We run the same set of searches on senior leaders every week. The results land in four shapes, and only one of them is good.
Absent. Nothing returns, or the answer is complete without you. This is the most common outcome by a distance, and the most misread. People assume they have been ranked low and could climb. Nothing has been ranked. There was nothing to rank.
Thin. A title, an employer, perhaps a conference photograph. You come back as a place of work rather than a point of view. A reader learns where you sit and nothing about how you think — and how you think is exactly what a board is trying to establish.
Wrong. Invented detail, or a merge with somebody who shares your name. This is worse than absence, because it arrives stated as fact and nobody thinks to check it. We find it far more often than anyone expects, and clients find it the hardest of the four to read.
Dated. A role you left, a firm that changed, a view you have moved past. The record stopped at the last time somebody else wrote about you, and it is still working on behalf of a version of you that has moved on.
There is a fifth outcome, which is that you come back accurately and in context, cited for a position that is genuinely yours. It is real, and it is rare.
A note on running this yourself. Do not search your own name. The system will find you if it is told precisely who to look for, and you will close the laptop reassured for no good reason at all. Search your category — the thing somebody types before they know your name exists. That is the search a board member runs, and an assistant, and a conference organizer with eleven slots and forty suggestions.
If you got one of the four, the useful question is not how to rank higher. It is what would have to exist for the answer to be different. That is a question about what you have published, not about what you have posted.
Founder, Chief Editor and Publisher of Stardom Books, and creator of The Authority Forum. He has directed 260+ leaders to become internationally published authors. About the house · raamanand.com