The show’s guest in this episode is Bant Breen.Bant is a successful global marketing and media executive, entrepreneur, and academic. He is the Executive Chairman and Founder of Qnary, an award-winning executive reputation management and talent branding solutions company.

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Reputation Management for Leaders with Bant Breen

Hey, it’s great to be here live with you today. Super fun to be here. I’ve been thinking about my own leadership. And I’ve been thinking about where I try to remove bottlenecks. And, you know, I have people I work with and people I do things with and, and sometimes I start trying to remove bottlenecks as a leader, and I start doing things that impact the people I work with. So I get on a on a chair is the best way to say it. And I just start to try to move things forward. And I sometimes do things that I don’t think things through, or someone will have been busy and not gotten back to me. So I start to try to move it through on my own. And I know what I’m doing, I know what I’m doing. I know, I’m trying to remove a bottleneck, and I’ve gotten sort of fed up with being stuck. And so I start to do that. And then it has some unintended impact sometimes, where and I’m just gonna say this didn’t actually happen on my team, but it happened in my life. And I have an unintended impact with somebody who’s also working on something that I wasn’t able to think through when I started trying to remove bottlenecks, and I try to be as collaborative as possible. But I know as a leader, sometimes I do odd things when people don’t get back to me. And so I’m just super curious if that’s something that happens to you. And then how you think about it, like do you get immobilized because you can’t ever move? Because people don’t get back to you? And you just let yourself be stuck? Or do you start to move and let the chips fall where they may and sort of, you know, ask forgiveness rather than permission? Or do you just as the leader, take the privilege that you have and just say, gosh, yeah, you could have gotten back to me, and we would have had a better collaboration. I’m not sure there’s a right answer for any situation. And I’m not sure there’s a right answer. For me, I just noticed that sometimes that happens. And I noticed my impact. And yet, I’m not sure how I should do it differently all the time. I don’t want to be immobilized as a leader. And I don’t want to make my people respond to me if they’re too busy. And I don’t want to be left with bottlenecks. So I’m curious what your journey is. And my challenge to you this week is to just watch your impact. And where you moving things has an impact on others.

I want to just tell you take a second. And I want to give you a really tool I want to give you it’s gonna start over. I just want to take a minute and I want to give you a really cool tool that I have that I share with people and it’s a reactive cheat sheet. And it helps you look at the reactive behaviors of yourself and others. You can get this completely free at reactivecheatsheet.experimentalleader.com. And I would love for you to have a copy. It’s a good way to do a quick read. It’s a good way to learn about your own leadership where you might have some toxic behaviors, where other people have toxic behaviors and there’s some good foils to those. And I would love for you to have this in your arsenal. 

And today I am super excited to have Bant Breen. Bant is a successful global marketing and media executive, entrepreneur, and academic. Bant is the Executive Chairman and Founder of Qnary, an award-winning executive reputation management and talent branding solutions company. I am super excited to get to talk to bat today.

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Bant welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here. Melanie, thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it’s great to have you I am super excited about this whole idea of reputation management and tell me what we’ll just dive right in but tell me what you’re up to in your work and your leadership and what how are you experimenting in your life right now?

You know it’s it was wonderful to hear you know your preamble and your start to the show today Melanie in a one of the things that I think any leader has to think about is always experimenting, always reinventing and and making sure that you build that into the model of your company. And, you know, give you an example about that. Over the last couple of years, our company focuses on, you know, the online presence for executives, I would imagine probably because as as the world shifted more digital over the last couple of years, we grew like a weed. And so when you scale a company very quickly, you have to kind of manage time efficiently, what are you how are you going to what people are going to do, etc. And as we were going into this year, I just saw that we were over allocating all of our everybody in the company, you know, and, and what we’ve done is we’ve pulled back and given them more time for innovation, and development. Because if that’s one of the principles of the company, part of our culture, we need to make sure that we give people time to think, evolve, develop. And, really, I think one of the biggest challenges for any company is, once you figure out how to make the cookies, you got to make sure that that’s the cookie that people are gonna want to eat forever, and it’s not going to be the cookie, they want to eat forever. So therefore, you got to figure out how to evolve it constantly. And so I’m that annoying person in the company who’s always kind of thinking about, like, what’s going to be next? And how do we make sure that that how we prepare for that?

