Katarzyna Szulim: The Reputation Strategist
How Katarzyna Helps Brands and Leaders Build Reputation, Authority and Trust!
Today, being good at what you do is only part of the professional equation. Expertise needs to be communicated, understood and trusted. For entrepreneurs and professionals building their careers, the way they present themselves can influence whether people recognise their value, remember their expertise and ultimately choose to work with them.
Yet communication and reputation are still often treated as specialist subjects, something reserved for PR teams, large organisations or moments of crisis.
Katarzyna Szulim is working to change that.
Her focus today is on making people more aware of the role PR and reputation already play in their professional lives. Through her e-book, Global Authority, and her educational platform, she is bringing together her experience in communications with practical ideas around personal branding, authority and trust.
The idea grew from what she has observed throughout her career. Professionals can have valuable knowledge and strong expertise, but expertise alone does not always make someone visible or recognised as an authority. The same applies to organisations: a good product or service does not automatically create a strong reputation. People need to understand what a person or business stands for, what value it offers and whether it can be trusted.
For Katarzyna Szulim, this is where greater awareness can make a difference. People do not necessarily need to become PR professionals, but understanding how communication influences perception can help them make better decisions about how they present themselves and their work.
Her decision to focus on education is rooted in a career that has given her an unusually broad view of communication.
Katarzyna began in journalism, where she learned how information is created, assessed and presented to an audience. She later moved into communications and PR, experiencing the other side of the process and working with organisations to shape their communication and relationships with the media and stakeholders.
In 2008, she founded Commfort Safety. Over the years, her work with Polish and international organisations across sectors including electromobility, IT, healthcare and education exposed her to different business environments, audiences and communication challenges. Those experiences have formed the perspective she brings to her work today.
After more than two decades in the profession, she has seen how quickly the communication environment can change, and how consistently certain principles remain important: clarity, credibility, authenticity, trust and an understanding of the people receiving the message.
That knowledge now extends beyond traditional client work. Through Global Authority and her educational platform, Katarzyna is creating a space where professionals can explore how authority is built, how personal brands develop and why reputation deserves attention before it becomes a problem.
Her message is not about turning every professional into a communications specialist. It is about helping people recognise something that is already happening around them: whether consciously or not, they are communicating, shaping perceptions and building a reputation every day. And for organisations, the consequences of that reputation become particularly visible when circumstances become difficult. Preparing for that moment, Katarzyna believes, starts long before a crisis arrives.
What a Company Should Do on its Worst Day
When a company is facing the worst day in its history, Katarzyna’s first rule is simple: do not panic and do not pretend the problem does not exist. The priority in a crisis is to establish the facts quickly: what happened, what is known, what remains unknown, who is responsible for communication and who is making the decisions.
For Szulim, one of the biggest mistakes organisations make in such situations is silence or an attempt to cover up the problem with another piece of information. People do not always expect immediate answers to every question, but they do expect honesty and a sense that the organisation is in control of the situation.
A crisis is also a test of leadership. It shows whether an organisation has procedures in place and whether it understands that reputation cannot be built only when a problem appears.
That is why, for Katarzyna, crisis communication begins long before the crisis.
Entering a New Industry Starts with Listening
Katarzyna does not approach a new industry with a ready-made formula. She starts by listening and getting to know the business. She believes every sector has its own characteristics, language, regulations, stakeholders and reputational sensitivities. Before developing a communication strategy, she needs to understand the product, the business model, the risks and the company’s ambitions.
At the same time, some things never change: a clearly defined objective, knowing the audience, authenticity, consistency and the ability to respond to change.
Working across different industries has taught Katarzyna Szulim that good PR is not about knowing one particular sector inside out. It is about being able to quickly understand a new reality. That ability to understand people and situations also explains why empathy and intuition have become important parts of her approach to business.
Why Intuition Belongs Alongside the Numbers
Szulim does not see intuition and data as opposites. She believes the best decisions are made when the two are combined. Data tells us what has happened, while analytics help evaluate the effectiveness of actions. Intuition, on the other hand, often allows people to notice something that is not yet visible in the numbers.
