About Your Reputation

About Your Reputation

By Cooper, The CEO

Early in your career, things like the college you attended, your GPA and your social circle weigh heavily on your career opportunities. Over time, these are replaced by something far more enduring, your reputation — or what some refer to as a “Personal Brand.”

There are many blog posts and even entire books devoted to personal branding. Most of it’s trivial… Things like how to stand out in a crowd and playing politics to manage people’s perceptions of you. But lipstick-on-a-pig approaches won’t work for building the kind of reputation that opens doors to rich and unexpected career opportunities.

So how do you build a personal brand?

You’re building a reputation every day by what you do, what you say, and how you say it. For most people, personal brand is an accident of personality and preferences.  But, for the truly successful, personal brand is a conscious act rooted in personal values and cultivated behaviors.

Our personal brand is rooted in our personal values. I think of personal values as ‘quirks of personality.’ And our individual quirks cause certain things to be important us… sometimes unreasonably and irrationally important.

We may or may not be able to control our values. That’s above my paygrade, so I’ll stop the armchair psychology and focus on something that certainly is in our control — our words and deeds. 

Building a great brand takes time. So, the sooner you get started, the better. 

What do you want to be known for? What do you want your personal brand to be?

Think about your job… Somewhere there’s a person with your job that is literally the best person at that job in the world. What specific behaviors make them great? 

  • What time do they show up for work?
  • How do they plan their day? 
  • How do they talk to their colleagues?
  • How do they prepare for meetings?
  • What does their finished product look like?

This is probably a new concept for many of you. But take some time to think about the way you conduct yourself. Are your words and deeds creating the reputation you want to have?


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