The Professional Essential

Over the years I’ve thought much about what makes a professional great – and by “professional” I mean anyone who earns their daily bread by trading on their personal skills and attributes. Doctors, engineers, and architects, yes, but also hockey players and bakers and entrepreneurs. If your success lies primarily in your own hands, you’re likely a professional.

There are dozens of factors which go into the success and happiness of the professional, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s reputation.

There are actually two reputations about which a professional should be concerned: one’s professional reputation, but also one’s personal reputation. The latter, which won’t be discussed at length in this essay, may not seem like much until one’s personal reputation is destroyed. The head of the Law Society who is found out taking sexual advantage of his clients, for example. In cases like that, you’re toast. If you can ever climb back, it takes decades.

But it’s the professional reputation which needs to be the North Star of every professional. It’s not about “Do people like me?”, “Do I look the part?”, or “Can I get a bigger billboard?” Rather, it ultimately boils down to this: are you the one they’re going to call when their biggest nightmare walks through the door? When they discover that their decades-long marriage has gone up in flames, and children and savings are suddenly in question? When they’re told they have a one in thirty chance of survival? When the cops just took their teenage son away in handcuffs?

Sometimes, though, it may be “who can you entrust with your most precious dreams?” as in when you’re about to drop five million dollars on your seafront dream home.

This notion of being “the one” is central to professional reputation. When you come immediately to mind when somebody out in the public needs what you offer. Or, just as important, the person who their close advisor tells them to call.

Professional reputation is not created by stacking credentials one upon the other, although those are useful demonstrators that you could be taken seriously. “Marketing” is generally better left to the commodity people like McDonald’s, and “networking” is just a cup of coffee unless your new friend becomes part of your reputation support system.

Professional reputation can’t be bought, or gamed out, or built by outside consultants. Every square inch of your reputation is built out the hard way: by producing excellent results, time after time, in challenging circumstances. It’s also built out by demonstrating to your peers that you are “the one”, and this is done by demonstrating leadership and expertise, in your professional association, in the literature, and by teaching and mentoring.

How important is keeping reputation front and centre of our thinking? Well, for me it’s important enough that the first lines on my Day Sheet are these: 1. What do I need to do now for my professional reputation? 2. What do I need to do now for my personal reputation?

And you?

Happy to discuss.