The Introvert Leader

What People Say About You When You're Not in the Room

• Austin Hopkins

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 11:51

Your reputation is your most valuable asset. It's being built in rooms you aren't in, by people you may not even know that well. Every interaction, every moment matters. In this episode, I want to help you figure out what your current reputation is, what you want to be known for, and what to do when you mess up.


Timestamps

1:07 – Personal Update: Working in new locations has unlocked my creativity. 

1:55 – How Your Reputation Is Formed: Intentions don't matter, and how you treat people defines you.

4:15 – Discover Your Current Reputation: Ask for feedback, look for patterns. 

5:48 – Decide What You Want To Be Known For: Winging your reputation won't work. Define what you want people to say about you. 

7:56 – Execute Consistently: Consistency matters more than you think.   

11:04 – Challenge for Listeners: Make a list of 3-5 non-negotiables.



Career & Leadership Coaching

  • Want a better career? Clients who work with us earn 57% more and get promoted 3x faster on average: Book your free career clarity call here.


Free Resources

  • The Brag Sheet (free Career Achievement Tracker): Here
  • Take the free Career Fulfillment quiz: Here


Engage

A Reputation Hits On Day One

SPEAKER_00

I walk up to my new assistant manager on my first day at the new office. I introduce myself and she shakes my hand. Alex smiles and says, I've heard about you. I give her a half smile, expecting her to say something nice about me. Instead she says, I heard you like to gossip. My smile starts to fade, and I give her a look of slight confusion. I wasn't expecting someone I just met to be so honest and share something like this. I remember kind of feeling unsure of what to say next, and so I mumbled, oh yeah, well sometimes. I'll never forget what it felt like to have someone share my reputation with me. A perfect stranger had already formed this negative view of me even before I could say one word. I walked back to my desk, stunned and embarrassed. There was nothing I could do to change her perception in this moment. I just had to sit with it. Our reputations are formed in rooms we aren't even in. They're formed by previous actions, rumors, and small bits of info. Today, I want to talk about why everything you've done in the past has created your reputation and why it's so damn hard to change. Hello, this is your host, Austin Hopkins, and welcome to the Introvert Leader Podcast. All right, before we jump into it, I want to give you a quick update on what I've been up to. So I don't know if you've noticed that when you work in a different spot than your normal space, you get better results. So recently I've been changing it up. I've been working from the patio or I've been biking to a local coffee shop. And for some reason, I feel way more focused and way more creative. There's something about being in a different environment that allows me to kind of go into a deep work phase and shift from my normal thinking patterns. I feel lighter for some reason. And so, like, I don't know if you even have the chance to do this at work, but if you could pick a new desk or a conference room to work out of, or maybe in the lobby, you might enjoy it. You might find that you get a little bit more work done and you're able to get higher quality work. So try it, let me know what you think. I think you'll dig it. If you haven't clicked the follow button, you might be missing out. I drop new career and leadership content every other week. So click the subscribe button for me. With that, settle in because it's time to learn something, my friend. So here's what I know about your reputation. It doesn't care about your intentions. It doesn't care about how hard you've been working. It's being built right now, as we speak, whether you're paying attention to it or not. So let's talk about how it actually works. Your reputation is being formed even when you aren't there. It's being formed in rooms with people who may not even know you that well. It's formed little by little over time. It's like a story that's constantly getting written, compounding over time. Good things, bad things, it all becomes what you're known for. There are two truths about your reputation that you have to grasp. The first, intentions don't matter. Intentions are kind of worthless. Actions drive your reputation. So what you actually do matters far more than what you say. So intending to go to the gym doesn't make you strong. Actually, going to the gym builds muscle. The same thing applies to your career. What you actually do day after day, week after week, builds your reputation. What are your actual patterns? Do you follow through? Do you do what you say you will? Do you check the small details? Do you communicate regularly? What you do actually matters. I've seen too many leaders say one thing and do another. This wrecks their rep in two ways. First, they're known for doing the opposite of what they say they will, which is usually not great. And second, they get known as someone who is all talk. Neither is something you want. So I'll give you an example. I worked for a boss who told me that he valued feedback about his leadership. But anytime I shared feedback, his feelings got hurt, and he never did anything with it. Maybe he intended to be the kind of leader who valued feedback, but his actions never backed it up. They negated his intentions. You can probably guess that I stopped sharing feedback with him because