Reputation Management for Leaders: Build Trust That Lasts w/ Charlotte Otter
Home > Podcast
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with author and speaker Charlotte Otter on the importance and impact of reputation management.
A few reasons why she is awesome — she is an author, speaker, podcast host, and advisor specializing in reputation management, change communications, and building high-performing communications teams. She’s the host of her own podcast: Speech Bubbles, helping us be seen and heard as the leader you are. Her new book We Need New Leaders: Mastering reputation management to reshape the C-Suite, shows how reputation management is a critical but often overlooked tool for diverse leaders aiming for those C-suite roles.
Connect with Charlotte and learn more about her work…
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
“Reputation, both for companies and for individuals, is an intangible asset… the sum total of past actions and future expectations that all audiences who have ever met you or encountered you have of you at any given time.”
Charlotte Otter
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Charlotte Otter, and here is why she is awesome. She’s an author, speaker, podcast host and advisor specializing in reputation management, change communications, and building high performing communications teams. She’s the host of her own podcast. Yes, she’s dipping her own toe into this world called Speech Bubbles, helping us be seen and heard as the leaders we are, and she’s got herself a new book. We Need New Leaders. Could not echo that more often. Mastering Reputation Management to Reshape the C-Suite, shows how reputation management is a critical but often overlooked tool for diverse leaders aiming for those C-suite roles. Hello, Charlotte.
Charlotte Otter: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on.
Russel Lolacher: Now if anybody’s, you know, listening at home for their keyword search, I’m sure they heard the word reputation management more than a few times. So, you have an understanding of where we’re gonna dig into today. I’m super curious about reputation management for the good and for the bad. But for Charlotte, you cannot get off the hook.
I have the same question I have to ask you that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Charlotte Otter: So I’m gonna tweak it slightly and tell you an employee onboarding story and we can guess afterwards if it was good or bad. So, as a 25-year-old, I went into my first corporate role. I had first worked as a crime reporter on a daily newspaper in Johannesburg, South Africa. And then I briefly worked as a fundraiser, first corporate role.
It was the biggest, most expensive, most fancy South African corporation. It was a mining house. Still famous to this day and on my very first day, my boss and my boss’s boss took me out for lunch, which I thought was lovely. We went to a very fancy restaurant. We went at 12, one o’clock past the second bottle of wine was ordered. Two o’clock past, three o’clock past… and we staggered back to the office at four o’clock in the afternoon. When I got home, I said to my fiance, now, husband, if that’s what lunches are gonna be like at this place, I am not going to survive.
So for some, maybe for some, maybe a good onboarding experience, for me it was terrifying because I’m a very… I mean, it just takes two glasses of wine and I’m feeling very tipsy.
Russel Lolacher: I dunno how to put this, but were you a special case? Like did they do this with everybody for onboarding? Is your first day you’re gonna get smattered… smashed? Like is that, was that like tradition or was that just sort of how, well, this is a person we’re gonna work with a lot, we wanna get to know them as a person, let’s lubricate them with alcohol.
Like what was the approach for the organization?
Charlotte Otter: I think the two of them just really felt like a fancy lunch and a lot of wine.
Russel Lolacher: Okay. Okay. So it was just their idea of how to relationship build with the new hire.
Charlotte Otter: How to have a good time and have a good excuse, new hire.
Russel Lolacher: So what did that, what did you take away from that? Because I mean, you’re looking at that going, these are supposed to be the people that are modeling the leadership behavior that I’m supposed to want to be successful in this organization. But then as you said, I can’t do that if this is our, these are our lunches moving forward.
So what was the takeaway for you?
Charlotte Otter: You definitely need boundaries with your bosses, and I’m gonna be invisible to them at lunchtime, so I’m going to the gym.
Russel Lolacher: And how important those boundaries are to communicate right outta the gate. I mean, I’m guessing this didn’t happen last week. This happened probably a while ago. At a point in your career where you probably don’t feel confident enough to tell people with lofty titles that you’re like, no, you know what? I can’t do this because it might be career limiting move as I love or hate to hear. So, yeah, it’s I that I think that really… good or bad, I think it’s really important that to, how you’ve illustrated is you have to know yourself and communicate yourself. This is not talking about work, this is boundaries we’re talking about, which go hand in hand.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, for sure. And I don’t think I was very good at expressing it. I was 25 at the time, but I just suddenly made myself very invisible at lunchtime.
Russel Lolacher: Which is also not good. You shouldn’t have to do that. That is not the win we all want. But I totally understand it. I totally understand it. Yeah, and that kind of makes me think a bit about our topic today, which is what kind of a reputation may you have gotten from saying no versus saying yes?