Well, and I’m sort of fascinated by the whole idea of innovation and reputation management, like, just that really caught my attention. Can you say more about Yeah, sure. And looks like…

Yeah sure. I came from the world of digital marketing, I used to manage a lot of big brands online. And certainly, companies are spending more and more money in the digital area digital channels. However, one of the things that I had noticed is that executives, whilst of their lives were becoming more and more dependent on how people found information about them, or their companies on online, were actually not spending much time in really making the most of their own online presence. And so, you know, our business was founded on a relatively simple thesis, which is that, you know, you as a professional, your online presence matters, it matters in terms of the opportunities that you’re going to receive as an individual, as well as the opportunities your business will receive. And then it also impacts the reputation of your business as well as the reputation, your your, your reputation, and we’ve only seen that grow over the last 10 years, as as the world has become even more digital. And, and so we we support individuals, I would say that one of the things that really always stands out to me is it’s so hard for brands to build a direct conversation with a customer. And the reason, you know, for years, I was kind of thinking like, oh, well, it’s because the messaging is not right, or well, you know, as a brand as a marketer would. And, you know, about halfway through the lifespan of Canarian so far, it just dawned on me, which is people like to talk to people, humans like to talk to humans, we want to be we trust, we trust one another more than we would trust a brand. Let’s put it that way. And we trust one another more than we trust a company, right? Or an institution, you know, and so it’s no surprise when I see things like our posts for executive getting 1314 15 times more engagement than something that would be done by by a brand. It’s because people interact with people, right? And put technology aside for a second and just think about yourself in your own life. Who influences you? Who do you want to hear from? How do you want to think about things? It’s people, right, so?

Well, I think it’s really interesting. And I work with my clients on what’s their leadership brand, which is, you know, sort of finding a space in the marketplace, where they can hold space, you know, whatever that is, and I’m sure you do something, you know, you do some of that sort of visioning as well. But it’s not the next step is to take it out into the world. So it’s more you know, sort of how they think of themselves. But I really see the need for that because…

I love that work that you guys that you do. I mean, I would say that executives have spent a little bit of time on on that work are always our best clients, our best customers because they they understand themselves. The biggest thing we always say to executives is that you know it as you move up the ladder of a company and you become a leader, you, you are doing many different things. And you probably feel entitled or able to speak to multiple topics. Yeah, I’ll be it. What we highly recommend is for executives to really kind of focus their, their voice around a smaller group of topics. Because in the, in today’s world, you’re really not going to break through if you’re just kind of generally commenting on the zeitgeist of the day, unless you’re a celebrity. Right. And, and that’s a different type of objective. You know, sometimes you come across leaders that want to be celebrities. And that’s, that’s kind of a different strategy.

Yeah, it’s, um, and I think about, you know, I know cold, you could wake me up in the middle of the night. And I know what I love about my work, like, I know what I do, I help people love their work, that’s always my goal, I want to remove all the bottlenecks, so that they can find fulfillment in their work. And it doesn’t matter. I mean, my, they have to be able to afford me in order for me to work with them in an ongoing way. But I would be happy to do that for a mechanic, I would be happy to do that for a waitress, I would be happy to do that for a CEO and a company. Because that’s sort of what what I want to bring to the world. And I think it’s, there’s like the, how do you want to make yourself successful, and then there’s the fulfillment piece for yourself. Hmm. And so I think that’s a really interesting.

That’s really beautiful. I would say that we are kind of tactic for you, in the sense that we’re, we would take what you do, and then we’re trying to give it a voice. Probably deep down in my own personal philosophy as a in human being is that we spend, you know, you have a very small group of people that get a lot of voice in our society, and a lot of mindshare in our society. And, and yet, there are 1000s, if not millions of people that are just tremendous experts, and wonderful people. And I really believe that part of my goal, and my purpose in life is to try to find a way to give them a bit more of a voice.

