Reputation Mastery in the AI Era

I am delighted and proud to have been invited to write this guest article for QGroup, but I am not surprised. The emergence of AI is completely changing the playing field, redefining new parameters to our most valuable professional asset: our reputation.

QGroup was probably the first company to recognise the vital importance of individual reputation. For the last eleven years, I have had the privilege of working with their consultants to analyse and develop their professional reputations. It is the most important and crucial asset you can take from one mission to the next.

One of the group founders, Mikael Kretz, wrote in the foreword to my latest book, *Let’s Talk About Reputation*: “Understanding your reputation is also the most valuable professional gift you can give yourself! We extend this practice to all our employees, seeing it as a gift for their future.”

With AI, something has changed regarding how business life and the business world work today. In these turbulent times, it’s crucial to leverage the best tools available and use them before they become indispensable.

At a time when AI is so rapidly impacting and changing the job market, our reputation as individuals has never been more important. It affects every part of our professional lives. I asked ChatGPT directly about the importance of reputation and received the following response:

“Reputation is a vital intangible asset for entrepreneurs, consultants, and leaders. It influences virtually every aspect of business operations and success, making it essential to actively cultivate and protect. It influences trust, credibility, opportunities, and long-term success. Actively managing and cultivating a positive reputation is essential for achieving and sustaining success in these roles.”

This response confirms the importance of mastering one’s reputation, but an important question today is how AI itself will affect our reputation, and I would like to highlight three areas where AI can significantly impact reputation management:

• Your expertise is taking on new and interesting parameters and is increasingly becoming the perceived level of your expertise.
• Knowledge of your soft skills is becoming even more important.
• As everything changes at an ever-faster pace, your bugs become even more important and indicate what you may need to update. Some may also be forerunners to success.

Let’s realise that everything revolves around your reputation—the game-changer that can transform your professional life forever. It has implications for us as individuals, teams, and companies and can give us competitive advantages. It’s not just about understanding the role of our reputation in professional success but actively managing it to leverage its potential.

‘Reputation Mastery’ means focusing on combining your perceived expertise, experience, and all those crucial ‘soft’ skills that transform your expertise into results. It’s being passionate about your area of expertise with an everlasting curiosity and commitment to always feel proud of what you deliver.

When AI Changes the Playing Field

While you may have brilliant business ideas or career strategies, their success ultimately comes down to one factor: how you are perceived—your reputation. Understanding the profound impact of this can elevate your leadership, business, career, and professional development to a new dimension. Reputation management is not just a concept but a powerful tool that, when harnessed, can transform your professional life. There is nothing more powerful, but paradoxically, it is our least known and utilised asset.

Few factors have as powerful an impact on our professional lives as AI and reputation. Together, the two are vibrant.

With the knowledge that your reputation gives you about your unique qualities, you gain the tools, platform, and often the courage to realise what you are truly capable of achieving. You can take your professional development journey to a whole new level.

However, AI will change the terms of our reputation and, therefore, our success as consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders in many ways. The sooner you realise this and act on it, the more competitive advantage you will gain.

 

“Understanding your reputation is powerful; it is a milestone that marks a before and an after in your ongoing journey.”
—Sven Hultin, entrepreneur and business coach

Your Expertise Becomes Your Perceived Expertise

Knowing your reputation is the key differentiator more than ever, especially now in the age of AI, because we will act with a different logic. There is more information out there today than anyone can really comprehend, and this trend is growing exponentially, leaving many experts stuck with yesterday’s answers. Without dedicated curiosity, more experts could become stagnant with outdated knowledge faster than ever before.

As AI’s vast knowledge is being unlocked in new ways, our expertise and how it is perceived will naturally be affected. Your expertise will have new parameters and will increasingly be about managing AI successfully and credibly, as well as how we deal with the information we receive. We refer to this as ‘the perceived level of your expertise,’ and your reputation will be a crucial measure of it.

By being aware of every part of your reputation, you will gain a unique and crucial combination of the perceived level of your expertise or leadership and the ‘soft’ skills that we now know to generate 85% of results.

Calling yourself a guru, a pioneer, a game-changer, or even an expert is no longer relevant or practical. But having it in your reputation is another thing entirely, allowing you to use it with both humility and pride. That is the beauty of reputation. Your reputation is simply as good as your professional environment perceives it to be.