And how could that have played into your relationships moving forward or your opportunities moving forward in that? I mean, that was a microcosm. That is a small, that is one moment, but it is amazing the ripples in a pond to your one’s reputation based on saying no and yes to certain situations. So before we get into any of that though, I have to set the playing field, which is how would you define reputation in the workplace? And then jumping off that reputation management?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, so reputation, both for companies and for individuals is an intangible asset, which makes it hard to define on one level. But the reputation scholars have defined it as, and I’ll summarize, the sum total of past actions and future expectations that all audiences who have ever met you or encountered of you have of you at any given time. So it’s big.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah. I was just gonna say, I’m like, that encompasses a lot. So to throw management after that word, what are we, like, how can we’ll get into how’s and the why’s, but what does that mean to try to take control of that?
Charlotte Otter: On one level you can’t, but on another level, what you have to do is just be very conscious of your words and your behaviors matching. So something I say to my clients all the time is you can espouse beautiful values. You can talk about strategy and vision, but if your actions don’t match those words, you have a trust gap. You have the say-do gap, and that is reputational.
Russel Lolacher: I love that you tied it to trust, because that is so, I often say the gap between what you do and what you say is where trust gets lost. Sort of, sort of the whole mind of the gap thing I stole from the UK is that you have to be very aware of what’s in that space. But I think we both understand that reputation, everybody has it. Everybody has one. Huge, small, complicated, simple. But whether we know it or not, we do have a reputation within the organizations we work. What are critical elements of a reputation for us to better understand it?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, there are three critical elements. And those are narratives, behaviors, and networks. So the narratives are the stories that you tell and the. The stories build up into narratives, and the narrative builds up into your reputation. So the things that you say about yourself, the things that you say about your organization.
The second are behaviors, which goes back to what we said just now about the say, do gap. And the third is your network. So where are you saying the things that you say, it’s your social networks, but it’s also your personal networks, your alumni groups, your industry organizations, your family and friends.
And those three things, cohere. Into this beautiful picture of your reputation, but you can also have reputations for different things. You can have a reputation for competence. Can have a reputation for character, so behaving well. You can have a reputation for both. It’s not either or, and what I’m telling my clients now, it’s absolutely crucial to have a reputation of being able to give context because the world is so wild, it’s so confusing. Things are changing on a daily basis, and leaders are now expected to be able to give context. Contextualization is critical.
Russel Lolacher: To be fair, I think they always were. I just think they’re being told they have to now.
Charlotte Otter: Yes, and the pressure is much more extreme in the last 20 years with the rise of social media, because before, as a leader, you could get things done inside the corporate boundaries and people would never know about it. Now your employees can leak something in five minutes. The whole world knows.
Russel Lolacher: I, that’s exactly where I wanted to go, was the outside forces that might influence the reputation within an organization because 10, 20 years ago, you were in this walled environment where what happened at work stayed at work to some measure beyond going home and complaining to your partner to some level, but it wasn’t for the masses to consume from LinkedIn to, you know, Open… Glassdoor, whatever websites that, where they talk about the workplace.
How has this reshaped how leaders, how prospective leaders need to behave in the workplace knowing that their work does not end from nine to five when it comes to reputation management?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, on one level it’s incredibly stressful. On another level, it can be very creative for people who have mastered their reputation. The stress is something you said wrong in a meeting can go around the world in a flash. I. And can really be incredibly uncomfortable for you. So leaders do have to mind their words.
And I had a lot of trouble with leaders of my generation. So I’m Gen X, and older, who had been so comfortable in that safe corporate boundaried world, suddenly having to people like me telling them they had to step out of the boundaried world into the social media networks and start having opinions and having something to say because they always felt that kind of fear of, I’m gonna say something stupid and everybody will know.
Leaders who’ve grown up digital have a lot more comfort. They just know what it’s like. You know, our kids, they just know what it’s like. They’re used to, they’re used to surviving in that kind of a world.
Russel Lolacher: So I push back a little bit on that as a fellow Gen Xer, because I get it from going to work and under, they’re more risk adverse, like Gen X and Boomers, a little more risk adverse, little more hyper aware because we grew up having to be a particular way at work and then not maybe communicating that at all in the social space, even as we’re learning it.
However, on the flip side, I think Millennials and Gen Zs are almost too comfortable with it, that they feel that there’s no repercussions to what they say online and how their opinions, because the line between work and home life is gone for them and they feel comfortable. I hear you, that they feel comfortable in the space, but I don’t know if they feel comfortable in the management part because it’s, it’s, they don’t know where the boundaries are because how they talk to friends, they feel they can do the same. Now, of course, I’m painting very broad brushes here. But to your point, because they grew up in this, they’re, they’ve been swimming in this water, we got thrown in this water. Right? So how do you approach generations that aren’t like, to your point, you see it is they’re more comfortable, but it also comes with its own challenges as well.
