People are already making up their minds.

Edition 06 of 'Reputation means business' explores what buyers, candidates, boards and investors have already decided about leadership, and what those decisions are doing to the business.

Every leader already has a reputation from the moment they take on a role serious enough for other people to have an opinion about them.

By then, buyers, candidates, board members, investors and partners are already making decisions about trust, credibility and whether this is someone they would want to work with.

Whether anyone in the business is doing anything useful with that reputation comes a distant second. It comes up so rarely it barely counts as a question.

Doing its own thing.

I have sat in enough leadership meetings to know that when that topic does make it onto the agenda, it usually shows up as something else entirely: more communications, more press, a sharper public presence. All perfectly sensible.

Yet none of it addresses the reputation already sitting there, doing its own thing regardless of whether anyone in the business has noticed.

That reputation can influence how quickly a buyer trusts, how hard they negotiate, whether a candidate says yes and whose name enters a board conversation first. Those are business consequences, even when nobody can point to the precise moment reputation influenced them.

The part anyone can point to.

None of this waits for a decision from the business about whether to manage it.

Leadership conversations almost always start with the visible activity: the podcast appearance, the keynote, the content calendar. That is the part anyone can point to and decide to do more or less of.

The reputation already influencing deals, hiring and access rarely gets the same attention. Leadership teams discuss the activity they can see while its commercial effect sits outside the agenda, largely unexamined and usually unowned.

Somehow, that question never gets asked.

You see it in the competitor who wins a pitch nobody remembers seeing opened, the candidate who says yes before the offer has been finalised, or the board seat that goes to a name everyone already knew.

I do not think businesses are getting this wrong, exactly. Reputation seems to have been filed under the same heading as communications and visibility. Once it lives there, it only comes up when someone is deciding whether to spend more on the visible part.

The underlying question that should be asked: what is our leadership’s reputation already doing to the business?

Somewhere, right now, a buyer is deciding how quickly to trust a leader they have never met. The business may never see that decision, only its commercial consequence.

That feels worthy of its own moment on the agenda.