The Current | September 2026: Your True Reputation Is Talking About You Behind Your Back
Every month, we send The Current to B2B leaders who want communications intel they can actually use. Below is our latest issue. If you’d like it delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
This issue: your real culture isn’t the one you wrote down. It’s the one your people describe when you’re not around, and you can’t write your way to a better version.
The lead
The Current | September 2026 — Kwedar & Co.
Your true reputation is talking about you behind your back.
Right now, someone who works for you is answering a question that will never reach your ears. A friend asked them how the job is. A brother-in-law asked if it’s worth applying. And in that unscripted moment, in their own words, they said the most honest thing anyone will ever say about your company.
That moment is your actual reputation. It doesn’t live on the careers page, or in the values you painted on the wall. It’s definitely not the LinkedIn post about how much you care about your team. Those are claims. What your people say when you’re not in the room is the verdict.
And you can’t simply write your way to a better verdict. A good job speaks for itself, and word of mouth from someone who lives it daily is far more persuasive than any ad you could buy. A bad one speaks for itself too, and no amount of polish glosses over it.
If that made you uneasy, pause for a moment. When your culture is genuinely good, people talking about you behind your back is the best marketing in the world. It only feels like a threat when deep down you suspect there’s a gap between the story you tell and the one your team shares when you’re not around.
So, good or bad, your true culture is very likely hiding from you, and it’s not the version you wrote.
What we’re seeing
Here’s a trap we see successful leaders fall into, and it’s a cruel one, because you earn it by doing everything right.
As your company grows, your job changes, exactly as it should. You move up and out. You’re no longer on the floor or in the weeds; you’re carrying the vision to bigger and more exciting rooms. You’re on the conference stage, on the podcast, repeating your talking points into every microphone that’ll have you. This is the job now, and you’re great at it.
But here’s what happens while you’re out there being excellent at the new job: You get so fluent in the vision, so practiced at telling the story of who you are, that the story starts to feel like the reality. You’re describing your culture so often and so well that you stop checking whether the description still matches life back at HQ.
Reality doesn’t hold still while you’re on stage. Processes change, and staff overturns. Then a great supervisor leaves and takes the team’s trust with them. A policy that sounded ideal in the leadership meeting lands badly three levels down. The values you’re describing from the podium slowly stop being the values people actually experience on a Tuesday afternoon. No one is sabotaging you, but culture is a living thing, and you stopped tending it in favor of describing it.
The better your communication gets, the more convincing your own story becomes to you. And the more convinced you are, the less likely you are to go looking for the gap.
You paint a picture from the stage while reality marches on without you.
The cautionary tale
This is a natural evolution, so we see versions of this a lot. Imagine a scenario like this: a company wants to overhaul how it handles time off. The old approach has gotten messy as the team has quadrupled in size, and it’s time for something clearer.
Then leadership listens to a podcast about a famously high tech company, falls in love with that company’s approach, and decides to adopt it wholesale: unlimited PTO. No set number of days. Just take what you need, and use good judgment.
It’s a great line, and it’s popular in certain circles for a reason. It sounds like trust, and it’s the perfect 30-second Reel on Instagram. And it works, arguably, at a company that hires almost exclusively from a small pool of highly paid, highly autonomous professionals with the exact same educational and professional background who all share roughly the same assumptions about what “reasonable” looks like.
But outside of Silicon Valley, things look a little different. Instead, imagine a workforce that spans very different roles, pay grades, and daily realities, from people who could step away for a week without issue to people whose absence means an entire production line doesn’t run. Hand all of them “take what you need,” and you don’t get freedom. No, you get a dozen different interpretations and a lot of anxiety. Everyone starts wondering: Am I actually allowed to take this? Will it count against me? What happens when my manager says yes and the guy next to me hears no? A policy that answers none of those questions isn’t generous. It’s just unclear, and unclear is its own version of unkind.
So now no one takes vacation, or they abuse it, and everyone is stressed. Perhaps leadership will eventually walk it back, bolting caveats and exceptions onto the original unlimited PTO idea. But the real fix is a clear, boring, specific document that every division can uphold and every manager can apply the same way.
Leadership was so busy looking outward and listening to other voices, that they forgot who they actually have working for them, and what their culture is like today.
One thing worth your time
Find out what your people really say about you when you’re not in the room. This is harder than it sounds, because the higher up you are, the more the answer gets polished before it reaches you. Walk onto the floor and ask “how’s it going?” and of course you’ll hear “great, boss.” That’s not dishonesty; it’s a power gap.
So look at the signals that can’t be flattered:
Who’s leaving, and what do they say on the way out when it’s genuinely safe to be honest?
Are your people referring their friends and family to work here, or notably not?
Will your frontline supervisors, the ones who actually hear the break room talk, tell you the truth when you make it clear you want it more than you want reassurance?
Those answers are more meaningful than anything you’ll get by asking directly from the top.
And here’s the real deal from someone whose whole business is communications: if there’s a gap between the story you tell and the life your people live, we can’t write you out of it. No campaign or careers page fixes a job that doesn’t feel the way you say it feels. What good communication can do is help you see the gap clearly and name it honestly. The closing is your work to do.
Find out what they’d really say. Then decide whether you’re proud of it.
About The Author
Lauren Kwedar Cockerell is founder and president of Kwedar & Co, a Fort Worth-based PR, messaging, and strategic communications firm serving purpose-driven B2B companies. She is also the firm’s lead PR and marketing strategist, host of our podcast The Impatient Entrepreneur, as well as a frequent podcast guest.
Over the past 20+ years, she has worked with 100s of leaders and organizations to create PR and marketing strategies and tactics that support visions and reach goals.
To connect with Lauren, please send an email above, or book a consultation.