Charlotte Otter: Oh yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And something that, you know, we’ve tried to help our own kids with is just be aware that anything you do or say online. A future boss is gonna be able to look at that or a future prospective manager is going to be able to look at that. So just bear that in mind as you manage your own social media profile.
I also think it’s interesting ’cause I think there are country and world differences. So, you know, I think the US is very social media savvy, but I think in Europe and even in Germany, there’s a lot more shyness around using social media. I’d say Europe is a couple of years behind the US in terms of that.
Incredible comfort. So my kids and their friends will have watched everything on TikTok, but they haven’t necessarily made their own TikTok videos or maybe only one or two. So there’s a, there’s kind of an interesting caution in Europe around using social media.
Russel Lolacher: That’s not a bad thing. That’s certainly, well, you have a lot less to, you have a lot less landmines to manage when you’re cautious, when you’re taking it… You know? I mean, there is, it depends on who the audience is. I think as a prospective leader, as someone growing the organization, you have to understand that it’s not just about you.
Like we’re both communication nerds. So it’s not just about what you say, it’s how it’s interpreted. Communication is two ways. We always talk like it’s broadcasting, which is not what it is. It is always about the audience as much as, and I think if from a culture standpoint, you’re taking that more seriously
I think that can only benefit. And I think that’s, as a Canadian, I think we’re more in line with the American perspective. Just not to the volume considering our population. What is a bad reputation? And I’m also curious, is it a scale? Because we talk very, it’s good reputation, bad reputation.
There’s no mild reputation. There’s no, like, it is it gray or is it good, bad, binary.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think a bad reputation is first of all, brutal. It usually comes behaviorally. So a reputation for being good at your job is more sticky than a bad character reputation. So you can be competent and a bit of a jerk and still have a decent reputation. But if you have bad, if you’re incompetent and a jerk, terrible reputation.
So that’s pretty, that is kind of interesting. But generally what we see with CEOs, I mean, it’s the CEOs who do something absolutely terrible that make the headlines and they usually make the headlines for, you know, for the wrong reasons. I mean, I’m sure you remember in January last year in 24, the Kyte Baby scandal that made CNN so that she was the CEO of a kind of organic baby clothes, wonderful parent friendly organization. And she fired an employee who had asked to work from the ICU while she looked after her new adoptive baby. The CEO fired her. Then the woman’s sister made a TikTok video saying, this has happened to my sister.
That went wild. Then the CEO apologized in sort of lawyer language. She’d obviously got advice from her lawyer, not from her communicator. TikTok went even more crazy. She then apologized and then she made CNN. She made CNN for trying to spin several bad decisions. Now, by the time CNN is making a story about you for your bad reputation, your reputation’s devastated and there’s no coming back.
Russel Lolacher: No, you can’t spin yourself outta that one. Sorry.
Charlotte Otter: No. No chance.
Russel Lolacher: Especially when it contradicts the vision and the mission you’re perpetuating on your website, you know that is the brand. I’m like, but you’re not the face of that brand if this is what you’re actually like behind closed doors.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, absolutely. And that takes you right back to what we said at the beginning. Say, do you, if there’s a gap between what your vision and your mission is, and then how you behave, people will tear you apart.
Russel Lolacher: That, and of course, that’s the most like public version of reputation management and not managing reputation, how does it impact this? A bad reputation to your point? Like you can get things done, but you’re a jerk to work for, so nobody wants to work with that person. So I hear you that they’re still manageable, but it almost normalizes it as well.
Is that, oh, that’s just who they are as opposed to, No, they should have some ramifications for them being the ass at work and so forth. So I’m kind of curious, from your opinion, how do you think slightly bad, horrific, what kind of ripples in the pond does that have within the workplace and the workplace culture, having a bad reputation?
Charlotte Otter: I think it has terrible ripples. I think that people, it you, that brings about a fear-based culture. People are scared to work with you. People are scared to speak up. People are scared to be honest with you. And once your people. Will feel silenced. Silence. Innovation goes out the window. Creativity goes out the window ’cause people are just too scared to speak up. And it’s part of the motivation for my book, We Need New Leaders in that I think we recognize a certain loud kind of confidence as leadership and forget to look at competence. And I think we over index on confidence over competence.
Russel Lolacher: Completely agree. Completely agree. So I guess that leads the question of how do we know what our reputation is? How do we audit our own behaviors to understand what this persona or this true or not true, is when it comes to the workplace.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, I mean, self audit, it would take a very self-aware person to do that probably. I mean, when I work with my clients, I do a kind of reputation 360. So I, I do very in-depth interviews with them, and then I do in-depth interviews with at least 10 of their work allies. And if there’s not a match, then I say to them, we’ve got a reputation gap here and we’ve got some work to do.
