Fighting Back! Defending Your Reputation and Your Work

Growing up we’re taught to be nice, turn the other cheek, and that bad or mean people eventually get their come-up-ins. Well… maybe, but more often they don’t. And when it comes to office politics or when your career’s on the line, it’s more important than ever to get the facts out anyway you can.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean of executive programs at the Yale School of Management, told me that most people have the tendency to shut up and lay low when they’re attacked at work. That’s a mistake, he says.

“Beyond our health and the health of our family, there isn’t much worth more to us than our reputations,” he said in an interview I did with him.

In “How to recover after a colossal mistake,” Sonnenfeld told me that when your reputation is under attack, you should respond immediately, thoroughly, and rationally.

So I took it to heart and did just that when I ran up against a nearly fatal career mistake two weeks ago.

I wrote and published an article in NASFAA’s Today’s News, a daily news pub with a subscription base of over 13,000. As it turns out, a portion of my article was missing some vital information and to industry insiders it appeared that I had left it out on purpose, to further a very divisive political cause.

The truth was that I took my information from a legislator’s letter which was only partially published on his website that morning. The fault was with the legislator’s staff, who fixed the problem after I had gone out with my article.

By 11:00 AM my email was lighting up with demands for explanations of why my article missing information. By 12:30 the media had picked up on it and one news source was demanding an explanation of why I had omitted/edited portions of a Senator’s letter.

I felt like slinking away and I began second guessing myself.

“Did I just do a sloppy job and missed that portion of his letter?” I thought.

Still, I held firm that portions of the letter - which were clearly visible on his website now - were not there earlier when I wrote the article. By early afternoon my company was slowly moving into damage control mode and it appeared that I was guilty… until one reporter got a hold of the legislator’s staff who admitted the mistake was theirs.

SALVATION!

While I doubt I would have been fired (because I had built up a lot of credibility with my company before this incident), I certainly would have lost a lot of credibility - both in the company and the higher education community - had I conceded to a screw up like that before all of the facts were out on the table.

My article in The Greentree Gazette gives five steps to recovering from a huge screw-up: (1) Preemptively build credibility, (2) Never agree to silence, (3) Fight back, (4) Seek the help of others, and (5) Follow up contrition with action.