Your reputation at work isn’t just about how you see yourself — it’s about the version of you that other people see. Associate professor Brian Connelly joins the latest episode of Rotman’s Executive Summary podcast to explain how reputations form, why they can shape career success...and whether you can actually change yours.
Your reputation at work isn’t just about how you see yourself — it’s about the version of you that other people see. Associate professor Brian Connelly joins the latest episode of Rotman’s Executive Summary podcast to explain how reputations form, why they can shape career success...and whether you can actually change yours.
Show Notes
[00:00] Meet Brian Connelly
[1:23] What is reputation - and how do we get one?
[2:34] Sometimes, we overestimate or underestimate ourselves
[3:30] Reputation represents the average of many opinions
[5:17] Why reputation matters in your career
[6:55] Reputation affects long-term success, and that can be problematic
[8:20] Can we change our reputation?
[10:43] Moral violations are hard to come back from
[12:12] Understanding the origins of a negative reputation
[12:59] How to come back from a negative reputation
Transcript
Brian Connelly: So, I study personality, right, and I tend to study it from how other people see our personality, it's a fascinating thing. These are our reputations. Like, on one hand, we're told, like, oh, you should really think about people's character, when you're deciding who to trust, who to hire, these kinds of things. On the other hand, you tell people, don't worry about how people judge your character. We spend all this effort building up reputations, but it feels like they're so fragile that they could collapse with a single instance of behaviour.
Megan Haynes: That’s Brian Connelly, an associate professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross appointment to the Rotman School of Management. Over the course of his career, he’s developed an, ahem, reputation as the expert on reputations… how accurate other people are in judging us, what makes a good reputation, and how it can impact your career long-term. And while, I think, we instinctively know our reputations are important…how important are they really? Can they prevent us from getting that promotion? (Spoiler…yes – and we’ll get to that in a bit)? How in line are they with how we see ourselves? And if they actually can impact our long-term career success…can we change our reputations for the better?
Welcome to the Executive Summary, I’m your host – Megan Haynes, editor of the Rotman Insights Hub.
Musical interlude
MH: So what, exactly, is reputation, and how do we get one? It seems like a simple answer: your reputation is who you are, how you present yourself to the world, how people interpret your personality. Of course, it’s a bit more complex than that – how you see your personality and think you’re presenting yourself to the world, can be very different from how other people are interpreting those representations.
BC: So if you can kind of imagine like a Venn diagram of: this is how I would describe myself and this is how someone else would describe me, and that overlap, that's basically the stuff that we agree on about me. We'll call that the trait, And that's how you're generally seen and how you see yourself. That's the part we all agree on. Then there's the part of you that, like, only you see, And we call that the identity. And that maybe has some parts that's like narcissistic kinds of tendencies, or maybe self-deprecating kinds of tendencies, where you don't believe in yourself quite as much. Then there's the reputation side, This is the unique version of yourself that other people see, right? This maybe isn't stuff that you're aware of, but this is the way that you come across towards other people.
MH: This is a model Brian and his colleagues developed, called the Trait-Personality-Reputation model, and it’s a way for us to think about that disconnect between how you see yourself and how others see you.
BC: So people have these tendencies to over or underestimate their positive qualities that we know, we all know that person that thinks they're like way better than they really are. I think of like Michael Scott from The Office as a classic example of this guy who has this really overly inflated view of himself, and that tends to lead him down some destructive paths, right? He kind of alienates people because they don't buy necessarily into his, his identity, as we call it. Reputation is the bird’s eye view of how other people see your personality – rather than your more limited view of how you see yourself. Importantly, Brian’s research tells us that reputation is a shared perception – it’s not just one person who believes you’re trustworthy that gives you the reputation of being trustworthy; but rather a group of people holding that belief. That’s good news – since don’t need to worry too much about one bad interaction with your colleague tainting your reputation. So any individual perceiver is going to make errors, right? They misinterpret something somebody says, or something somebody did and so from my perspective as a personality psychologist, the best thing to do is ask a lot of people, And so what you get as an average across those readings is going to really pull apart the signal from the noise, right? So like one person may be like projecting their baggage, their stuff onto you, but if you ask a lot of people, hopefully that will sort of circumvent those kinds of issues. And since reputation is other people’s perceptions of you, it doesn’t always line up with how you might define yourself. We tend to view ourselves through the lens of our own intentions, sometimes, like my motivation is this, even if it comes across in the worst possible way. I know that I really had a good motivation, right? Other people don't necessarily see ourselves or our actions in that way. They tend to see us as: how is this impacting me and how is this impacting other people.