I really love that. And I think it’s so important. Um, you know, sometimes we hear about sort of authenticity, when things go wrong. And that just popped into my head. I’m curious, you know, sort of what you generally advise, when things go wrong for someone, how do they manage their reputation when they’re working for money and something goes wrong?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing is, don’t wait till the till you’re having crisis. That’s the first thing I would say, you know, the company, the individuals that are active, are the ones that have built a digital footprint that can help them manage themselves through a crisis. Now, when crises happen, you know, the old way of communications, philosophy was always go silent, don’t say anything. Have, maybe maybe you’ll get something from the head of PR, that will be a statement that the CEO will supposedly have said, and it will be released. We think that that’s just a horrible strategy today. Today, the world is so transparent, the expectation that we as individuals and as consumers, and every CEO, that’s a customer has this expectation of immediate gratification, and, and people want to know what’s going on and they want to they want people to take take accountability for for their actions, or for a challenge that they’re facing. The the individuals that over the last couple of years that were more open about their, their challenge challenges during the pandemic, were were rewarded for being open about that. The the individuals that kind of demanded that their workers go back to the office or, you know, fired people. You know, there’s famous, obviously famous case study of the individual, I think it better calm that fired 950 people on a zoom call. I mean, just so inhumane, and it’s so tone deaf, and it’s not that the guy didn’t have to do it. It’s not that the company didn’t need to have those didn’t need to make those tough decisions. But wow, what what a horrible way of doing it and what a what a what a what a way of not really putting it into a broader context.

I know, I’m going to just tell you one of the things I grapple with, and get your take on it since you know, since you’re here, and I’m here, you know, I’ve been working, I’ve been a solopreneur for a really long time. And then as I built a brand around the experimental leader, I think it’s exactly what you’re talking about, about the voice of the brand, and me as the leader and the face of the brand. And so I always struggle about, you know, which one to give more attention to in our messaging? Should it all be me? Because then what happens if I get hit by a bus? And should it all be the company? No, probably not. And so I just am curious if you have any, you know, Quick Insights for us about how we think about that, because I think that’s a really common problem for entrepreneurs.

Yeah. So as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to my honest advice is that, as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to do everything you possibly can to break through and so no one’s gonna do you any favors. Yeah. And, and to be honest with the, you don’t have the budgets to compete with the big big companies that are going to be pouring media dollars, to get their their own things noticed. And so when I will look at my the channels that your channels, I would look at the ones that that can help you the most. And certainly, I would kind of put those Put, put the ones that can drive the most and use the other ones as support channels and, and vice versa, they should be kind of playing a bit of a halo role on each other, right. So your personal channel should have a halo effect on the brand, the brand should have a halo effect on on your personal channels. And, and I would say that for almost really all entrepreneurs, you can’t, you can’t be tone deaf for your customers, you have to engage with your customers, you have to figure out a strategy of how to do that. You don’t need to be doing that across every channel, you can select the channels that you really want to make sure are those channels. But today, in a world where we’re where we’re qualities like empathy, openness, equality, you just have to be more, it’s just, you just have to be more open, truly open an open type of person, and you have to build a model that that that has has space for that level of transparency.

And so I always grappled with this, and people that I coached grapple with this too. It’s like, there’s openness, and there’s sort of professional openness, and then there’s hot mess. And how do I and I actually have clients, I think hot mess works really well for I don’t think it works for me as a coach. But how do how do people think about sort of transparency, openness, professionalism, hot mess?

Yeah. So I would say that as you try to cultivate a voice, you really want to make sure that you focus on the topics that matter the most for you and are related to the niche audiences that you really want to be a thought leader within. I think that that type of a positioning is not really a hot mess type of positioning, it’s more of a, of a professional voice. Now, that being said, leaders that have these moments where they, they have real examples of human problems and weakness, etc. And they’re able to communicate that effectively. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s, it’s an extremely cathartic thing that just even a generation ago would just have been impossible. Like, you know, if you’d had a breakdown, and I’m Gen X. And if if my peers or my bosses had done that, that would have been the end of their careers, full stop. And, and I would say the beauty of the millennial generation and generation Z is that they’re demanding a more holistic, professional model. They’re demanding that we understand the full self and that we build a work environment that reflects that full self. And I think it’s only a good thing. It’s, I mean, we can only learn from them. We complain about it sometimes because we’re, you know, we’re tough and we’re cool, and we think we’re so great, but the reality is, they’re right, they’re spot on and we just and we just need to listen to them.