Russel Lolacher: Now, three sixties are generally above, who on your team and a few colleagues as well. Do you go further? And I ask this because reputation can go to quite a few other business areas that may not barely work with you, but they don’t work with you because of reputation. Right? Three sixty I can get, but it might, is it sometimes maybe too close to home?
Charlotte Otter: It is sometimes close and I generally ask the leaders to give me the names, but it’s amazing how brave people are. So people have given me their customers, they’ve given me, their board members. You know, a couple of people have given me their wives and husbands, and boy do you get truth from them. So I love the vulnerability that’s already inherent in that.
Russel Lolacher: Now that self-awareness piece has to be super integral to reputation management because you don’t know what you don’t know and you have to be aware of it to even manage it because I’m guessing this is not something you can outsource or delegate going can you manage my reputation for me? I mean, to some point there is because we have PR firms when it gets to that level, but we don’t have PR firms internally in the organization.
So how do we recognize when our actions are not in alignment with the reputation that we want?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, I’ll push back slightly on we don’t have PR firms in the organization, so I ran executive communications at SAP and we were like an internal PR firm, so we took responsibility for each of the board members and the CEO, and we would work very closely with them on what are your messages? And as an individual, how do those messages match the company messages? Where are your audiences and how good are you at disseminating those messages? And if there are gaps, what do we need to fix?
Russel Lolacher: But doesn’t that take away, and I totally hear what you’re saying and I know organizations that absolutely do that because there’s some horrible executives that you never know are horrible because they’ve been rubber roomed.
Charlotte Otter: Massaged.
Russel Lolacher: Absolutely. Where’s the accountability in that though?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah. I mean, the accountability for them comes with critiques on LinkedIn. They post something and somebody pushes back. I mean, it’s quite hard to get away with it now. It’s quite hard. Or Glassdoor, or, you know, the accountability does come.
Russel Lolacher: It’s almost like you hope their internal PR firm isn’t too great, isn’t too good at their jobs because that CEO or whatever could be poisoning the organization with their one-on-one conversations. And we don’t know. And you know, because it’s being kept silent and I’m, again, this is a generalization, but there are many executives who are not leaders and who have never been told or trained properly that they may need to correct their behaviors. And we are going into extreme levels here, but there could be just cutting people off in meetings or like, there could be these little things that just pick away at someone’s reputation that, yeah.
So I just I feel like I, I totally get it from one side and the other side. I’m like, could they come take some responsibility themselves for their own reputation, because that’s a leader to me.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, for sure. And now in my work with clients as a, as an independent consultant I don’t like to ghost write. I don’t like to do polished images anymore. I would much prefer to empower somebody in how to show up as their best possible self, because to me that’s much more authentic. And I like authenticity.
I wanna see the real person. I don’t want to see that polished, perfect exterior.
Russel Lolacher: I am, you can’t see this right now, but I’m doing a slow clap to that. I hate ghost writing. I get being too busy. But at the same time, we can’t say authentic in one sentence and then go, could you write this for me, I’ll just proofread it afterwards in the next. It is hypocritical to say the least. So thank you for saying that’s again, also as a communications nerd, I’m like, you can’t hire somebody else to build relationships for you.
You have to do that yourselves.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Russel Lolacher: So leaders in an organization, what are you telling them that they need to focus on? Personal habits, practices, developing, enhancing to make sure that they have a handle on their reputation. What personal work do they might need to do?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, it’s really about for good leaders. Not the bad type we’ve just been talking about. It’s really about good self knowledge. The leaders who I interviewed for my book, who are emerging or established leaders from diverse identities and backgrounds have done the work. It’s often because they’ve faced obstacles.
So one of my interviewees was a CEO as a man, and now is a trans woman and a board member. And she was able to compare and contrast what it was like leading organizations as a man, how easy it was when she gave instructions, and how much harder it is now as a woman. So what I’m saying is she went through massive obstacles to get where she is today.
So she has beautiful self-knowledge. So I’m seeing that a lot. People have had therapy, they’ve done coaching, they’ve done the work, they understand themselves, they know what their triggers are. That’s the first part. Those people lead with empathy because of the obstacles they’ve been through and they are inclusive in the way that they lead, but not inclusive in it’s all, you know, flowers and meadows and candy floss and holding hands and skipping.
It’s inclusive in that we can disagree and have uncomfortable conversations because we have already built the trust in the psychological safety in my organization. Because as I said at the top, you don’t get innovation and creativity in organizations if you aren’t having those really honest, really open conversations.
So those leaders do the work on themselves, understand their triggers, are lead with empathy, and then build psychological safety and trust in order to innovate and in order to be creative and in order to lead successful organizations.