In PR, where the work involves people, emotions and reputation, empathy becomes a very practical business tool for Katarzyna. It helps her understand how a situation will be perceived by an employee, a customer, a journalist or a business partner.
Results are still important. Reach, reactions, media coverage, quality of exposure and the achievement of objectives all have to be considered. Yet numbers without an understanding of people can lead to decisions that look statistically very good but are communicatively very weak. This understanding of people has also formed another area of Katarzyna’s work: personal branding and the question of how professionals establish themselves as trusted authorities.
Authority Begins with a Question
As the author of Global Authority and the creator of a programme around personal branding, Katarzyna has spent considerable time examining what makes a professional recognised as an authority.
For her, the starting point is one fundamental question: what does a person want to be known for?
Many people begin with publishing content. Katarzyna believes they should start earlier, with strategy. First, they need to define their area of expertise, their value, their audience, and the position they want to occupy.
A strong personal brand is not decoration. It is a system that helps the right people understand a person’s value more quickly.
Her work around these ideas extends into both her e-book, Global Authority, and her educational platform, where she develops her approach to personal branding, authority and communication.
- Explore the Global Authority e-book
Technology and AI are now part of this equation as well. They can help professionals scale their presence and create communication systems, but technology cannot replace the human being. Authority is still built through experience, credibility, and trust.
Her belief in the importance of human qualities also informs the way she approaches leadership, particularly her experience as a woman building a company in a competitive industry.
Building Leadership without Waiting for Permission
For Katarzyna Szulim, the biggest challenge she has faced as a woman in business was not one particular situation. It was the need to continually prove her value in a constantly changing business environment.
Rather than focusing exclusively on barriers, she believes women should consistently build their expertise, relationships and position.
Her message to women is simple: they should not wait for someone to give them permission to become a leader.
She encourages women to invest in knowledge, learn how to negotiate, build their network and speak about their achievements without fear. They also do not have to copy a male model of leadership. Empathy, intuition, the ability to build relationships, and the ability to listen are powerful business competencies.
When Katarzyna speaks about the people who shaped her own outlook, she gives credit to her parents. They have always been her greatest mentors and gave her the belief that many things are possible. That belief in human capability now sits alongside another major change in the communications industry: the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
Learning to Work with AI Without Losing the Human Voice
Projecting forward to the next 5 years, Katarzyna sees one technology having the greatest impact on PR: artificial intelligence.
She does not see AI as a threat to people, but as a tool that can fundamentally transform the way professionals work. AI already allows teams to analyse enormous amounts of information, support content creation, monitor reputation and automate certain processes.
In Global Authority, Katarzyna devotes considerable attention to the concept of the digital twin, communication automation and the relationship between humans and AI.
There is, however, one condition she considers essential: professionals must not give AI their own voice.
Technology can help people become faster and more efficient, while authenticity, experience, empathy and responsibility still belong to the human being. For Katarzyna, that means professionals need to do two things at the same time: learn how to work with AI while developing the competencies AI cannot replace, including critical thinking, relationships, intuition, leadership and responsibility. The same principle brings her thinking back to where her career has always been rooted: communication as a responsibility of leadership.
Reputation Should be Built Before it is Needed
If Katarzyna could leave one message with every CEO about communication and leadership, she would ask them to stop treating communication as an addition to the business. Communication is part of leadership.
A company can have the best product, the best people and an excellent financial strategy, but if it cannot clearly tell the world who it is, why it does what it does and what value it creates, someone else will tell that story for it.
Every decision is also a form of communication. The way a company treats its employees, responds to a crisis, communicates with customers, or engages with business partners all builds reputation.
For Szulim, the lesson is therefore straightforward: CEOs need to take care of their reputation before they need it. When a crisis comes, they are not starting to build trust. They are relying on the trust they built beforehand.
And as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly involved in how organisations communicate, she has one final piece of advice for leaders: they should start taking care of their PR before AI algorithms do it for them.