And and then I always like to talk about things like, like gender, and orientation and race, like I like to think about, you know, I’m part of the queer community, and I want that to be part of my brand. But I don’t want it to be the only part of my brand. I don’t want it to overtake my brand. And I guess I’m curious how you think, you know, how do we weigh in on challenges for women in your voice? Like those things happen all the time? But where do we think about that?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we always talk about there that we generally recommend every one of our clients to have 123 pillars that they’re talking about. And so that may be a passion area for you to highlight something that’s been important or is important to your life, and playing a role in the transformation of how those issues are perceived, needs to be highlighted. And so I absolutely would champion those causes. And you would make that part of your voice, it just might not be your only voice. And I don’t want it right, yeah. And then, you know, if, if you what you’ll notice is on a lot of platforms today, their their The platforms are asking for you to place your pronouns that you want to be known known as. So I would say that, you know, you can make a statement in that regard there. And I would say that’s, it’s the pronoun thing is really more of an American thing still right now. We get a lot. Yeah, Canadians as well. Yeah. But um, you know, I’ve listed the pronouns and, you know, when I’m in Europe, they’re like, what, what are you doing? They don’t really understand. But that can be a good thing, because then it can lead to a conversation that that is that is that it? You know, it’s a passion point that you might want to have?

Yeah, I really like that. I think it’s an interesting. I think it’s interesting, although, I don’t always like in groups asking for people’s pronouns, because I may out somebody who isn’t ready to reveal.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I look society. And the way we’re talking is, is constantly shifting. I think that you’re we’re going to continue to see those types of thing areas discuss and they’re going to move in one direction, they’ll probably shift back in another direction. It’s the same way that it’s always been. It’s just requires us always to be on top of it.

So I another question for you. Because, you know, I mean, it’s the experimental leader podcast, and I like to talk about data collection a little bit. And marketing is, you know, has great data usually, because, you know, if some, you know, what’s happening, when you do something, you’re tracking that or you should be looking at those things. How do we think about that in terms of reputation management? Is there any sort of experimentation? Or, you know, how do we know if our brand voice reputation is working?

So Good discussion? Good question. Um, you know, when we we started my another one of kind of probably my big pillars is privacy. For some people that might seem ironic for somebody who manages online presence activity, but I’m, I’m an extremely private person. And I would say that I really am a champion of privacy for the individual. And so I, I, you know, I would say that, you know, our our philosophy was that we want to make sure that you control your data as much as possible, you control your footprint as much as possible. And so one of the big things for us is we really want to advocate for our clients to take control of their online presence, take control of the different channels that where they could have a control over their name and things like that, that’s really important in terms of the data that’s collected by different groups, you know, the data, the data rules, and laws are changing quickly. I think, you know, Apple’s recent decisions are having a huge impact on the advertising and marketing industry. I you know, if you look at Facebook’s q4 results, they highlighted in you know, they’re going forward message was that they’re going to lose something like I want to say was like $1,000,000,000.10 billion dollars because some huge number because the way that iPhone, the iPhone privacy restrictions work, they just won’t be able to target their ads in the same way. Yeah, and, and, and, you know, that’s, I think, gonna be a lesson that’s gonna we’re gonna go through and it kind of ultimately leads to the the the good place, which is I am willing to give my data up for things that I want. Like and and, and it should be an exchange of value, it should be a real exchange of value, it shouldn’t be a secret of exchange of value, it shouldn’t be that Facebook is my broker, and I don’t know that I made that exchange of value, it needs to be a transparent exchange of value. And so I think, you know, I get very excited by business models that allow for, you know, individuals to have a much more open discussion about that exchange of value based on their data. And so, you know, we’ll see how that goes. But as, as the world becomes more open, more sophisticated in their understanding of technology, I can only imagine that consumers will demand more control over that.

