The Reputation You Don’t Know You’re Building

It was a Friday afternoon when two colleagues asked if we could talk.

Not a hallway exchange. Not a “got a minute?” that turns out to mean something minor needs polishing. This was a calendar invite. Two people. Friday afternoon. Sitting down. That alone told me most of what I needed to know.

They are people I respect. Calm, thoughtful, measured, kind. The kind of colleagues who do not create drama, do not waste words, and do not come to you with something difficult unless they believe it needs to be said. So when they sat across from me and told me I had a reputation problem, I did not argue. I did not start assembling a defense. I listened.

What they said was hard to hear. People felt like my time mattered more than theirs. That I interrupted. That I cut people off mid-thought. That I called without warning and expected immediate answers, regardless of what the person on the other end might actually be doing.

There was not much to argue with, because they were right.

The Thing I Thought Was Efficiency

One specific example hit harder than the rest, probably because it felt so reasonable from where I was sitting.

In meetings, when someone mentions that we need to talk to another person to resolve an issue, I do not always add it to a follow-up list or schedule a separate conversation. Sometimes I call them. Right then. During the meeting.

In my mind, that is not rudeness. That is momentum. We have the right people in the room. We need an answer. Why create another email thread, another scheduling exchange, another meeting to discuss the thing we might be able to solve in two minutes?

That was the story I told myself. But that story was missing something important: the experience of the person receiving the call.

When you are in a leadership role and you call someone out of the blue, that call carries weight whether you intend it to or not. It implies urgency. It suggests importance. In some cases, it creates an obligation that goes unspoken but is very much felt. People pick up because they assume it must matter, because they assume you think it matters, or because they are not entirely sure what it means if they do not.

Meanwhile, I was not thinking about what they might have been doing. They could have been in a procedure. In their own meeting. Working through something that required actual concentration. Finally sitting down to eat lunch like a functioning adult instead of inhaling calories standing over a keyboard.

I was thinking about momentum. Progress. Keeping things from getting stuck. They were experiencing something closer to disrespect. That is a humbling gap.

The Cost of Always Moving Fast

Here is what I have come to understand about high-performing environments: speed gets rewarded. Decisiveness gets noticed. The ability to keep things moving is treated as a leadership strength, and to a point, it is.

But there is a line, and it is easier to cross than it looks.

When people feel consistently interrupted or overridden, they do not just stop talking in that moment. Over time, they start filtering what they bring forward. They simplify ideas before sharing them. They wait to be asked instead of volunteering. Eventually, some stop contributing altogether. Not dramatically. Not with a resignation letter. Just quietly. They are still in the room, but they are not really in the room.

From the outside, that can look like alignment. It can look like a team that understands the direction and has nothing more to add. What it may actually be is disengagement wearing a polite jacket. And disengagement is a much harder problem to solve than a slow decision, an extra meeting, or one more email thread nobody wanted.

That is the part I missed. I thought I was saving time. I may have been spending trust.

The Twenty-Five-Year Mirror

I went home that Friday and could not let it go. Not just the feedback itself, but the pattern it revealed.

I have been in veterinary medicine for 25 years. I have led teams, managed hospitals, built a practice, taught students, and worked with people across every flavor of pressure, conflict, ambition, fatigue, and chaos. And I am almost certain this was not the first time people had experienced me this way. It was just the first time someone cared enough to say it directly.

Once I let myself look at it honestly, I could see it. The conversations where I was not really listening, just waiting for my turn. The moments I told myself I was being decisive when I was probably just being impatient in a better suit. The times I thought I was helping the group move faster while someone else felt dismissed, rushed, or made smaller.

That realization does not arrive gently.

What made it worse is that I know better. I have read the research on active listening. I have taught leadership principles that live in the same neighborhood as this exact issue. I have written about habits that quietly erode team trust without anyone noticing until the goodwill has already left the room.

Apparently, I was not only writing about other people. That is the part that stings. It is one thing to discover a blind spot. It is another thing to discover you have been lecturing near it for years.

Intent Does Not Get the Final Vote

Here is the truth I had to face: it does not matter that I have good intentions. It does not matter that I care about the people I work with. It does not matter that I was trying to be efficient rather than dismissive. It does not matter that I never set out to make anyone feel unimportant.

Intent matters, but it does not erase impact.