New ways of building, expanding, and marketing yourself as an expert are needed today. I may be one-eyed, but I am convinced that your reputation will do the job.

The Soft Skills Revolution and AI

Artificial intelligence will cause massive changes and create a new era in business and the job market. At the same time, ‘soft’ skills will be more critical than ever. Leadership, creativity, curiosity, imagination, commitment, courage, passion, empathy, and having a business mindset are just some of the areas where AI simply cannot compete. These skills make us uniquely human and will be our most valuable assets in the AI era. Knowing your reputation will always be the best and most reliable tool available to help you discover and leverage these crucial skills and talents.

To be honest, these skills are not soft; they are the skills that genuinely create results. We call them ‘soft’ because it’s convenient and means we can then move on to something seemingly more important. But ignoring these skills is a huge mistake. Again, according to research by the World Economic Forum, Google, and LinkedIn, they generate 85% of the results.

In the Momentum podcast, Professor Kjell A. Nordström and Per Schlingmann say that it is impossible to predict how a human will behave even with all the AI in the world. We are increasingly inundated with AI-generated messages, and the more AI content we see, the more we will crave the human element.

AI will bring about a tool shift, a mind shift, and a skill shift. Everyone is talking about a skill shift in general terms, but they don’t define what it means. Understanding your reputation will be a game-changer since your reputation will give you a huge opportunity to stand out as unique. It’s about rethinking consulting, stepping up, creating added value, doing more meaningful work, and being more creative.

Even Your Bugs Can Be a Forerunner of Your Future Success

Four years ago, I removed the concept of weaknesses from my vocabulary and reputation analysis, replacing it with bugs. I was inspired by the apps on our smartphones that are released in beta and, of course, have bugs. These bugs are natural and are updated over time with the aim of achieving excellence.

It’s the same with you and me. When we move forward and do something new, there are bugs; they are also natural and can be updated in different ways. With the incredibly fast pace of change in the age of AI, there will undoubtedly be bugs, and some of your bugs could develop into the success factors that make you unique. It’s an exciting thought!

Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, expressed similar thoughts in his book “The Startup of You.” He wrote that if you are not embarrassed by the first version you release, you have released it too late.

The Hybrid Consultant is Measured by Their Reputation

As AI transforms the market, the concept of hybrid consultants is emerging, where your expertise takes on a whole new set of parameters, and your reputation becomes the real measure. You have a unique reputation built on your often broad expertise, where you also see the bigger picture.

The concept of hybrid consultants is about the vital balance between technology and humans, the balance between the perceived level of your expertise and the soft skills that generate 85% of the results. A consultant’s reputation becomes both the benchmark and the tool to manage it effectively.

Something is rapidly changing in business today. I am meeting more and more consultants and entrepreneurs who talk about finding new ways to show their true value to attract new clients, contracts, talent, or investors.

We will likely see an increasing distinction between ‘title consultants’ and ‘reputation consultants.’ The former are more traditionally based on their title and the historical facts of what they have achieved, and the latter on their knowledge of their reputation in their market and what they can achieve in the future. Of course, the optimum is a combination of the two.

Knowing your reputation is the key because it sums up your actions and achievements in past years. It indicates your capacity and creates expectations about what you can achieve. It is crucial information that people are looking for, and we need to start showing it concretely. It all revolves around your reputation.

It’s about challenging the mediocre, focusing on an area where your talent, passion, and commitment come together to create something great. It’s letting go of the ambition to be the best, aiming for mastery, becoming unique, and not comparing yourself to anyone instead.

The Consultants of the Future

I see many people gaining the tools and courage to elevate themselves to a whole new professional level by understanding the key factors that build their reputation and how they can interact in new ways in the era of AI.

My work is based on my experience and belief in the immense power of your reputation, and I want to provide you with the best tools. I aim to inspire you to recognise the new opportunities in today’s marketplace based on your reputation and the expectations it creates.

Your reputation profoundly affects you, your team, and your organisation. Successful teams and missions are built on people whose reputation is their most important asset, grounded in their achievements. It’s the cornerstone of what they offer.

As an entrepreneur, consultant, or leader, your reputation is everything today, especially in times of rapid AI adoption.

Let’s face it: consultants with an attractive and high-quality reputation will have a considerable advantage when AI is used effectively and, above all, in a trustworthy manner. This advantage will shape the consultants of the future.