Russel Lolacher: What’s really highlighted for me in that is that reputation management is far more about preparation, not reaction. So to that point, if say a leader in an organization does a misstep, and I just mean like everyday day-to-day operations said the wrong thing to the wrong group, and sort of fractured the reputation that they’d already been building.
How do they recover from that? If they’re, you know, really working on their self-awareness they’re really prioritizing this. How did they adjust? Or do they, to your point, if they’ve got all that psychological safety work, it’ll just work out itself?
Charlotte Otter: No, they need to address it. So they need to take that team aside. They need to take that team aside and go guys. I misspoke. I’m really sorry. I felt so uncomfortable when I got home that night. You know, my partner told me I was an idiot and I’m here to say I am open to you showing me the way. And next time I do something like that, call me out in the moment.
Act. Act with vulnerability. You know, Brene Brown, vulnerability as strength.
Russel Lolacher: What’s come up a lot for me in a lot of the conversations I’ve had is the importance of, as a leader, you’re part of the team, you’re not an other of the team. And that a lot of leaders are very lonely in the sense that I am responsible for this team. And it’s almost like put on a shelf over there. I need to make sure that’s the most productive, happy group possible without including themselves in it. So I love the fact that you’re like, if you have a problem, A- don’t wait too long to address it. ’cause it’s not something you come back six months later going, Hey, remember that time I was an idiot in that meeting? Yeah, nobody remembers. They just hate you now. However, it’s really important. I love that you’re talking about like, no, that is your community. That is where you can rely on and your resource to be better as opposed to, oh, it’s just something. I’m trying not to break every day.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, I love it too. And I, you know, who doesn’t want to be led by a leader like that? You know, I’ve been led by those people who sit on the pinnacle. And occasionally turn up and give some instructions. But I mean, work employees are burnt out, people are exhausted. Work isn’t working, people are miserable, and the onus is on leaders to make it better by creating these inclusive cultures that innovate and succeed.
Russel Lolacher: What do you feel are some self blind spots that we might have when it comes to understanding or improving our own reputations?
Charlotte Otter: That’s a good question. I think, I think leaders really do need to ask for feedback, and that goes back to the creative abrasion and encouraging debate and discussion. And don’t react when people give you feedback. Don’t freak out and start self-justifying. Just say thank you and take it away and let it sit and see what happens.
One of my interviewees is a black woman in the UK and she talked about how she deals with microaggressions
She says she doesn’t shame people, but she very quietly organizes a one-on-one with that person and just asks them why they said the thing they said, and then explains to them how it might be received by people who are from another community or another background.
You don’t ever need to shame people. I think shaming is the worst thing a leader can do. If you’ve got something to say that you think might be difficult or you want to hear something as a leader, you want some feedback, do it. Do it quietly. Do it with directly with that person.
Russel Lolacher: I wanna pull back a bit because you’ve been focusing on the individual. I’m curious now to get a little deeper into that team conversation. What kind of reputation should we be targeting to have with our teams versus a larger organization? Because those are two very different things is how you’re perceived by other work areas and executive versus those you are responsible for and work with every day.
Are they two different reputations or is it kind of the same thing?
Charlotte Otter: You know, I love that you asked that question because I do think that those peer to peer relationships across teams are sometimes neglected in the reputation conversation. And what I do see is that, say an organization is very command and control, very top down, I do see leaders creating their own little cultures.
And I think I did that. So I was working in an organization that was quite top down, so I created in my team the sense of psychological safety. But the challenge then for my team was once they stepped outside the doors of our team, they also had to have resilience because they were back in command and control, and this is how you have to act.
So I do think leaders have to think about not just this beautiful little world that we are making of our own, but how does that world exist when we open the door and step out into the broader culture of the organization.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah, I mean I’ve… similar experience ’cause you can only control what you can control and I have no control of the goodness or badness of another leader and how they treat. However, I can be very focused on the growth and the support and the, to your point, psychological safety of that. So the reputation I have, but here’s the thing, how that could impact though, Charlotte, is that I could have the most amazing reputation with my team doing all that, but that reputation might not be great outside that team. ’cause they’re like, oh, they don’t know how to manage a team. They’re too soft on them. They’re way too easy. Oh, you know what? They really don’t blah blahs, fill in the dot. So it could actually be hurting your reputation within that organization to go down that path.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think those leaders have to think a lot about team performance as well. Team productivity, and this is where data comes in. I mean, just keep great data because nobody can argue with that. So that was another thing that we did in our team. We might have been, we might have had wonderful psychological safety, but we were also renowned for being the team with the best data.
So if anyone ever came and argued, I’d be like read the stats. Read it. We are performing.
Russel Lolacher: Because stats tell stories as well. Stats, the data tells the story of like, you may not agree with me, but guess what? It works. It is. This is the, and I think a lot of hr, I just came from a huge HR conference recently and. It was over and over about your data is the thing that you can use to push back.
