to get the story out?

Your reputation (s) are influenced by your actions, the stories you tell and the places you tell them.

But, the big question still: is anyone listening?

If you’re forever stuck on ‘transmit’ mode, it’s hard to build a likeable and trusted profile.

The best communicators understand and like their audiences.

Because your reputation is, ultimately, theirs to give.    

Mike Sergeant is a writer, keynote speaker and communications coach. He specialises in public speaking training, media training, writing and reputation consultancy.

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