The Executive's Guide to Shaping Your Brand and Reputation

Karen Stokes-Lockhart (0:00)

Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes-Lockhart.

Most CIOs assume that if they execute well, the recognition follows. But in high stakes corporate environments, technical capability is rarely the bottleneck. Brand and reputation are.

And when you leave those to form on their own, someone else decides what you're worth. Today, we're getting into why doing your job really well is just the price of admission to the C-suite and what it takes to deliberately engineer the way you're seen. To walk us through it, we're joined by Gartner Vice President Analyst, Rob O'Donohue. We'll be presenting on this very topic at Gartner IT Symposium Expo this fall. Rob, welcome to ThinkCast. Hey, Karen.

Rob O'Donohue (0:45)

Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here to talk about brand and reputation.

Something I've been deeply immersed in over the last few years.

Karen Stokes-Lockhart (0:54)

All right. We're glad to have you. Let's start with the hard part. Your research says that as a CIO, the belief that doing your job is enough to build a leadership brand is a dangerous executive trap.

Why is that a trap and not just good advice?

Rob O'Donohue (1:11)

Yeah, it's interesting and a good way to start, I think.

The research that we have been digging into over the last few years shows that about 50 percent of CIOs leave their brand to chance, right? The other 50 percent are a bit more deliberate. And creating a brand on a daily basis, the other 50 percent just they think that it's happening by accident, or in many cases, they're not thinking about it at all. And in the world we're in right now, with so much change, with the pressures that, you know, expectation has around AI and everything else that CIOs need to focus on, just letting that brand emerge in an accidental way, there's a lot of risk to it. And so we put this framework together to really help them, guide them through how to be more intentional about it.

Karen Stokes-Lockhart (2:04)

So you also draw a line between brand and reputation. Can you talk a little bit more about what's the difference and why people should stop using those words interchangeably?

Rob O'Donohue (2:14)

Yeah, definitely. We've published about brand for a number of years, but only had the word reputation as an afterthought. So I really wanted to bring these clearer into focus. And when we think about brand, it's very much, there's maybe a negative connotation sometimes with brand and marketing spin, or people talk about brand and think more at an organisational level. But the brand is something you take control of. You have ownership of it if indeed you actually are actively managing it. It's very much what you promise to your organisation or to the world.

Whereas reputation, on the other hand, you hear it in conversation, that person has a good reputation or they'll get a bad rep for doing something like that. That's what others see in you. I call it the aggregate proof of others' feedback around somebody.

And it's less something you control. It's something you can earn through your actions and behaviours, but it's more what others see in you. Now, I like to use the analogy to say these are two sides of the same coin. The brand is the promise you give to the world, and the reputation is the proof of that. So that's the distinction. And as I talk to today's framework, and as I talk to clients about this all the time, I take a little bit of time at the start just to separate the two things up.

Karen Stokes-Lockhart (3:44)

So Rob, you mentioned the 4D framework. So let's get into that. Can you start with an overview of what the framework is?

Rob O'Donohue (3:51)

Absolutely. So the 4Ds, the first D is for diagnose, where we really understand what's going on for the CIO that brings them to this conversation around brand and reputation.

The second D is around design. So that is all about designing the brand that you want.

The third D, which can happen in parallel with the second D, is around discover. So this is all about how the CIO can discover the reputation that they actually have right now. And taking the inputs from both of those, they effectively design that brand that they want, and move to the final stage, which is the do stage. And that's all about living to the brand that you want, putting the brand into action, through your behaviors, through your words, how you present yourself, and that ultimately brings the new brand to life. So they're the 40th.

Karen Stokes-Lockhart (4:55)

Perfect. So let's jump into stage one, and can you talk a little bit about what kind of event should make a CIO stop and say, my brand needs a reset?