Your work does not speak for you. So what does?

In Edition 10 of Reputation means business, Laure Golly looks at a pattern from her recent conversations with senior executives at a turning point. Nearly all of them are considering a portfolio career, and few were prepared for how much the organisation had been doing for their reputation along the way.

Over the past month, I have had many conversations with senior executives at a turning point. Nearly all of them are considering some form of portfolio career: a board seat or two, advisory mandates, interim or fractional work, consulting, speaking, a firm of their own, or several of these at once.

I would not present it as a trend. It is, however, something I keep hearing, and it exposes what few of us were prepared for: we were taught to build careers, and nobody taught us how to own them.

The promise we absorbed.

Many of us built our careers on a simple promise. Do excellent work, develop deep expertise, earn the trust of the people around you, and recognition will follow. Keep your head down and the work will speak for itself.

For a long time, the promise appeared to hold, at least on the surface. Perhaps the work never spoke for itself. The organisation spoke for it. The title, the logo, the colleagues who mentioned your name in meetings you were not in, and the rooms the role opened for you: together, they made your experience legible to people who had never seen you work.

None of that was visible while it was working. It simply felt like the work speaking. When a whole career was built inside one organisation, there was never a reason to notice.

What the organisation was bundling.

A senior corporate role is a remarkable bundle. Income, identity, credibility, network, status, a steady flow of opportunity and, above all, distribution: the thing that carried your name into rooms you never entered. You never had to assemble any of it, since it all arrived together.

A portfolio career takes the bundle apart. Each board seat, mandate or client has to be found, won and explained separately. Some of the network turns out to have belonged to the company. The distribution stops on the day the email address does.

Experience nobody can see.

This is where something strange happens. Twenty years of experience can become surprisingly hard to see once it is no longer attached to an institution. The judgement is still there, along with the expertise, the relationships and the pattern recognition that lets you see a problem coming before anyone else in the room. The credibility with people who watched you work remains, and so does the point of view you earned along the way. None of it comes with a label.

The new requirement is uncomfortable: you have to separate what was genuinely yours from what belonged to the role. "Former senior executive at [impressive company]" is a perfectly good line on a CV. On its own, it leaves people to guess what you would do for them now.

The loud answer.

There is a popular answer to this problem, and it is not an attractive one. Post every day, build a provocative personal brand, and compress twenty years of judgement into a content identity with a hook and a weekly growth target.

I understand the appeal, since visibility is part of the problem. The cost is the person you have to become to keep it up. Which leaves the tension at the centre of all this: how do you become visible enough for the new world without becoming someone you would have rolled your eyes at in the old one?

Legible, memorable, transferable.

The more useful answer is less dramatic and asks for far less volume. It is to make valuable experience legible, memorable and transferable.

Legible, so that someone who has never worked with you understands what you are good at within a sentence or two. Memorable enough that they can repeat it in a conversation you are not part of. Transferable, in that it still holds up outside the company, sector or title where you earned it.

Getting this right usually takes fewer words than people expect. It takes the same few, repeated wherever someone might look for you, until other people start repeating them on your behalf.

Speaking for the work.

The work still counts for a great deal. It is the evidence, and nothing replaces it. What it cannot do is explain itself. Inside an organisation, the organisation did the explaining. In a portfolio career, or even in a transition, that job passes to you.

The work does not speak for itself. You have to speak for it.