If the experience people have of me is that I do not value their time or their voice, then that is the reality I have created. Not the one I imagined. Not the one I would prefer to explain. The one they actually lived.

Most of us judge ourselves by our motives. We judge other people by their behavior, but we give ourselves the warm shelter of context. I know what I meant. I know what I was trying to do. I know my heart. But people do not live inside my intentions. They live inside my behavior.

That is a hard sentence to write, mostly because it is true.

I have thought a lot about the people I may have pushed away over the years without realizing it. Staff members who stopped offering ideas because they expected to be interrupted. Colleagues who kept conversations shorter than they needed to be. Friends or family members who may have decided I was too distracted, too impatient, or too hard to fully reach.

I do not have a list. I cannot measure the cost. But I know there has been one.

What Change Actually Looks Like

I am not going to tell you I have fixed this. I have not. But I am working on it in ways that are specific enough to matter.

I am pausing before I speak. Not the quick, performative pause where you are still loading your response like a cannon. A real pause. Long enough to actually hear what the other person said. Long enough to notice the impulse to jump in and choose something different. It feels slightly unnatural at first, which is probably the point.

I am texting before I call. “Not urgent. When you have a few minutes, can you give me a call?” It takes five seconds. But it gives the other person control over when they engage. It signals that their day has its own architecture, and I am not assuming I get to kick the door in because something occurred to me.

I am catching myself when I interrupt. Old habits do not disappear on a schedule. But I notice it faster now. When it happens, I stop, I say so, and I let the other person finish. It is not dramatic. It is not some grand transformation. It is just different from what I was doing before.

And I have asked people to help me see what I cannot see on my own. “Now that you know what I am working on, call me out when you catch it.” That is not always fun. Receiving real-time evidence that your self-improvement project still has scaffolding around it rarely is. But you cannot repair a habit you will not let anyone name.

The People Who Tell You the Truth

The ego is a talented attorney. It can produce exhibits quickly. That is exactly why leadership requires the discipline to set down the legal pad and listen.

Those two colleagues did not have to schedule that meeting. They could have said nothing. They could have worked around me, lowered their expectations, warned other people privately, and moved on. That would have been easier. Cleaner. Safer for everyone involved.

Instead, they told me the truth.

That is not just honesty. That is investment. That is what trusted advisors actually do. They do not simply cheerlead, validate your wins, or carefully manage your feelings so nothing gets disrupted. They help you see the version of yourself other people are experiencing. They risk a little relational friction because they believe you are capable of receiving the truth and doing something useful with it.

That kind of feedback is care with a backbone.

It also requires something from the person receiving it. You have to resist the urge to turn the conversation into a courtroom. You have to let your first response be curiosity instead of self-protection. You have to listen long enough for the truth to get past your pride. That is not easy, but it is necessary.

If you are in a leadership role and do not have people around you who will do what those two colleagues did for me, that is not a neutral condition. That is a liability.

The Reputation Built in the Margins

The difficult thing about reputation is that we rarely build it in grand, dramatic moments. We build it in the margins. In interruptions. In rushed phone calls. In how we enter a room. In whether people feel larger or smaller after talking with us. In whether our urgency quietly becomes everyone else’s emergency.

Most of us have a reputation we are trying to build. Thoughtful. Decisive. Reliable. Trustworthy. Pick your adjectives. Most of them are admirable.

But there is also the reputation we build accidentally.

That one is formed by patterns we cannot see because they make perfect sense from inside our own heads. We think we are being responsive. Others experience us as reactive. We think we are being efficient. Others experience us as dismissive. We think we are being decisive. Others experience us as someone who has already moved on.

Both can be true at the same time. You can have good motives and still cause damage. You can genuinely care about people and still make them feel unheard. You can be trying to help and still need to change. That is not hypocrisy. That is being human.

But once you see it, you become responsible for what you do next.

I am disappointed in myself. I wish I had understood this sooner. I wish growth came with a rewind function and a modest instruction manual. It does not.

So if you think you are being efficient, but the people around you are pulling away, pay attention. If you think you are being decisive, but your team has stopped bringing you ideas, pay attention. If you think you are just getting things done, but the cost is the trust of the people doing them alongside you, pay attention.

The work matters. Of course it does. But the people doing it with you matter more.