That’s really interesting and interesting to hear from you, as someone who’s been in this space for a long time. Where can people find you?

I’m everywhere, you can find me at www.bantbreen.com, you can also find me on LinkedIn, I also have a website  www.qnary.com. Definitely email me at bant@qnary.com. And I’m happy to I’ll definitely get back to you.

And how should someone you know who who should reach out to you? Like, how would somebody know that, you know, you were going to make their life so much better?

Well, I don’t know how they would know exactly. But, you know, I, we work with companies and executives of all sizes. And I guess my, my, one of the areas that we’ve been talking today about Melanie is this idea that people are going to look look for people. And they’re gonna so you know, one of the things that’s kind of funny is, when someone goes for a job, there’s so much focus on Well, the company to prepare for, you know, making sure that they look good, and they talked about their culture. Well, I would say, you know, what, that person you’re gonna, that’s going to interview is going to look at your profile, they’re going to look at who you are, because your values, your beliefs, your presence, your voice matters to them. And I’ve had the the opposite happen to which is people coming into our own company for jobs as social media strategist or something like that. And we look at their online presence, and we’re like, why does he think he’s a social, you know, he doesn’t even have a, you know, an Instagram page, or, you know, it says, so like, there’s little things like that. They’re just obvious, right?

Yeah, I had a 16 year old high school kid, reach out to be, you know, to do digital marketing. And I, you know, sent me a direct message on Facebook, and I looked at his profile. You know, no, just no, like, yeah, you I agree, you aren’t a grown up, and you haven’t even managed to look like what online?

Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it’s, it’s gonna become more important to people going forward. And what we’re seeing is it’s becoming more important to enterprises, because let’s say you’re a big company, and you want to change the focus of the business. You know, I mean, I don’t want to use Facebook as another example, again, but I mean, I mean, I don’t know Facebook will be successful in this change. But they’re trying to make probably one of the biggest changes ever have a company their size, in order to go from being essentially a social platform to being the gateway to a different digital, your digital identity in a in a digital form. And that’s a huge shift. I mean, they got to figure out how they’re going to message that and communicate that right.

Yeah. Well, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for your time, and all of your generous comments and suggestions and help.

Thank you. I mean, really great to talk.

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Cool. Well, that was so interesting. I love getting to talk to bat brain. He was fantastic. And I love this idea of curating your presence online. I also like the idea of, you know, picking three things that you can focus on so that you’re not trying to be all things. It’s part of that that personal brand leadership brand. Who are you? What do you want to move in the world? What’s your vision of a world? You know, a perfect world? And how do you comment on that? So, my challenge to you this week is to take a minute think of the three things you want to move in the world and make some notes for yourself, figure out how that’s going to be a part of the way that you manage your professional brand and your reputation and go experiment.

Important Links: 

• Qnary – Executive Reputation Management
• Bant Breen – Website
• Bant Breen – LinkedIn
• Bant Breen – Twitter
• Bant Breen – Facebook
• Bant Breen – Instagram

Bant Breen

Bant is a successful global marketing and media executive, entrepreneur, and academic.

Bant is the Executive Chairman and Founder of Qnary, an award-winning executive reputation management and talent branding solutions company. Qnary was listed as one of the 360 best companies by Entrepreneur magazine in 2018 and 2019.

In 2010 Bant was inducted into the AAF Advertising Hall of Achievement. In March 2020, Bant received his PhD from Blanquera – University Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain, in which he explored the perceptions of artificial intelligence by the advertising industry and contrasts those perceptions with the state of AI marketing development today. He lectures at the university on marketing, executive reputation, and artificial intelligence’s impact on media.

Bant started his career as a WPP Fellow and spent his advertising agency career in holding companies and operating unit leadership roles at Publicis, Dentsu, and IPG. He later became the Worldwide CEO of Interpublic Group’s global search and social media agency Reprise.

Bant continues to advice leading companies and individuals, offering media and marketing solutions via his advisory business LogicTension. Bant has worked and lived in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the US.

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