Help! They’re Wrecking My Reputation!
“I think I misread the situation.”
That’s what a client said while telling me about tackling a colleague regarding some inappropriate comments he’d made during a meeting. She’d been very careful to frame her feedback, basing it around her personal experience, delivering it in a friendly message, sent only to him.
His response was to complain to HR, and their response was to have ‘a quiet word’ with her. (My response was: “For f***’s sake! You were the one in the right! So why are you getting the flack?!?!?”)
As our conversation progressed, we talked about the frustration that’s felt when someone is saying things about you behind closed doors, which could be unfairly wrecking your reputation – particularly with colleagues or clients. But then I shared with her a question I ask myself in these situations:
What’s the reputation of the person wrecking my reputation?
Because when you take that into consideration, you often find that the weight of what they’re saying about you is nowhere near as powerful as you’re giving it credit for.
A case in point
A few years back, I was approached by a woman following one of my presentations. She wanted my opinion about how best to handle a situation where she had recently taken on a new role, leading a new team, reporting to a new boss who, whenever she wasn’t in the room, would say wholly negative and derogatory things about her. (She knew this because members of her team had brought it to her attention.)
The woman told me she’d tackled her boss to insist he stop saying the remarks, but like King Canute getting his feet wet from the tide, it had zero effect. She then tried taking the matter up with her boss’s boss, who had listened but done that politically correct but useless thing of remaining entirely non-committal.
She was at a loss about what to do, highly stressed and fearing that if her boss kept repeating his comments to all and sundry, her reputation would be in the doghouse.
But then I asked her, “What’s this guy’s reputation like?” She replied that he was known for being a difficult person who was always being negative and putting people down, but that he’d been there a long time so people had just learnt to work with him.
That changed the game
Although someone with a strong, credible reputation will be perceived as having views that are strong and credible, someone with a weak, unreliable reputation will be perceived as having views that are weak and unreliable – or at the very least questionable in their truth.
The fact that this woman’s team were the ones who had told her what was going on showed they had already discounted what her boss had said. (If they’d agreed with his views they’d have simply regurgitated his comments behind her back.) And the fact her boss’s boss chose not to comment may well signal that she was already acutely aware of this man’s rap sheet. (She certainly didn’t stick up for his actions.)
Which doesn’t make what he was doing right, but it does take some sting out of the tail.
Here’s what to do
The main piece of advice I gave the woman was to follow what the celebrities do when a scandal hits. They (or at least their PR agency) generate loads of positive press to counter the bad stuff, pushing the skeletons further down the Google searches and back into their closet.
Her equivalent was to be seen by the right people doing the right things, providing evidence to counter his claims, while putting across positive messages about her personal brand. I also suggested she enlist the help of her team, asking them to correct any misconceptions when they heard them.
It might not stop the tide of rubbish this guy was spewing, but it would ensure he made much smaller waves.
If you’ve been in a position where someone was attempting to wreck your reputation, what did you do? Do you have any other advice that would help? I’d love it if you’d share it. Thank you!
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