ThemeReputation & Presence
CardCard 45 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Recommendations

Who & why recommends you

Recommendations are among the most powerful signals in a career, and most people give far too little thought to building and maintaining them.

A recommendation is someone using their credibility to vouch for yours. When it comes from a person whose judgment others respect, it carries weight that your own self-description cannot match. It is one of the most direct ways reputation moves through a network, and it operates constantly in hiring, in client decisions, in funding, and in the informal referrals that never get explicitly named.

Most people build recommendations passively, by doing good work and hoping the right people remember it. This works to some extent, but it is slow and unpredictable. A more active approach means thinking about who knows your work well, making sure the relationship is alive enough that they would speak up on your behalf, and giving them the information they need to do so credibly.

The other side of recommendations is giving them. How generously and how honestly you speak about others is itself a reputational signal. Being known as someone who genuinely supports the people around you, and whose word means something, is a form of professional capital that compounds.

How to work on it

Practical ways to reflect on and develop this dimension of your working life. How it tends to look at different stages of a career, and where to put your attention.

Early career

Identify two or three people who know your work well and would speak positively about you. Make sure the relationship is warm enough that asking would not feel strange.

Mid career

Think about the range of voices who could speak to different aspects of your work. A recommendation from someone in your direct field is different from one from a client or collaborator in an adjacent space.

Giving recommendations

Be specific and honest when you give recommendations. Vague praise is less useful to the recipient and less credible to the reader. The more concrete you can be, the more weight your recommendation carries.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Who are the two or three people most likely to recommend you strongly right now, and what would they say?
Are there people in your network who know your best work well enough to speak about it in detail?
When did you last actively think about the relationships that underpin your reputation, rather than just your day-to-day work?
Is there someone whose recommendation would open doors you cannot currently open yourself? What would it take to earn it?
How do you approach giving recommendations for others, and does that approach feel right to you?

Things to notice

Recommendations decay if the relationship does: a former boss who would have vouched for you enthusiastically five years ago may not feel current enough to do so now, and staying in light contact matters.
Asking for a recommendation at a moment of need, rather than maintaining the relationship over time, often puts the recommender in a difficult position and weakens the result.
Not all recommendations carry equal weight in all contexts: a strong reference from within your immediate community may matter less than one from a credible voice in the community you are trying to enter.