When What is Said Behind Your Back Seals Your Fate

In a world where decisions are made practically every minute primarily on the basis of word of mouth, what people say about you - especially when you are not in the room - has become the most expensive currency of our time. Today, your going rate is determined not by what you say about yourself, for example in an interview situation, but rather more by what people say about you - long before you even applied for that dream job.

The concept of personal branding is therefore not a personal job any longer but rather a delegated role albeit inadvertently. You appear before a panel of interviewers and get well-dressed executives looking all professional and serious only for them to start stealing mischievous glances at you, a whisper here, a whisper there, they burst out in laughter almost unannounced.

You smile or laugh too because it feels like the right thing to do so as to look the part. Fit in, somehow!

For a moment it feels like the giggling and blathering will go on forever until the head of the table cuts in: “Gentlemen, let us begin the interview, Mr. Njuguna you can shoot the first question. This one should be fast and easy.”

“Bwana chairman maybe we should start with a round of introductions so that the candidate can also get to know us,” Njuguna suggests.

“Oh sorry, yes yes yes let us do a round of introductions, my name is” … they go round the table talking about themselves and after they are done the chairman takes over once more, “now my friend you can ask the questions, we are all familiar with the candidate from that funny clip doing rounds on WhatsApp.”

?Negative Comments

You must have found yourself in a situation where you had to give an opinion about somebody or tried to get an opinion about somebody else from a friend. More often than not the first response one gets is a negative one. It might be easy to brush this off and act like you do not care what others say about you, but should we? Why should we care about what people who may not even know us say about us?

Granted, while there might be some truth in the notion that what other people say about you has more to do with their bad behavior and not you, it becomes a concern when what is said about you in your absence determines what you get and when you get it. This makes such opinions a life and death matter and so you must care!

Forget about that one, he is good for nothing. You will regret working with her, she is very stubborn and not a team player. That one is full of himself. He is a drug addict. He is always high on weed. She has loose morals. That one was even fired from his last job. The man is always late, and people say his wife beats him up. He is a thief. Bla bla bla!

Make or Break

Such one-liners tend to make or break people based on nothing mostly but informal quirks. A good opportunity would pass you by even before you are given a chance to pitch for it. Your views in such circumstances do not matter and just like that, the less known character gets the opportunity, not because they are better than you but simply because of lack of oddities evidence - their story was not shared in advance.?

It may pass as normal for people to make casual negative remarks about their friends and even more typical for one to badmouth an enemy or those perceived as competition but frankly speaking when the same is propagated by one’s professional referee, it takes betrayal in the corporate world to a whole new level.

Now, after reading this I want to believe that you may be having an idea as to why you never get that call-back even after a job interview that seemed to have gone very well.?Apparently, many candidates fail not because they did not ace the interview but rather because they got a poor review from those listed in their resume as referees. Be very careful who you present as your referee, they could be the ones standing between you and your career breakthrough.

People Change

So, what is the moral of the story today you might ask! Yes, I am talking to you. From this point forward, stop doing that. Stop judging people based on past experiences especially bad ones. Give them a chance to disappoint you anew so as to form a fresh opinion. That is only fair for it is true that people change.

In rare occasions, those who are generous with sharing information about you with others before consulting you will surprise you and share good things. Sometimes with exaggerated details.

A while back, somebody approached me back in the village to do for them some consultancy work. When finally we got to talk, the work was something to do with financial management. Apparently somebody close to me had told him that I was working in Nairobi as an Accountant and that I was very good at what I do. All my explaining was taken to mean that I had simply refused to do the job!

Update your Information Sources

So, if for one reason or another you trade in the business of mining information or enjoy gossiping for the sheer pleasure of it, be a little more considerate to your audiences and dignify them with more updated information. Arm yourself with the latest about your victims and then talk about them as much as you can but with the latest about them, good or bad!

How in the heaven’s name can one rely on high school or campus memories to give information about a business prospect? You throw away up to ten years of an entrepreneur’s life and base your judgment on obsolete information and still consider it ok? By any standard, ten years even for the slowest learners is a long time, long enough to make progress and turn around one’s fortunes. Long enough to reinvent oneself and build a new character.

Unlike atoms, human beings are complicated and elaborate creatures - totally compos mentis with several other variables determining how they behave and the greatest of them all is time. In time, people change and mostly for the better.

People aspire for greatness in a universal way. There might be false starts, heartbreaks, disappointments, outliers and a myriad of other challenges but in the midst of it all, we all strive for greatness, for goodness. Perfection even!

So next time you find yourself in a privileged position to put in a word for someone, put in a kind one and give people a chance to disappoint you one more time. At least that way, you will have a good reason to write-off someone as incorrigible. Form a point of knowledge. It is only human to do that and by all means a fair ask.

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