Alyssa Jade McDonald meets reputation coach Katy Caroan, who explains how you can assess your professional reputation and how doing so can enable you to play to your strengths.

As entrepreneurs, our reputation either propels our businesses forward or disables them at the core. It is like a ‘mysterious force’ that runs alongside us during our meetings with customers and suppliers; it stamps our online presence and precedes us before a speech. While deeply important, and a clear governing factor to our success, our professional reputation is as sly as a masked bandit when it comes to capturing it.

What is my professional reputation anyway? I know it’s why someone calls me out of the blue and asks for my product. But how do I get “more” of that good stuff?

Probably your mind asked the same questions as mine did. Katy Caroan knows this all too well. As a professional reputation coach, she spends her days with entrepreneurs and corporate climbers to help them understand what their reputation currently is and what that means to them.

Professional reputation means two key things:

To know what other people objectively think your strengths are. To be able to look into those strengths for the clues about where you should spend your time/energy. To know what other people objectively think your strengths are

In typical third party reputation analysis, someone will give their tick-box answers to you and (more often than not) say something to appease you.

“Testing your professional reputation needs to be completely objective and qualitative. That means, from people you trust, you gather the information from them completely anonymously so they give authentic answers as to their opinion of you” Katy says.

This means, once you get the results, don’t waste your time thinking about why Ms X or Mr Y said ABC about you, but you take on the feedback fully and without prejudice.

Additionally, Katy explains that great reputation analysis will happen qualitatively.

“This is because words mean more than numbers. And someone’s use of words about you can really draw a great picture of their views.”

So in summary, you need to gather objective third party views on your strengths (don’t focus on weaknesses!) and also get them to describe values and attributes of your gifts. Too many people focus on their failures or weaknesses. As a culture, we seem to be set up to monitor many of the things we do wrong, and spend our effort to improve it.

Look into those strengths for the clues about where you should spend your time/energy

Once your professional reputation is gathered from a variety of objective third party contacts (colleagues, partners, suppliers, customers) you can see the red thread of common traits that are perceived. And in a productive world of building on strengths, this means that we find similar answers from everyone interviewed.

“Typically there are 2-3 core competencies that come out in a reputation analysis, and we always find that these match the personal values of the person it was about! And what they love to do! It is no wonder that what you love to do, and find easy is also what others appreciate about you,” Katy shares.

And this, my dear entrepreneurs, is where the magic is.

If you, like me, sometimes bang your head against walls pushing through tasks and processes that feel uncomfortable (like someone is rubbing our back against the grain of our fur!) it is time we stopped.

It is time to see that pushing our weaknesses is not really appreciated by our customers, partners or suppliers, nor does it serve us.

Unfortunately, it does not mean we give up responsibility on the icky tasks (which is a shame, because I was just about to push the book keeping away) but it does mean that on a value basis, we can be proud to align our businesses to who we really are and what we bring to the marketplace. Like giving permission to our authentic selves. There is so much pressure to be like Company X or entrepreneur mastermind Miss Y, that it is time we take stock of the core of why and how we started our dear businesses, and share with everyone the core attributes which make them so brilliant.

Aka. You. Your excellent values. Your unique traits that made the idea of your business.

A professional reputation coach is one of the ways we can come back to these basics. And if you’re a nuts 'n bolts kind of founder, then it needs to be more than a crystal retreat and a 'Come to Jesu's song.

Katy explained to me that it was about knowing what to select and deselect in my daily activities. And that made me sign up.

Katy said that with a professional reputation analysis, you can focus more on, and explore, your own potential. Which enables you to make big decisions confidently. I found that it gave me the courage to be objectively proud of what my network said about me, and to see what others consider to be valuable. What I can bring more of.

 

Her program is called Master Your Professional Assets , in which she offers a descriptive analysis and tagline of your professional reputation. Also she complements that with coaching and digital positioning tools so you know how to best reflect that to your market (e.g. What to do on LinkedIn etc.).

She combines the analysis with the coaching because the analysis will give you an “as is” summary, but the stretch will come from looking at the results and seeing what they mean to your current status. And joy. About where you are at your best and what you really contribute to.

Katy tells me also stories of other entrepreneurs who had a similar experience. She calls it “what happens when you see your blind spots”.

She’s currently coaching a lady who was in a normal job. She was an immigrant to the country and had always held herself down because she was a foreigner, and had no formal education. She took assistant jobs and was stuck in the low hierarchy of the company. One day she got an interim role account managing a project and she had the chance to shine and use her real strengths. But she felt like she was stuck in her job. She didn’t know that in fact, her peers had seen her as a leader for many years.

She was on the verge of burning out and leaving. Feeling that there was more inside her than what she was living. She was doing all the work but not standing up to be counted for the benefits and incentives she could receive that came from her work.

She did the professional reputation analysis and broke down and cried. She had no idea. She always thought she was, in her words, ‘a second rate person’.

In fact, her analysis came back with reports that she was deeply trusted, dependable, a “fixer”, a leader. With this analysis, she had the courage to make the first step in herself, to be bold and be counted for the value she brought the company. She approached the MD with her analysis, and also the ideas she had to move forward. With this confidence, she secured herself a much better position in the company, that celebrated her innate attributes. She’s delightfully happy now. For her, the professional reputation analysis gave her the courage to see her strengths, something that women tend to shy away from.

As Katy told me: “That is a good example of what the analysis makes you do. It gives you the courage to live your strengths. It becomes clear for someone to act. It then becomes apparent that it is a dis-service when you don’t live to your full power.”

Katy’s top three tips to address your professional reputation:

1. Understand what you’re good at. Not only by doing a test, but really understand and ask people around you how they perceive you. 

2. Start defining the moments when people are excited about your work – when it is easy to do, or fun. Notice when you’re having fun, and you’re bringing value to someone / a process.

3. Stop doing the things you’re not good at! Stop focusing on your weaknesses. Your focus should be about strengthening your strengths --- not the ones you believe you have, but the ones that are reflected back to you from your peers and colleagues.

Also she has a free eBook you can download here for some quick-start tips! 

Katy Caroan conducts professional reputation analysis mostly in English around the world from her base in Sweden. She can be contacted: Caroan Consulting AB.

Alyssa Jade McDonald is the founding MD of BLYSS GmbH. The name BLYSS comes from the English word „bliss“, which literally describes a state of profound happiness and joy. Alyssa Jade felt the fusion of bliss and her own name, Lyss, was a commitment to bringing joy into the world via a consciously-indulgent gourmet experience and evolving business methods to bring communities forward together, from addressing diabetes in the Gulf to standards of living in South America.