Working for Your Reputation
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Life Behind the Glass
The pretty well-known French self-made Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte used to say, “He who stands high and in full view of everybody should not make jerky movements”. Let me add: if one makes them, these should be only thought-over jerks and prepared improvisations. Any manager – the owner of a business or the authorized top manager – is a priori more public than an average employee. For someone it is a burden and for someone it is a cherry on top of the high social standing cake. Anyway, it is an absolutely different context of being. What is it determined by?
By a wide range of social contacts and a big number of social roles. Interest from the media. And, finally, by the amount of those who are willing to fling a rotten tomato at you. Not necessarily because you have violated the rules of morality or law – just because of commonplace envy, spite or meanness.
Scientific progress has offered these haters (resentful employees, claimants upon your job or your share of the market, local idiots) an opportunity to do it on a no-name but at the same time headline-making basis. Today, a text placed in the right spot of the Internet space is enough for the audience to grow at an exponential rate.
A Door-Keeper or a Reputation Manager?
It is dangerous to leave forming your reputation unattended. A spontaneously formed idea of a person’s individual and professional traits is sometimes in stark contrast to the genuine. In the age of information, reputation has become one of the key factors of personal competitiveness and, indirectly, competitiveness of a business you are in charge of.
Reputation should be managed. The easiest way is to find “a specially trained person” as he/she is generally known in the business environment: a PR expert, a press secretary, etc. What traits does he/she have to possess? Enthusiasm, common sense, intellectual daring, diligence, high emotional and social intellect. A person who more or less knows a hawk from a handsaw can continue the list.
Yet there is another question that employers can find difficult to answer. What exactly does an expert entrusted with their precious reputation have to know? A lot of chief executives confuse a corporate PR expert’s functions with those of a personal press secretary. Of course, if you are the owner of a business and run it according to the principle “my way or the highway” it is your vested right to concentrate all the PR efforts on your personality. If you do not own a business, sooner or later you will have to give an account of your managerial activity results and this kind of self-obsession will cost you dear. To fulfill your personal ambitions you should handle the staff expert with care – in this case it is much more practical to consult external experts from time to time.
Every PR expert has their own skill level. One can merely look after your reputation like a door-keeper repelling attacks from time to time. Another will excitedly get to managing senses, information flows and communication channels. The difference lies in the level of expertise and motivation – every manager should choose their own model of the hammer to forge their happiness.
Be Your Own Reputation Expert
A simple truth that every manager knows is that if you want something done really well do it yourself. Let me add – you can otherwise create a super-reliable control mechanism. When it comes to reputation management the principle works like in any other area, though with a subtle difference.
A person, even as wise as Solomon, cannot assess their image potential absolutely impartially and choose an ideal model of its unlocking. That is why, if you decided to put reputation-making processes in order, first of all you should give a diagnosis: to identify your personal PR resources and PR vulnerabilities. Then you should format a way of using the former and neutralizing the latter. Of course, involving an expert, a fulltime employee or a freelancer, it does not matter much. What does matter is that this person should be competent.
When developing a strategy try to avoid daydreaming: “I am a mouse but I wanna be a hedgehog” (like a popular business joke goes). Place your stake on your strong points and think of the ways how to use them effectively. This is a joint task for a manager and a PR expert who is a kind of Michelangelo cutting all the unnecessary bits off the image and extracting the diamond heart of one’s personal competitive advantages. Each side is aimed at a particular category of stakeholders – shareholders (if there are any), employees, business partners, journalists, officials, bankers, etc.
On the implementation stage, the cornerstone of success is the efforts, diligence and adequacy of the “promoted object”. It does not mean that it is necessary to rewrite articles and press releases, to make near miss comments on the phone for anybody asking for them without notifying your PR experts, to refresh profiles in social networks nonstop. All these activities should be reasonably configured in terms of their procedure and should not interfere with the core work, should not be performed arbitrarily but with due consideration given to the opinion of PR experts. After all, this is what they are paid for.
A manager or a businessman who has made up their mind to devote themselves to their reputation in earnest should develop a knee-jerk reaction of assessing reputation consequences of their acts and works. Because in the “life behind the glass” format, insider information is trusted first of all. If you want to be considered a decent person, act like a decent person. Or have a strong reason why in this or that case you deviate from “making dharma”. If the strategy says that you are a democrat, be so kind as not to wall yourself off from the society. If it has been decided that it does not make sense to stress gender characteristics, be a boss but not a lady boss.
Each act of communication – from “good morning” addressed at your secretary to speaking with the governor – means a PR activity to you. The key points should be highlighted in such a way that the output would be the image of a person who people want to work with (because people come to a company and leave its manager), whose hands people do not want to wring when concluding a contract, who people want to pay more and to grant more powers.
Right, it is hard work. No, it does not bring about an instantaneous effect. But reputation is the only asset that belongs exclusively to you. And this is the main reason why you should take care of it thoroughly and continually.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1369572-rabotat-na-reputaciyu