Your Reputation is Your Chief Asset
The asset you’ve already built and probably haven’t noticed.
“I know I have a strong network. But I don’t know if they’ll even want to talk to me.”
She’d been promoted every 1-3 years for the last decade. Associate to project lead. Project lead to director. Director to executive leader—the kind of role that people dream about but don’t often achieve. By almost every measure, she had already arrived somewhere impressive.
And now she was stuck.
Not because she couldn’t find a job. She had landed every recent role through her network. They’d called her. They’d known to reach out. But sitting down to call them? That felt different. Riskier. Like she might actually discover that those relationships were more fragile than she thought.
I asked her a simple question.
“When you got your last role, did they find you, or did you find them?”
“They found me,” she said.
“Right. And why do you think they knew to call?”
She paused.
What we don’t see when we’re in the thick of it.
Here’s what I’ve watched happen over and over in coaching senior leaders:
We confuse reputation with visibility.
We think our reputation is built on awards, titles, promotions, or big splashy announcements. We imagine it’s something polished and public—a LinkedIn headline, a promotion announcement, a press release.
It’s not.
Your reputation is what you leave behind when you’re not in the room. It’s how you showed up when the bigwigs weren’t in the room. How you handled pressure. How you treated people who couldn’t do anything for you. What you delivered when the stakes mattered. How you moved through a project, a team, a crisis.
People are watching. They’re noting it. And they remember far longer than you think.
The truly disarming part?
You don’t build this by doing extra. You build it by doing your actual job well. Every day. In how you relate to others. In the results you delivered. In how you carried yourself through your work and the work of others.
That’s it.
I learned this the hard way.
A few years ago, when I was getting ready to launch my coaching practice, I posted about it on LinkedIn. Within days, someone from my past reached out. She’d worked adjacent to me at one company. Different department, different reporting line. We’d crossed paths in meetings and collaborated on a few initiatives. But we’d never worked directly together.
She responded immediately to my post. Said she wanted to catch up. And then, when we talked, she told me something that genuinely surprised me:
She’d been watching how I showed up. She’d seen me in meetings, in how I handled the bigger organizational challenges, difficult colleagues, and complex issues. And she had been impressed. Enough that when I put my work out into the world, she thought: I want to support this person.
Over the next two years, she referred me to multiple senior leaders. Several became clients.
I had no idea I’d made that kind of impression on her. I didn’t imagine I had made such a meaningful impression. I was just doing my job.
And yet it reinforced what I had learned a few years prior.
In my first job out of college, I worked with a senior banker. He was leading deals, while I was the grunt on them. I wasn’t the top analyst in my group. I was mid-tier—solid, but not standout. And honestly, in that role, I was struggling. Not just with the work, but with the pace, the culture, the demands. Looking back, I’m pretty sure I didn’t show up as my best self. I was surviving, not thriving.
Twenty years later, when I wanted to reach out to his current company for business reasons, I had no idea if he’d even remember me. And if he did, I wasn’t sure what impression I’d left.
I reached out anyway.
He responded immediately. We caught up. And then he referred me to someone inside his organization.
Again. No idea that what I’d done in that first job had lasted that long. That I’d mattered enough, despite my own doubts about my performance in that role.
What this means for you.
When you’re mid-to-late in your career, you’re no longer building a reputation for its own sake. You’re building optionality.
Every interaction you have right now, in meetings, in how you handle your team, in how you respond when something goes wrong, in the way you collaborate with someone in a different function, is creating a network of people who know what you’re like to work with.
They’re tracking whether you deliver. Whether you’re easy to collaborate with. Whether you show up as someone who thinks bigger than your own role. Whether you can be trusted when things get complicated.
This doesn’t require extra. It requires intention.
It means showing up fully in your current job, even if you’re already thinking about the next one. It means treating the person on the junior team the same way you’d treat the senior leader. It means following through on commitments, even small ones. It means being the person people actually want to work with again.
Because when you decide it’s time to make a move, whether that’s in six months or five years, the work is already done.
Your reputation precedes you. And people will respond not because they’re doing you a favor, but because they’ve already seen what you’re capable of and they want to benefit from the association.
Your move.
If you’re not currently in a job search, don’t skip this: think about one relationship you’ve been meaning to deepen. Someone you worked with years ago. Someone in your current organization you admire, but don’t yet really know. Someone a friend mentioned to you, but you haven’t had (or made the) time to connect. Reach out. No agenda. Just a genuine conversation.
Your future self will thank you for tending to it now.
If you are actively searching and are hesitant to reach out to past colleagues, remember this: you’re not asking people to take a chance on you. You’re giving them the opportunity to be associated with someone they already know is excellent. That changes everything about the conversation.
Either way, the relationships you’re building right now are compounding. Don’t wait until you need them to nurture them.
If you found this post valuable, please consider giving it a ❤️ to help others find it too. And if you’re feeling generous, share it with a friend. You won’t just be helping them — you might be creating an accountability buddy who helps you take action, too.
May you lead without limits,
A couple of things I’m opening up this fall, in case either is useful to you:
I have 2 spots available for one-on-one coaching, and 2 openings for live team facilitation if your team needs a reset.
And if you’re ready to step away from the daily fray and reset your career roadmap, I’d love to have you at my Career Without Limits Retreat in November. More here.