Council Post: Why People Talking Behind Your Back Is A Good Thing

By Dan Reilly, co-founder of B2X Global, a high-performing entrepreneur, avid customer advocate and committed coach to young professionals

You might start your career trying to outwork, outsmart and outperform others. I know I did, and that strategy didn’t get me far. I resisted a simple fact of the business-relationship game, and as I continue to mentor young professionals, I realize that I wasn’t alone in my old beliefs.

A long-term mentor and coach of mine, Vance Caesar, has repeatedly taught me: “It’s not just who you know or who knows you. It’s the stories that influential people tell about you because you’ve earned their trust.”

Building trust through secondhand stories is a challenging concept. It seems to contradict what we often hear — and intuitively believe — about networking. It feels out of our control, passive and even like a gamble. It also means progress takes time.

In business relationships, you’re playing the long game. You’re investing in something that’s always working, and if you take the following steps early in your career, it can pay out dividends. Good stories can continuously work for you while you do the hard work of your job each day.

Across my career, this single “trust-through-stories” truth has helped me immensely. To illustrate how to follow my mentor’s sage advice, I’ll share the three steps that skyrocketed my career. I hope they do the same for you.

1. Understand the power of stories.

Stories grip our attention, alter our mood and galvanize us into action. Bullet-point-riddled slides and formulas can bore us to death, but a well-told, relevant story never will.

Remember that people make decisions based on emotion, and then look for objective evidence to back them up (i.e., motivated reasoning or confirmation bias). 

That’s why stories are so important in business: You can send people success statistics, pour tens of thousands of dollars into advertising and logically explain why you’re the best fit, but I’ve found that someone’s emotional connection to you — or what they glean from their colleague’s story about you — is king.

2. Learn who’s actually influential.

The gatekeepers aren’t necessarily the C-level executives. Powerful people come in all shapes and sizes, from executive assistants and sales reps to new hires and former employees. Even the close friend or neighbor of a decision-maker is someone who could tell an impactful story about you. Anyone could be influential.

Let’s say your goal is to connect with the president of a company you’d like to partner with. Well, their executive assistant screens all incoming phone calls and selects which messages cross the president’s desk. She decides what he looks at and what to prioritize.

Or, perhaps the sales rep you spoke with meets with the president every week. This sales rep gives the president a pulse on the market and insight into where future opportunities could lie.

Recognize and embrace that the receptionist and sales rep, who rank lower in the corporate structure, are influential people on the road to that targeted — and potentially career-changing — relationship. 

3. Do the work.

Finally, the burden rests on your shoulders to do a great job and work hard. You get to earn other people’s trust with your everyday actions.

If you aren’t constantly earning trust, then everything I’ve discussed so far is completely irrelevant. We know and love the feeling of trusting someone. When we trust another person, we believe in them and root for them. We naturally want to see them happy and successful.

Therefore, once trust is established, that person will naturally start talking about you to others. And the stronger the trust, the more likely they are to think about you, talk about you and share stories that you play a starring or supporting role in.

Your job? Be a great person who’s worth trusting and does things that are worth recounting. After that, you release control, keep your nose to the grindstone, and let the stories and influential people do their thing.

You can trust the process.

Hard work, patience and faith are all required to follow these steps and see the results. Though following this process takes time, humans love to communicate and tell each other things. Everyone likes to hear a good story, and most of us can’t wait to retell stories that move us. 

Right now, a contact of yours is sitting face to face with an individual who could create immense opportunity for you. Isn’t it amazing to think they could be talking about you right now and recounting that noteworthy thing you did to warrant telling a story?

Now, get to work, and play your part in powerful stories.