You can’t do the touchy feelies and say it works. You have to prove that it works before you can start having the conversations to move forward. So I thank you for bringing up data. I don’t think, I think we talk about AI too much. I don’t think we talk about data enough.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, for sure.
Russel Lolacher: I’m kind of curious as well as ’cause change is happening all the time and reputation management kind of has to go hand in hand with that. So, for instance, see you are new on a team, you’re brand new on a team, or you’re stepping into a new role you’ve never had before or an unfamiliar team environment… how do you handle change when it’s worked so well here, but it might not work so well into a new team that you’re now in charge of?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, I think it’s worth having some discussions around change, especially if you’re coming in as a new leader. Understand the change. Relationships or facility within your team. So what I see often, particularly in very large companies, when leaders come in from smaller organizations into large companies, they start issuing orders.
And I think it’s really healthy to recognize, particularly in bigger companies, that the relationships in the connective tissue are absolutely critical. So I think leaders really need to consider spending a lot more time listening. Ask about the change facility. Ask about the levels of comfort with change on an individual level, on a team level, on a department level, and really get some sophisticated understanding of where people are with change before you come in and just go, how are we doing this?
Russel Lolacher: Fair. I’ve been in situations where I’ve shut up for two weeks and just attended meetings and been really vulnerable and go, I don’t know. So I’m gonna sit here and I’m gonna listen because you are the experts. I’m still learning. But there are circumstances where some leaders are put in situations where they’re demanding something right away, and I think that transparency still needs to come to your team going, I’m still learning, but this is the direction we’re gonna go. We’ll figure it out as we go through it.
Charlotte Otter: The transparency is beautiful.
Russel Lolacher: I think and I think that helps with reputation. Is that transparency going because I mean, how often do we use the sentence, I’m probably not supposed to tell you this, but dot, dot, dot. But that helps your reputation.
So how do you manage it when there are difficult decisions you have to make? Maybe it’s straight outta the gate and it might actually damage the team’s perception of you in that moment. You know, they’re going to not like this. You know, it might reflect on you even though it wasn’t your decision, or maybe it was, how do you in that moment make sure that you’re minimizing damage or at least managing your reputation in those tough times?
Charlotte Otter: I think there’s no jumping around or avoiding the thing that has to be done, you can’t pretend it’s not happening. So do it with empathy. Do it with kindness, do it with thoughtfulness. Be honest. You know, I think people can smell politics and rumors and change, so there is absolutely no point avoiding it or trying to skirt it.
I think being direct but kind is the best way to handle those kinds of situations.
Russel Lolacher: And reputation management is a long game. As much as we, I mean, we’re talking about the micro here, but we also have to look at the macro, especially as we look to move up into the organization. So how do we keep consistent as leaders in making sure that we are managing it? That’s not going off in different directions, so easily but we’re consistent in our efforts.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, consistency is absolutely crucial. One of the things that I say to leaders is, you might be bored after saying that message twice, but people need to hear it between seven and 10 times for, to even begin to land. So allow yourself to get bored. Saying the same thing over and over again. And one of the issues with leaders is that they are a type personalities and they wanna have a new story to tell.
So my role always in executive communications was, no, stick with the old story. Don’t keep telling new stories. And, you know, observationally, the leaders who kept consistent had the best results in the end. But it’s a tension for leaders. It’s a tension between those personalities that want to drive towards something new. But the fact that they’ve just gotta be rep repetitive in order to get the organization with them.
Russel Lolacher: No, I completely agree. I’ve only come to the realization lately and I’m, as a comms guy, I’ve always defaulted to the, you can’t over communicate. But then I started talking to a lot of neurodivergent people. And they’re like, if you tell me this thing one more time do you think I’m stupid? Like I’ve heard this a hundred times already because they’re so detail oriented.
That, so it’s a balancing act to your point is that we have to repeat these stories, but also understand that our organizations are not homogenous, our teams are not homogenous. And you may need to cater or craft personal ways of doing that. I mean, there’s obviously every communication interaction is different, but Yeah, I came to that recently where I’m like, well, there are some people you don’t wanna overcommunicate to. ‘Cause then they take it personally that you’re, you think they’re stupid that they’re not gonna remember.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, that’s such a good point. And you know, in my podcast, I’m talking a lot to leaders who are neurodivergent, but it’s also really good to think about the audiences who are just as diverse as the leaders are.