MH: Some people are what Brian’s research calls quote good targets, that is, they are easier for strangers to form similar first impressions of them. These people tend to be expressive, likeable and behave in ways that generally fit the social setting. But the majority of us, well, it’s a little harder for other people to quickly judge our personalities… And, if we’re judged poorly, that can be pretty detrimental to our careers.
Musical interlude
MH: So, why does this matter? Well, for starters, Brian’s recent research shows that having a good or positive reputation can also have a strong impact on your career. People with good reputations tend to be granted more autonomy in their jobs, greater trust, more power, more promotions and offered better career opportunities. People who have a so-called bad reputation tend to see fewer advancement opportunities, rate themselves as having lower-well being and are more likely to face exclusion and have poor relationships with their peers. So what gives you a negative reputation at work?
BC: The things that people tend to care about in the workplace tend to be mostly around how hard working and conscientious is a person. Are they a team player? Are they cooperative? Are they friendly? Those kinds of things. And then, are they capable and competent? are they smart? Are they, like, thoughtful, reflective, those kinds of things. Reputations are a pretty good indicator of how people are going to perform later on, and I think there's both a part of detecting the signal there, , so you're getting a sense of what is the personality of this person like, and how does that drive them? There's also maybe a part of this like self-fulfilling prophecy that occurs too, that like once somebody has a good reputation, people invest more resources into them, more like trust, more responsibilities, those kinds of things, and it gives them more opportunities for success too. Essentially, how other people see you – how they judge you and perceive you – is a better indicator of your long-term success, than how you see yourself. You can have all the confidence in the world that you’re a hard worker and team player, but if other people collectively don’t agree with that belief, you’ll be limited.
MH: And, this isn’t great, since Brian’s research found that co-workers actually aren’t particularly good at accurately judging our personalities. He and his colleague did a meta analysis of research, and found that – unsurprisingly – friends and family were the best, most accurate judges of your personality. If you’re objectively a kind person, your family and close friends are really good at also describing you as a kind person. In comparison….
BC: Interestingly, work colleagues weren't a ton better than total strangers, which to me was really surprising. These are people you work with, you know, maybe 40 hours a week, you're spending a lot of time with them, they are better than total strangers, but they're not a lot better. Part of this is that you just show a small slice of your personality at work, which means people are judging you based on only a sliver of your full self. So they can judge some parts of your personality pretty well, like how extroverted you are, or maybe how conscientious, how hard working you are those kinds of things, but some of the more internal parts of your personality, like your anxieties, your fears, maybe how like thoughtful and reflective you are, those kinds of things, they have a harder time judging.
Musical interlude
MH: If our work colleagues are only slightly better than strangers at judging us, can we change how they interpret our personalities? Yes…and no. First, as we mentioned, we’re not actually that great at understanding our own personalities. We tend to overestimate our good qualities and underestimate our bad ones. So that makes it really hard to know what, if anything, we need to change to garner a better reputation at work. But, it’s important to note, that our personalities aren’t statics things.
BC: We're realizing that people's personality does change over the life course. It changes typically in response to major life events, right. So people start becoming more conscientious around the age that they enter the workforce, right. So it's like, yeah, you've got a job now, you have more responsibilities, and so your personality kind of shifts to match that.
