The Reputation You Build When No One Is Watching.

I have considered achieving results, meeting client expectations to be a metric that drives professional credibility during my tenure as an Account Manager, but the Business Professionalism lecture made me question whether reputation should only be determined by what we can see.

Especially, the Four Pillars of Business Professionalism; professional formation, self-management, presence or image and communication as expressed by Strom had a great impact. At first, I was thinking of them as single attributes but later I realized that when it comes to creating a winning professional brand, it's important to have values and actions that back it up through behaviour consistently.

“Reputation is a product of others’ perception and integrity is a product of our decisions when no one is noticing.”

The differentiation of professional ethics and compliance was also significant. Following rules and doing as told is an indication of responsibility, it's not an assurance of good judgment. This provoked my thinking that positive outcomes should result from integrity in the profession.

For instance, digital marketing campaign performance is not just about achieving profitable business growth, it includes recognizing limitations, articulating poor performance and providing recommendations based on data-driven evidence. Focusing on positive outcomes might appear to be a commercial draw, it can also lead to a compromise in the trust of your clients in the long run. Reputation relies on what others say to a certain degree but integrity is a matter of consistency regardless of whether others notice. Thus, professional credibility evolves from daily decisions to be genuine, fair, and accountable.

I would like to build my moral compass with respect to transparency of recommendations, outcomes to various stakeholders and feedback when confronted with difficult decisions. I want my values to be acknowledged as I move up the ladder of senior leadership, beyond only the outcome. My key takeaway is that reputation is a product of others' perception and integrity is a product of our decisions when no one is noticing.