We were in standard nine, which in South Africa at the time, was the penultimate year of school. We were called in to vote for who we wanted as Head Prefects and Deputy Head Prefects (male and female) in our final year.
I was surprised when somebody said to me that they had voted for me. The thought that somebody would vote for me was inconceivable to me. Other students started saying it was between me and ‘so and so’ (I had voted for ‘so and so’ and thought they would be the best person for the job). Not in my wildest imagination had I thought I was even in the running. The teachers had to vote, of course, but ultimately I got the job.
It happened again when I was about 27 or 28. I was employed by a company as an editor and public relations practitioner/account manager and was part of the client-facing team (we numbered about 13), which included print reps, account managers and communications people. We had a substantial lithographic printing facility as well as digital printing and a fairly large graphic design team and admin staff.
Traditionally, this client-facing team was run by the managing director, but at one meeting the team said to him that, as MD, he was too busy to really manage and lead the team. They wanted somebody to be appointed from within as the new sales, communications and marketing manager.
Out of the blue, the managing director said, “Well, what do you think of Colin?” He caught me totally by surprise (and everybody else). They went around the room and each person had to give their opinion on what they thought of me becoming their boss.
At one stage, somebody said, “Oh, we’ve all been giving our opinion, but what does Colin think?”
I thought, you know, this could be the moment to be self-effacing and all those sorts of things, or to take the opportunity, so I took the opportunity and said I would love to take the position and lead the team. I got the job.
The thing that strikes me is that what people think of you, in business, in your workplace or community, can quickly and suddenly, literally, change your life. I had no idea of what people thought of me; of what my ‘reputation’ was (I thought I was just part of the paintwork), but clearly I had one. We all do.
Both moments happened in rooms full of people who’d been forming opinions of me long before anyone said them out loud, and who then, when it mattered, acted on those opinions. I didn’t get a vote in what they thought. I just inherited the outcome.
That’s still how reputation works, but what’s changed is the room.
Somebody somewhere is making a decision based on your reputation; a client choosing whether to go with you or not, or an investor doing due diligence, is no longer just the people who’ve met you or done business with you.
Increasingly, it’s an AI system: trained on everything that’s ever been written, indexed or said about you, weighing it up, and handing back a verdict before anyone picks up the phone.
We call that an organisation’s AI Trust Footprint; everything an AI system can find and stitch together about you, accurate or not, current or not, and whether it actually reflects who you are. Most organisations have never thought to check. I hadn’t either, right up until the moment somebody had to decide what they thought of me, and it changed my trajectory.
The lesson isn’t that reputation matters. Everyone already knows that. It’s that your reputation is being assessed and acted on whether you’re paying attention to it or not. The only real choice left to you is whether you find out what it says and take back control before the decision gets made.