Show and tell

How reputation subverts the rules of literature

Show don’t tell is one of the fundamental tenets of writing fiction. The quote ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass’ has been attributed to Chekhov. Show don’t tell is hard to master, and the mastery comes in knowing when telling is needed and when showing would be better. As a crime novelist, I often used telling to move the action forward, but relied on showing to try to elicit or evoke emotions.

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

Reputation subverts the rule. To be seen and heard as the leaders we are, we need to show and tell. This works in a number of ways:

Actions meeting words

As a leader, your words and actions need to match for trust to be built. If you talk about building inclusive cultures (tell) but you host meetings with no accommodations for differently abled colleagues (show), you undermine trust. This seems so obvious, but it happens in corporates and businesses all the time. Leaders need to be obsessed with matching words and actions. Unless of course, they genuinely don’t care about building trust with their audiences or their reputations, in which case, carry on.

Being an advocate for yourself

It’s much harder to ignore someone with a stellar record of success, as Mary Ann Sieghart says in The Authority Gap. For me the emphasis is on record. For too long, women and people from underrepresented minorities were told ‘work hard and you’ll be rewarded’, just to see the opposite happen. As I set out in We Need New Leaders, it is up to each of us to talk about our success, create a record of it and make sure our managers know about it. That’s why so many people in corporates turn to LinkedIn - posting there creates a public record that cannot be mysteriously lost, ignored or disappeared. You create success by being successful (show), and you create a record by talking about it (tell).

Being an advocate for others

Part of the joy of building your own reputation is being able to show up for others - firstly, if your reputation leads to more senior roles, you are able to open up opportunities for other people, but also by shining a light on your own reputation (by telling), you show others how to do the same for themselves. By doing the telling, you’re modelling the behaviour others need to learn.

Thought leadership is organisational telling

The platform is just the medium; humans connect with humans. According to FTI Consulting, 70% of decision-makers decide if an organisation can deliver based on their thought leadership, and 75% said it leads directly to signing on the dotted line.¹ Thought leadership is organisational telling - and if you’re in B2B and you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on opportunities.

Being human in a world of digital noise

There’ve been all kinds of complaints about LinkedIn becoming ‘too much like Facebook’ and I’ve seen at least one executive flounce off because it is ‘not what it used to be’. To each their own, and no-one should feel forced to reveal anything personal they don’t want to reveal or feel they have to stay on a platform that’s not working for them. However, the joy of the platform is that it is huge - with 350,000,000 users² - and by showing up as a human and telling other humans about yourself, you’re likely to make joyous connections.

How you show up and how you tell about yourself matters. You are the custodian of your reputation and if you ensure that your words and actions match, that you have a stellar record of success and that you are opening doors for others to do the same, you’re building a reputation that cannot be argued with.

1. https://fticommunications.com/creating-industry-thought-leadership/

2. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/theanishajain_linkedin-has-350000000-accounts-here-activity-7322167625461989376-fcsH/