There is a version of you that exists in rooms you will never enter.
In conversations that happen after you leave. In the way a decision you made last quarter gets described to someone who wasn’t there. In the shorthand a board member uses when your name comes up in a different context entirely.
That version of you — assembled quietly, without your involvement — is your reputation. Not the one you intend, the one that has accumulated.
Most senior leaders understand this in theory. Very few have thought carefully about what it means in practice. The gap between the reputation you’re building deliberately and the one forming in your absence isn’t fixed by a better LinkedIn presence or a sharper bio, it is a structural problem that sits at the level of how you make decisions, what you prioritise, and what you allow to speak on your behalf when you aren’t speaking.
I call this the narrative gap.
It is the distance between the story you believe you’re telling about your leadership and the story everyone else is quietly assembling from the evidence available to them. That evidence may not be your intentions, but it is your pattern of choices, read over time, by people who are drawing their own conclusions.
In Practice
I worked with a CEO recently who came to me focused on a specific problem. He was anxious about his executive presence and how he was perceived, and whether people took him seriously at the level he was now operating at. His instinct was to start with LinkedIn. To tighten the profile, post more consistently, develop a voice that matched his position, and he wanted help with the writing. He wanted someone who could work with his style and build something that felt authentically his.
That was a reasonable instinct, but it just wasn’t the right starting point.
Before we could architect anything outward, we needed to understand what was actually being received. Not what he hoped people or what he intended to project, but what was actually landing.
So before we touched a word of content, I went and asked his peoples. Not through a survey or an anonymous form but actual conversations. With people who worked alongside him, reported to him, and sat opposite him in the boardroom. I asked them what qualities he brought to a room. What they trusted him for. Where they felt his presence most, and where they noticed its absence.
What came back was not what he expected.
The qualities his colleagues named such as the precision under pressure, the willingness to hold a position when the room wanted to move on, the quality of his listening, were almost entirely absent from the story he was trying to tell about himself. He had been so focused on what he thought the executive level required of him that he had systematically underplayed the things that were already making him credible.
His narrative gap wasn’t a deficit. The substance was there but the architecture wasn’t.
That is where the work began. Not with a LinkedIn profile - although I did build a killer one and ghost wrote some engaging content - but with understanding the distance between the reputation he was accumulating and the one he was aware of and then building a narrative that closed that loop deliberately.
The gap opens slowly. A decision that looked pragmatic from the inside reads differently from the outside. A silence in a meeting that felt considered gets interpreted as detachment. A hire, a restructure, a missed conversation — each one becomes a data point in someone else’s narrative about what you actually value, what you’re actually building, who you actually are.
None of this is unfair. It is simply how reputation works. It is constructed from accumulated signals, and the question that matters is whether you are the one shaping that signal, or leaving it to chance.
This isn’t about optics it is about architecture. The difference is between dressing a building and designing the structure that determines how it stands.
This Friday in The Quiet Work, I am writing a premium piece on this, where I am going into the full framework of what narrative architecture actually involves at the executive level, why most leaders only discover the gap when it’s already costly to close, and what the ten-year compounding effect looks like when you get it right.
In Other News
I have been listening to Empires of AI by Karen Hao on Audible this week, and I would encourage anyone thinking seriously about leadership, power, and narrative to do the same.
Hao’s central argument is a discomfiting one, in that the story of artificial intelligence and its promises, risks and governance is being written almost exclusively by a small group of men with enormous capital and limited accountability. The policy implications follow the narrative. The environmental costs are absorbed quietly and the rest of us — users, citizens, leaders — are largely consuming a story we had no hand in shaping.
The reflection on Sam Altman is particularly instructive. Not as a character study in ambition, but as a case study in what happens to a reputation when the gap between public narrative and private reality becomes impossible to manage. The OpenAI board crisis of late 2023 revealed the narrative gao that had been widening for years. When the moment came, there was no coherent, consistent story to hold and in the absence of one, others wrote it.
That is a lesson that extends well beyond Silicon Valley. The executives who outlast their moments are those who understood early that their narrative was not a byproduct of their success. It was part of how they built it.
In Case you Missed it
I have wrapped up co-presenting the first season - yes, there is another in the pipeline - of the podcast with my mentor, Liam Black, called Walking Out Loud, produced by the team at Tandem. Go have a listen wherever you get your podcasts, drop a comment and give us some stars. Helps to boost the algorithm apparently.
An Invitation
If the ideas in this newsletter are ones you want to explore further — in your organisation, your leadership team, or your own practice — there are a few ways we can work together.
My keynotes and masterclasses are built for the moments when clarity matters most. If you are planning a leadership event, an offsite, or a conference and want a conversation that actually moves people, I would be glad to hear from you. Holla at me here.
For those who want to go deeper on the ideas here, the premium subscription to The Quiet Work offers longer essays, audio reflections, and more detailed explorations of leadership, reputation, and the realities of building something that lasts. If this newsletter lands for you, the premium tier is where the real work happens and I would love your support if you would subscribe and share this with others too.
Appreciate you reading this far and wish you well on your journey of leadership. Wherever it will take you.
Until next time, stay curious
David
Loving the story about the CEO, Dave. This stuff is real at every level, and just because you are Exec doesn't mean you ain't human. (Unless you're a sociopath, obvs...)
Thank you for this. It’s something that I hadn’t really given much thought to. It reminded me a bit of the Johari Window. That tool and the reflections from it are all important parts of the narrative that is constructed by us and about us.