Truth 15. Your career can recover from an engagement hit

The success record of your career path over time is tracked in two ways. The first is your resumé. The second is your reputation. Although it’s definitely not advised to fake your resumé, it’s done all the time. Even famously. And those who are found out seem to be tripped up for only a split second. Then they move on.

It’s not so easy to fake your reputation. When you screw up in a big way as a manager, word is going to get around. Let’s face it. People like to talk. And they especially like to forewarn. So when people say, “Your reputation precedes you,” they’re not kidding.

But you’re also human. So you’re going to make leadership mistakes. When you’re a manager, you are on a steep learning curve that never seems to end. The higher up you go, the more you’ll have people at the receiving end of the consequences of your errors. And those people will talk.

Can you ever recover? Yes. (While this book was being written, a high-profile CEO resigned after it was revealed that he lied on his resumé. Was his future ruined? Seems not. He was named CEO of another high-profile company the same week his replacement in the previous company was announced. If he can bounce back, surely the odds are in your favor. I mean, really, how bad can it be?)

The most powerful things that you can do... take little energy, cost nothing, and have amazing impact.

You can survive a star-crossed incident where you violated an engagement value that’s cherished by your people. You will need to handle the upcoming months, even years, very carefully, though. That will give your track record of trustworthiness the chance to overrun and outlast the regrettable glitch. Fortunately, the most powerful things that you can do over that time take little energy, cost nothing, and have amazing impact.

“If you have a damaged reputation and people have suspicions about you, the most effective way to disarm any negative expectations that people will have about you is to be viewed as an absolutely fabulous listener,” says Ian Ziskin, executive coach and president of EXec EXcel Group, a NYC-based talent management consulting firm.

“Be a good listener and look for opportunities to address some of the things that you hear about. Your track record for listening to your people and removing their roadblocks will soon be the word that gets around.”

This is not about buying votes through good works. You are actively demonstrating your commitment to restoring a tightly woven fabric of trust in your time and reliability in your personal brand as leader.

Here’s how you can shore up that slightly eroded trust: With your team, identify two or three critical initiatives that the entire group can take on over the next 6 months. Give them something they can focus on that will give them immense satisfaction as a group and that they must depend on each other—as well as you—to achieve. This way you are restoring a culture of team mutual dependability, while you’re giving them something more satisfying and forward moving to concentrate on.

While your team selects and focuses on goals that can be achieved only when the entire group (including you) works together, also commit to personal development goals with each one of your employees. At least once a quarter, hold one-on-one meetings with your direct reports to explore and agree on what skill development goals they can work to achieve over the next 3 months. Increasingly, engagement research is showing that individual contributors recognize that they are solely responsible for their careers and future. So your people are more focused on how their hours at work are building their prospects than they are on that thing you did to violate their trust.

As you grow in your own career, you will have errors in judgment. (If you’re not making mistakes now and then, you’re not growing.) Your heart will have been in the right place, and it will have been an innocent mistake. But as much as it will be a learning experience for you, it won’t be a mere classroom exercise for your people. It will affect your people in very real ways.

You’ll just have to let the passage of time and the accumulation of positive events swing your career narrative away from the dings and toward a legacy of true engagement.