The Four Rings of Reputation
Renee is forty coffees into her independent practice, and every one of them goes the same way. She explains what she does and who she’s looking for. They say they’ll keep her in mind.
Nothing comes back.
Renee thinks she needs more coffees. What I’ve found is that demand for you doesn’t come from describing yourself well. It comes from the conversations you have, about what, with whom, over time. And which conversation is the right one depends on where your reputation stands.
So little cause and effect
This is what I keep noticing with fractional leaders and consultants. You have a good conversation and nothing happens for weeks. Then something arrives from a direction you can’t trace. Without a map, you can’t tell progress from wandering.
There is a map. In fractional leadership, opportunity moves along lines of trust and relationship. Your reputation is what brings you to the table when a company leader is deciding who gets to be part of the solution. And reputation grows in a particular order.
I call it the Reputation Rings.
The shape
Ring one is your personal reputation. These are the people who know your work firsthand. They don’t question whether you can do what you say.
Ring two is your defined reputation. You become associated with one problem in one market. People know what to think of you for.
Ring three is your market reputation. Introductions begin to arrive that you didn’t prompt.
Ring four is your professional reputation. Here you become what I call a person of value. Company leaders seek out your read on what’s happening in their world. When you say you can deliver, nobody wonders.
Each ring grows out of the one before it. There’s no skipping ahead.
Where most people get lost
The heaviest lifting is in rings one and two. It’s also the stretch where it feels like nothing is going anywhere.
So people skip. They go from the handful who know them straight to trying to be known by a whole market. That was Renee’s forty coffees. She was reaching for ring three without ring two. Everyone liked her, and no one could say what to think of her for.
The relationships that carry you
The rings tell you where you are. They don’t move you.
What moves you is what I call the Ecology of Opportunity. It’s how you navigate the people in each ring, which relationships you collect and the part each one plays, and how you maintain them so you never have to “just check in” again.
A network is raw material. An ecology is a network you’ve given form.
And the conversation inside them
Every one of those relationships runs on conversation. The one that serves you in ring one is not the one that serves you in ring three. Knowing which to have, and how to lead it, is what turns a relationship into an opportunity.
That’s my specialty, and it doesn’t fit in an article. It fits in a conversation.
So look at your last ten business conversations and ask which ring each one lived in. If you can’t tell, or you don’t like the answer, reach out. We’ll find where you’re standing and the conversation that moves you forward.
Find your ring first.