Russel Lolacher: How does the unwritten culture of an organization like norms, values, expectations that are not written down on a website? How does that shape a leader’s reputation beyond what they directly can control? I’m getting macro here.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah. Yeah. I think it certainly can. But I think it goes, always goes back to behavior. So those unwritten norms can be, I’ve worked in organizations where one of the unwritten norms was the leader needs to get to version 32.A/1 before they’ve signed anything off. That wasn’t written down anywhere. That was a shock to discover. I mean, as a leader, that’s a reputation that’s gonna stick with you. You’re a perfectionist, you’re a micromanager. That’s kind of a hard one to shake off. I do think it’s difficult.
Russel Lolacher: Especially if these things to your un to the unwritten part of that, especially if your organization, your… leaders need leaders. And if you as a leader are trying to manage your reputation and you don’t know the playbook, you’re not given the guard guardrails to understand, you are gonna be wildly throwing darts at it… i’m using way too many metaphors here. Two darts at a dartboard, and it will hurt your reputation through no fault of your own.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, but it does go back to having those transparent conversations at the beginning and maybe also saying to your team, look folks, what do I need to know? What don’t I know? I’m making these assumptions as I come into this organization. What do I need to know? What I what, What do I need to look out for?
Russel Lolacher: How does values play into this? Because we each have our own personal values, the organization has their values. We like to think they’re mostly in alignment, but sometimes they’re misaligned. So how does that play in reinforcing or even maybe damaging reputation?
Charlotte Otter: Values are absolutely critical. Going back to the say, do gap, you know, if you say My values are integrity, honesty, and trust, and then you behave in it, the opposite of that, nobody’s gonna believe a word you say. I do think that organizations over index on finding five nice values, slapping them on a wall, and ignoring them.
But I recently came across a French company that does such a brilliant job so that everybody knows what the values are, and at the start of every meeting, whoever is hosting that meeting says, this meeting will be held in the spirit of transparency or whatever value they choose. This meeting will be held in the spirit of healthy debate.
And by voicing it at the start of every meeting, you set the tone. I think it’s, I think it’s an amazing, it’s an amazing and useful strategy that a lot more organizations could make the most of.
Russel Lolacher: I love that you jumped into communication because that’s obviously a huge piece of this. So you are a leader. You are happy with the reputation, or at least you’re comfortable with the reputation you have, how does communication play into this when it comes to the larger organization? Because your team can understand your reputation, but if you’re trying to move up in your career, you’re trying to build a network, you’re trying to build relationships that will foster and help your career growth. What do you do with that reputation? I’m holding it like it’s a ball. Like what am I doing with this? What am I doing with this thing I’ve created?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, I think it’s really important for those leaders with ambition to get comfortable with power. So build relationships with power you know, build relationships with those step leaders. So leaders who are two levels above you in the organization. Also build relationships parallel to you. So it’s about the relationships above, the relationships parallel and the relationships below.
And people generally tend to forget one of them. So you can be super indexed on your own team, super indexed on your step leaders, and forget your peers. Forget your peers at your peril, because you, those peers can destroy you. So you have to think about all three.
Russel Lolacher: And in thinking in that, in reaching out to people and if you don’t have a fully grasped understanding of your reputation, because you may have a reputation you’re not aware of to other business areas, They could be geographically dispersed, like we have an, we’re in United States, we have an agency in Germany, and I don’t know what my reputation is there.
Are there things we can do as we go into other pieces of culture, the many subcultures, to put our best foot forward in that?
Charlotte Otter: I think it’s behavioral at this stage, so show them that you understand the business. Offer help say to them, maybe you need, you know, if you need a, a door opening in the us let me know. I’ll see what I can do to help you. I think it’s behavioral at that point.
Russel Lolacher: What do you mean? You say when we need new leaders. When you say that we need new leaders and it is tied to reputation management, what are you trying to tell us, Charlotte?
Charlotte Otter: I am trying to say that the leaders we have right now are not the leaders we need in this moment. That we have returned to… We briefly opened the door in a new school of leadership style of leadership, and then we closed the door. We’ve returned to an old school, extremely masculine command and control, top down style of leadership.
And I am saying we need a change. We need to accept that leaders come from all kinds of backgrounds and identities. That being loud and shouty doesn’t make necessarily make you an excellent leader. That you can be quiet and empathetic and be a good leader. And the reputation aspect of that is I am saying to those leaders from diverse identities, diverse backgrounds, underrepresented minorities, you can’t argue with an excellent record of success, and a record of success is not only doing the job well, that is only half of doing the job well. The other half of it is talking about doing the job well and even better getting other people to talk about how well you do the job. So that record of success is not, attended this course, managed a team of five was incredibly productive. The record is the speaking, so that’s why I say you need to be seen and heard as the leader that you are. And I’m saying to le leaders from diverse backgrounds and identities, use the tools of reputation management. Lean on your communicators if they exist on the, in the organization, lean on the social networks. They’re there. LinkedIn is an wonderful internal communications tool. If you’ve got a success, put it on LinkedIn. Don’t be shy. Much harder to argue with when you’ve got that shiny record of success.