I knew he couldn't handle it. The second truth is that we live and die by how we treat people. You can be the smartest, most technically proficient employee, but if you suck to work with, your rep will suffer. I bet if I asked you right now to name someone at your job that you hate working with, you could quickly point them out. How do they make you feel? Do you feel better or worse when you're around them? We never forget how people treat us, and we are quick to share those observations with others. And that's how a bad rep spreads. Here's another example. Our reputation is built on how others perceive our treatment of them. Are you negative when someone shares a new idea? Do you recognize people for their efforts? Do you go out of your way to make sure to include junior people to give them a chance to shine? Do you act better than the people around you? Do you talk shit about people? Do you compete needlessly? How we treat people tells a story that no amount of talking can change. Every interaction, every moment with every coworker builds your reputation. When you think about it that way, you kind of start to slow down and think about how you're gonna show up because every moment matters. I want to transition. Let's talk about how to discover what your current reputation is. You can't improve what you can't measure. So the first step to figuring out what you need to improve is identifying what's hurting you. So I'm gonna share two simple ways that I've used in my career to figure out my baseline. So the best way to figure out what people think of you is to ask, right? Asking for feedback is potentially awkward, I'll be honest. But if you choose the right person, it can be eye-opening and it won't be as scary. So here's an idea. I want you to ask a friend, someone you trust or your boss to tell you what people think of your rep. And it might sound something like this: hey Greg, can I ask you something kind of weird? I've been wanting to tighten up slash improve my rep in our org. Is there anything I'm doing right now that's hurting my reputation? You can be totally honest with me and I promise I won't be offended, right? Pretty simple. My biggest advice is to choose the person carefully. It has to be someone you respect and trust. And I would suggest not asking your employees if you're a leader unless you really think they can be honest. A lot of times that relationship makes it hard for them to be totally honest with you. Another way to find out what your rep is is to look for indicators. If you don't have someone you can ask for feedback, the next best thing is to observe and look for the themes or the patterns. So look at things like who wants to work with you? What kind of work do you get asked to do? And how do people respond to your ideas? So this is what it would look like. Pay attention to how people respond to you. When you send an email, do you usually get a response right away? Is it collaborative? Is it a combative response? Next time you're in a meeting and you share something, do people nod along like they agree? Do they purse their lips? Do they look away? Do they make eye contact? If you sense they're engaged or supportive when you speak, chances are things are good. If they act like they don't care or they try to avoid you, something's off and you might want to take a second look. So we know how our reps are formed, and we discovered what our current rep is. Now we need to decide what we're gonna be known for. So they say if you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything. If you go through life winging your reputation, it will show, trust me. To achieve what I wanted in my life and my career, I had to draw a line in the sand and I had to determine what I was gonna be known for. So I'm gonna help you do the same. The first thing you got to ask yourself is what would make me proud for people to say about me? My goal during my corporate life was to never have anyone be able to say anything negative about how I treated them. They could talk crap about my ideas, my performance, but never about my integrity or the way I treated them. I wanted to be known as the guy who helped everyone around them become the best version of themselves. And so I tried my best to give away my help, my insights, and my support freely, even when I didn't get anything in return. So I want to give you something that really helped me. For most of my career, I did my best to act in a way I could look back on and be proud of, and more importantly, aligned with my faith. But at some point I decided I better define exactly what I wanted to be known for, the stuff that could be written on my gravestone. So I spent a few weeks defining my non-negotiables. It would be my top 10 things I wanted to be known for. So here they are lead with a why, efficiency, vision, feedback, care, follow through, trust, respect, curiosity, and humility. Once I had them defined, living in became so much easier. So I gotta ask, do you have a vision for what you want to be known for, or are you kind of just winging it? So something else to consider is what will you never do? Careers aren't easy. They're gonna be full of crap that tests us, makes us question who we are and what we're doing. It's easy to be the person we want to be when things are going well, right? It becomes increasingly hard to be good when the options suck, when your boss is putting pressure on you, when you're tired, when you've lost your patience. But there has to be a line that you never cross, somewhere you never will go, no matter how hard it gets. Otherwise, you'll