How senior leaders can shape the narrative about their leadership
What story about your leadership is travelling through your organisation right now?
Not the version you’d construct if you were asked. But the one forming in conversations you’re not part of. In the retelling of a decision you made last month. In the read someone put on your silence in a meeting. In what a peer said about you to a colleague over coffee, meaning well, but working from an incomplete picture.
At senior levels, this is one of the less-discussed realities of the role. The work becomes less visible, but the scrutiny doesn’t. If anything, it intensifies. And in that gap – between what you do and what people see – reputation quietly takes shape, with or without your input.
Earlier in a career, reputation tends to follow performance fairly directly. You deliver something well, people notice, and your name becomes associated with that capability. The feedback loop is relatively tight.
At senior levels, that loop loosens. Fewer people see your work directly. More people hear about you through others. Your reputation starts to travel through layers of interpretation – filtered through context, relationships, and the organisational politics that accompany any sizeable business.
And it means that if you’re not actively shaping the narrative about your leadership, someone else will shape it for you.
I see a few patterns here that are worth naming.
The first is what might be called reputation through absence. When leaders stay quiet, stay strategic, or avoid operational involvement, the organisation doesn’t tend to interpret that as restraint or delegation. It reads it as disinterest, or distance. Silence often becomes indifference in the retelling.
The second is the impact of small moments. Senior leaders often underestimate how much travels informally through an organisation. How you respond to bad news in a meeting. Whether you stay curious or go quiet when challenged. How accessible you seem. These moments move fast, and they quietly accumulate into a picture of who you are.
The third – and perhaps the most uncomfortable – is reputation by association. At senior levels, people observe what you back. Who you promote. Which initiatives you visibly champion. Your reputation becomes entangled with the behaviour you tolerate, the people you elevate, and the things you allow to slide.
None of this means managing your reputation in the performative sense – curating an image or engineering perception. That kind of effort tends to backfire at senior levels, where people are well attuned to the gap between authenticity and polish.
It means something more deliberate, and more honest: choosing to understand how your leadership is being experienced – not just how it’s intended – and being willing to act on what you find.
Reflect: Start with what you actually know, not what you assume.
What three words do you think people would use to describe working with you – and how confident are you that’s accurate?
What one area might there be a gap between your intent and what the organisation is actually experiencing from you?
What recent moment might have landed differently than you intended?
Feedback: Find out what people are actually experiencing, not what you hope they are.
Who in your organisation would tell you something uncomfortable about how your leadership is landing – and when did you last ask?
What signals – in how people behave around you, respond to you, or brief you – might already be telling you something?
What feedback have you been sitting on that you haven’t fully acted on yet?
Create: Reputation is built through consistent choices, not occasional effort.
What do you want to be known for – and what would need to change for that to be what people actually say?
Who understands how you think and lead well enough to represent you accurately when you’re not in the room?
What’s one thing you could do differently this week that would start to shift the narrative?
