How - Dov Seidman [107]
Reputation is as important to recruiting at the entry level as it is at the top. David B. Montgomery of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Catherine A. Ramus of University of California, Santa Barbara, surveyed more than 800 MBAs from 11 leading North American and European schools. Amazingly, more than 97 percent said they were willing to forgo financial benefits to work for an organization with a better reputation for getting its HOWS right. How much would they forgo? On average, 14 percent of their expected income. A reputation for doing it right and for caring about employees both rose to the top third of the list of 14 attributes these MBAs most valued in a prospective employer, proving to be about 77 percent as important as the top criterion of intellectual challenge and only slightly below financial package in relative importance. “We were quite surprised by these results,” said Montgomery, the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing Strategy, Emeritus, and dean of the School of Business at Singapore Management University. “There were no previous empirical studies that indicated how important these additional job choice-related factors might be.”16
Goran Lindahl, former CEO of Swiss industrial giant ABB, put it simply: “In the end,” he said, “managers are not loyal to a particular boss or even to a company, but to a set of values they believe in and find satisfying.”17 Those values, manifested as behavior and performance throughout every facet of an enterprise’s activity, provide the building blocks and mortar of reputation. They are the invisible added something that binds people together more powerfully than short-term gain. Instead of thinking of reputation and trust as just shiny surfaces on the walls of the fortress, we need to understand them as assets that provide the engine of our achievement.
“Reputation is not about spin. It is merging what is real with what people think about you,” says Charles Fombrun of the Reputation Institute. 18 We know that the brain is exceptionally good at recognizing conflicting messages. Thus, integrity is a necessary component of any representation a company or an individual makes. If those to whom you are communicating sense dissonance or apparent conflict between your carefully crafted message and the realities of your behavior, they will quickly turn away. When I think about reputation, therefore, I think about something holistic and authentic, something that fills the interpersonal synapses between one person and another, between one company and another, and between every organization and its various stakeholders. It begins with the individual and extends out to the organization of which he or she is a part.
Values. Continuity. Reputation. To thrive in our transparent, connected world, we need to shift our thinking from managing reputation to earning it. Reputation cannot be spun like the gossamer threads of a spider’s web intended to catch flies, but must be built, brick by brick—one communication and one interaction at a time—to form a structure capable of sheltering the aspirations of those who wish to live there. You cannot get to a good reputation by cutting corners; reputation is on the square, or not at all.
A SECOND CHANCE
Whereas it may take less now to redefine your career, you cannot do much to redefine your reputation. You build