cave. It's so easy to cave, to go with the flow, to be like everyone else. It takes courage to do the hard things, even when everyone else takes the easy path. Here's some good questions you could ask yourself. Where do I refuse to compromise? What leader will I never be like? What corners will I never cut? What will I never do even when my team or my boss isn't looking? What do I never want people to say about me? What actions will I never take, even if they help me in the short term? I want to move on and talk about the importance of executing consistently. Your rep isn't static. It's always being built or torn down. Stuff you did five years ago sits right next to stuff you did this week. The big mistake I see people make is thinking they can craft a positive rep for a season and then go back to their normal. This doesn't work. Instead, you have to stay consistent. Being a nice person can get derailed with one big crash out with your coworker. Here are two things that help me stay consistent with my rep. So the first is holding myself accountable. Small slips turn into big ones without even realizing it. Mistakes will and do happen. I'm running short on patients and I snap at an employee. I turn in an assignment late because I got too busy at home. The key is not just letting those slip-ups happen without clocking it. When I make a mistake, do something I know isn't right, I label it, and most importantly, I own up to it. Here's an example to show you what I mean. I remember I had an employee who asked to have access to a data tool. This tool would make their life easier. It would give them insights into customer behavior, and it probably would save them maybe one to two hours a week. And so during their one-on-one, I promised I would get them access to it before our next weekly meeting. The meeting came and went, and I totally forgot to give them access. I didn't follow through like I should have. Finally, like three or four weeks later, I realized my mistake and quickly got them access. Now I could have just enabled the access and moved on, hoped they didn't notice, let it go. But I knew the right thing to do was to apologize. They were totally understanding, but it caused me to feel a little bit of pain and learn my lesson. I wasn't going to be the type of leader who didn't follow through. If I did, I was going to own up to it and make sure I didn't do it again. Something else that really helps me was to make it easy. You're busy. I'm busy. I get it. We've got a million responsibilities, deadlines are coming at us left and right, and it's so easy to forget the little stuff that can hurt our rep. So the best way to make sure you show up the way you want to is to make it easy. So I'm a big believer in setting up reminders, routines. They help the ADD in me, making public commitments and making myself some rules. So setting a reminder to check in with a new coworker who's in over the head is going to make it so much easier to remember. Committing something to your employees in a team meeting is going to help you stay accountable because of the public perception. And making yourself some rules about what you will and won't do will take the guesswork out in the moment. So I want to jump back to the story from the beginning. After Alex shared what she heard about me, I felt so sorry for myself for the next two weeks. I went back and forth between being annoyed with Alex and mad at myself for letting this immature habit define me. I wondered, was she maybe the only one who thought this, or is it that bad to be a gossip if I'm a top performer and I'm good at everything else? But I remember one day I just woke up and decided I'm gonna be different. This wasn't gonna be easy because I liked connecting with people through gossip. I was a people pleaser and this was an easy way to get people to like me. So I decided the best way to change was to make two rules for myself. The rules were super simple. Number one, I could only say positive things about people who weren't in the room, even if I wanted to say bad stuff. Rule number two, if people were gossiping around me, I could not join in and I had to immediately find a way to excuse myself. In the beginning, this was so hard. I felt like I was missing out on juicy conversations. I felt a little left out in the office, but over time I started to respect myself a little more. I felt proud of who I was becoming. Did I still mess up? Yeah. But was it easier with time? You betcha. And eventually, people stopped coming to me to even gossip, and I found other ways to connect with my team and coworkers. So if you take some time to understand what your current rep is and commit to what you want to be known for, you can change your rep in real time. But before we wrap up, I want to give you a quick challenge. This week, I want you to make a list of the things you want to be known for. It doesn't need to be 10 things like mine. Start with three to five things that you want people to say about you when you aren't around. Now, if you want help figuring out what you want to be known for and building the confidence to actually live it, that's exactly what I do. So click the link in the description and I'd love to have a chat. Your reputation isn't set in stone. If you like your rip, good, stay consistent. If you don't like it, change it. The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time is today. I want to say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day. Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday.

Contributor

Austin Hopkins

Host