Russel Lolacher: I’m putting on my comms hat here as well because you said something in there that I don’t think it’s hammered home a lot is that you might not be the right messenger sometimes, and that it is extremely important to have other people tell your story, not just yourself, because they have different relationships, they have different reputations.
I remember trying to do a lot of change management and knowing that I had a new reputation. I was new to the organization, so I wasn’t trying to get executive on board. I was trying to get the people that they, their champions on board because I knew they listened to them. They didn’t have any reputation.
They didn’t know me, but they knew this Person A. So for that, I had champions of reputation. I had champions that would be in the rooms that I couldn’t be in to tell my story. I just had to make sure I communicated to them in a particular way. So interesting.
Charlotte Otter: Yeah, and that goes to the back to the network. So we told, talked about the stories. We’ve talked a lot about behaviors. The networks are crucial. Without the networks, your reputation dies with you.
Russel Lolacher: I kind of feel like I know the answer to this, but I have to ask it. Does it matter around perception versus reality? Because as reputation, sometimes it’s not true that people think about us, know about us, whether it’s in this organization or another. Reputation management can be as much about perception as it is about reality. Do we approach it any differently or does it matter at all?
Charlotte Otter: It does matter, and I’ve noticed that leaders who cover from underrepresented minorities and diverse backgrounds and identities think about perception a lot because Mary Ann Sieghart, the author of the Authority Gap, says bias is the flip side of perception. So if you are a leader from the Dominant Power Group, you don’t have to worry about perception at all. You just walk through doors. But if you look different from the norm, perception is really important to you.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah, I mean, the old saying perception is reality for a lot of people. So that’s what I was sort of getting at is the idea that even though perception is very important for us to get in, we can’t just dismiss it because it’s a perception. It is astronomically important that we take that in.
And your white, CIS males do not have the same challenges, to your point, as people coming from other geographies, cultures, you know, socioeconomic everything else. And if we’re gonna talk about diversity, if we’re gonna actually make this part of our conversation, this has to be part of it.
Charlotte Otter: It absolutely does, and I can tell you that the emerging and established leaders I’ve interviewed… hyper-aware of how they’re perceived. They think about it all the time, don’t stop thinking about it. But they also try to enhance it with speaking their truth, acting according to their values, building good networks, getting comfortable with power in the organization, and building that record of success.
Russel Lolacher: So we’ve never thought of reputation management. I’m speaking for somebody that might be listening. Never thought of it. What, who, where I, I made it 20 years into my career, i’ve never even thought of this before. But I’m, but maybe I should be. Where do they put their efforts starting tomorrow? Where do they dip their toe in the pond?
Man, it’s metaphor heavy today. Where do we start tomorrow if we’re needing to really understand this better?
Charlotte Otter: Yeah. Yeah. I just want to first say it usually comes out of inflection point.
People waking up are like, Ooh, I need to think about my reputation right now. So for example, I had a customer who was CFO of his organization, the CEO and Founder had a big argument with the board, disappeared. Suddenly the CFO had been a backroom guy and was suddenly front of house in his organization.
Suddenly had to think about his, suddenly had to think about his reputation. And I took him through the process that I do with leaders. But it’s usually that point of inflection that change where leaders start to think. What are my stories very deeply hidden in reputation is personal brand. It’s something I don’t talk about a lot, but it’s who am I? What do I stand for? What do I want to stand for? What are my stories? How do those stories support the business strategy going forward? So there’s a kind of some quiet work around personal brand and then where do I go with them? Where are the networks I’m taking them to? What are the channels? Where am I trying to be seen?
Russel Lolacher: We talked about gaps a lot when it comes to what you do versus what you say, and I think that’s so important to understand what is your reputation and what do you want your reputation to be? And that is an absolutely a gap that may be very far away, but it might actually be a lot close in your think.
And as you said, unless you understand and get real vulnerable and real honest with yourself, that gap will never get closed.
Charlotte Otter: No. And I think that the people who generally come to me, there’s a certain level of self-awareness already. You know, I think that there are some leaders who probably will aren’t going to ever bother with working on it, Excuse me. But people with self-awareness want to understand more.
Russel Lolacher: Until their PR firm tells them that they need to start maybe working on their reputation. ’cause they said something stupid on LinkedIn.
Charlotte Otter: That’s also an inflection point. Ouch.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you so much. That is Charlotte Otter. She’s an author, speaker, podcast host and she has a podcast you definitely should check out, which is called Speech Bubbles. And she’s got a brand new book that you even more should really check out called We Need New Leaders, Mastering Reputation Management to Reshape the C-Suites.
Thank you so much for being here, Charlotte.
Charlotte Otter: Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.