Why Great Engineers Get Passed Over for Promotion | Ep 223

So let's get started on building your reputation.

So what is a reputation? If results are not what gets you promoted, if results are not what gets you exceeds performance ratings and reputation is, we better define it.

And the simplest way for you to think about your reputation is understanding that it's what people think of when they think of you.

The answer to the question, what do people think of when they think of you, is your reputation.

You hear a lot about personal brand, especially on social media here on LinkedIn and YouTube and Instagram, all the places maybe where this video is showing up for you.

People talk about personal brand.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, we're going to call those the same thing.

Your personal brand is your reputation.

And like I showed you here, the formula is results times reach.

Now, because it's a multiplication of these two things, you can think of it Simply, geometrically, to put a picture here, imagine that you have 10 reputation points to invest in your career, and you choose to invest one of them into reach and nine of them into results.

By the way, this is a pretty typical engineering approach to amplify your results.

Well, that would be nine, we'll call them reputation points versus you see where I'm going here.

What if you just put five and five? You're doing less work than this other engineer.

And you're putting more emphasis on reach.

And that leader has 25 points.

They're winning in this reputation building game.

By the way, you don't have to like this game.

But if you don't play by the rules of the game, that is your career, then you're going to have more resistance, more friction, more challenge, more frustration, more burnout, more stuckness, all of the things that you don't want.

So let's understand the game.

Let's learn how to play it in a way that's optimized for you.

Don't fall into this trap of a career that is really skinny or on just results with no reach.

What you want is to build a very rounded reputation where you're delivering great results and getting big reach.

Now, one more thing on reputation before we move on and explore how to amplify results and amplify reach.

Remember, this is a formula that's multiplication.

Reputation equals results times reach.