MH: Brian says that our openness to new experiences tends to peak when we’re in college or university, while having kids can make us more agreeable, nurturing and cooperative. And as our personalities change, our workplace reputations are likely evolving alongside. That being said, if you’re trying to actively change your reputation, it’s not easy.
BC: We know that reputations, especially negative reputations, tend to be kind of sticky, right? Imagine you're a workplace manager, you've got a new employee, and they come in late the first day,? Does that necessarily mean that you're never going to be able to see them in a different way? Not necessarily, if it was a one off, and sorry I got stuck in traffic, or I got lost, or whatever. You can kind of easily dismiss that as an unusual thing, but what might have a longer lasting impact is because you relate the first day. Now I'm frustrated with you, and so now I'm like, I've got to manage this person, and that's going to set us down this trajectory, where instead of me starting off with this trust in your work ethic, now I feel like I've got to do all this overbearing stuff. That’s not to say if you’re tardy your first day, you’ll forever be labelled as chronically late. It’s more that you’re being judged now through that lens, and it sets the tone for your early relationship with that manager and your new colleagues. Certain types of reputational harms are also going to be harder to overcome than others. I think probably the things we tend to be the most attuned to with reputation is moral transgressions, so like you've berated someone else publicly, you know, or you've done something criminal or horrendously egregious, right? These things that are seen as like moral violations are really, really hard to come back from. So first impressions matter – though not in the same way we think they do, and moral transgressions are harder to overcome. But say, you’re trying to convince people you’re congenial and a team player? Can you actually, meaningfully change your reputation at work? Part of that may start with shifting your personality…which can be done…modestly.
MH: Brian and his colleagues looked at whether hiring someone with a personality mismatch for a role could be addressed. They found that yes it could, but with caveats. You can become more conscientious, emotionally stable and outgoing, for example, but you want to want to change, practice that new behaviour and work to maintain those traits. Their research found that this change takes time and tends to be modest, so you can’t expect a total personality transplant. But if you’re worried about your own reputation, it’s still worth a bit of introspection. It’s time to ask yourself if you’ve actually earned that rep as a negative Nancy or a bad team player.
BC: So what should you do? I think probably a first thing is like: okay, where is this coming from, right? And try to understand what are the origins, and the second thing is, at the risk of gaslighting yourself, like, okay, is there a signal in that? Is there something that this is like tapping into that I don't like, and that I want to change about myself? And if that's the case, then, like, I'd say, yeah, work to change that, part of your personality.
MH: And if you feel that you’re being judged by other unfairly – say your peers view you as always missing deadlines, but when you look at your own deliverables, you can see that’s not the case, then Brian recommends acknowledging that you have that reputation, but that’s it not accurate. Then, you kind of have to go about proving to everyone that the reputation is unearned – and that’s a fair bit of work. Brian’s research has also shown him the limitations of managing your reputation – and that’s important for listeners to remember.
BC: I think it's helped me to be a little bit more open to hearing what other people see about me and recognizing that maybe some ways that I'm seeing myself or intending to come across don't always land, you do get like feedback about what your personality is like from people sprinkled into conversations like periodically, and so I'd say studying reputations has made me a little bit more attuned to that, and it's made me ask myself, okay, is this something like real that I need to see in myself, or is this something that, like, okay, I can see how they got this, but this is a misconstrued the situation, or whatever. to some extent, you can think almost your reputation like a theory of what you're like and theories can be right or wrong, right, but you can say, do I learn anything new or interesting when I look at myself through this reputational lens?
Musical outro
MH: This has been Rotman Executive Summary, a podcast bringing you the latest insights and innovative thinking from Canada's leading business school. Special thanks to associate professor Brian Connelly. Join us next month as we chat with professor Walid Hejazi about whether Canada’s economic strategy is ready for our current politically topsy turvy reality.
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This episode was produced by Meaghan MacSween, written by Megan Haynes. It was recorded by Dave Whittington and edited by Avery Moore Kloss.
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