A Resume Has Never Told Me If I Can Trust Someone

Here’s something I’ve learned from a year of building a fractional leadership community: the resume is the least interesting thing about the person.

I don’t mean that dismissively. The resume matters. Experience matters. What someone has actually done in organizations, the kinds of problems they’ve solved, the scope they’ve operated at, that all matters. I look at it.

But it doesn’t tell me what I actually need to know before I’m going to bring someone into a client’s business. It doesn’t tell me how they handle a room that doesn’t trust them yet. It doesn’t tell me how they talk about failure. It doesn’t tell me if they’re the kind of person who makes you feel like you’re the only one in the conversation, or the kind who’s already thinking about the next meeting.

Those things matter more.

Fractional leadership works differently than a hire. When you bring in a fractional executive, you’re asking someone to walk into your company, understand what’s going on in a fraction of the time a full-time hire would have, earn the trust of your people quickly, and do real work in the middle of all of that. That’s a high-trust, high-exposure situation from day one.

Which means the thing you’re really evaluating isn’t credentials. It’s character. It’s fit. It’s whether the person sitting across from you is someone your team is going to open up to, or close off from.

And you genuinely can’t tell that from a PDF.

Last fall, I had an idea that started small and grew into something I’m really proud of.

I wanted to get a group of Cincinnati’s best fractional leaders together, not to network, not to hand out business cards, but to actually talk. On camera. The way people talk when they’re being real with each other.

We booked Cincinnati Podcast Studio for a day. We built five panel conversations around themes that matter in this work: trust, leadership, mistakes and comebacks, what founders get wrong, why this work is worth doing. We brought in 17 leaders who I think represent something genuinely special about the fractional community in this city.

And we just let them talk.

What came out of it was something I didn’t fully expect. Not just good content. Actual relationship. You could watch these leaders, some of whom had never met, start to see each other clearly. Start to trust each other. Start to say the honest things instead of the polished things.

I think that happened because they were talking about real stuff. Not their titles. Not their wins. What they actually believe. What they’ve learned the hard way. What they care about.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about fractional leaders who do this work well: they invest in each other.

Not in a transactional way. Not “I’ll refer you if you refer me.” In a real way. They show up for each other’s questions. They make introductions because they think it’s the right thing, not because there’s something in it for them. They’re honest with each other about what’s working and what isn’t.

That matters because fractional work can be isolating. You move in and out of companies. You’re rarely someone’s permanent team member. You don’t always have a built-in peer group the way a full-time leadership team does.

When fractional leaders actually know each other, that changes. The referrals get better because they’re grounded in real knowledge, not just a LinkedIn connection. The support gets better. The community gets better.

I wanted Cincy Voices to help build that. I think it did.

After the event, we built something out of the footage.

It’s a site called Cincy Voices, and it’s live now at voices.workwithmean.ing.

What you’ll find there is 17 fractional leaders, each with their own profile page and video clips from the event. Not highlight reels. Not testimonials. Real moments from real conversations where they’re answering hard questions and being honest about what they’ve learned.

You can browse by leader. You can browse by topic. You can watch a two-minute clip of someone talking about the hardest decision they’ve ever made in a company, and you’ll walk away knowing something real about them.

That’s what I wanted to build. Not a directory. Not a database. Something that actually lets you get to know someone before you ever reach out.

Because I think that’s what makes the first call different. If you’ve seen someone be vulnerable on camera about something that didn’t go right, and you still want to talk to them, you’re already starting from a different place. You’re not evaluating from scratch. You’re building on something.

If you’re a business owner trying to figure out what kind of leadership support you might need, I’d love for you to spend twenty minutes on that site. Just browse. Watch a few clips. See if anyone resonates.

And if you’re a fractional leader who doesn’t know some of the people on there, I’d love for you to look at your peers. These are your people. You might want to know them.

That’s kind of the whole point.

The relationships that make fractional work succeed aren’t just between the leader and the client. They’re in the community. They’re built over time, through honesty, through showing up for each other, through knowing who people actually are.

I built Cincy Voices hoping to be a small part of that. I think it might be.

Go take a look: voices.workwithmean.ing