What to Do When You've Made a Bad Impression

When you get off on the wrong foot with a new colleague, is there any way to recover? As I discuss in my book, Stand Out, it’s essential to build a strong network to ensure your ideas can gain traction and be heard. Making a bad first impression doesn’t have to be fatal, and it’s worth the effort to overcome it if you need to get the person on your team. Psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of the new No One Understands You and What to Do About It, recently shared two research-based strategies with me about how to do it.

• Bombard them with contrary information. Let’s say your new boss is irritated because you’ve been late to work frequently. If you want to overcome the reputation of being late and irresponsible, Halvorson suggests that you should “bombard them with a lot of evidence to suggest that their first impression of you was wrong. It can’t be subtle…If you come into work on time once, that’s not going to do anything. That’s just going to be [seen as] an anomaly. What you have to do is be early and be early for weeks. You need to make the evidence that you’ve changed, or that you’re not who they think you are, abundant and eye catching. If you just keep that up for a while, eventually people will change their opinion of you.”
• Arrange a joint work project. The problem with the former strategy, of course, is that it can take a long time. If you’d like to hack the process, says Halvorson, create an opportunity for you to work directly with your colleague and “make your outcomes dependent on one another’s…As soon as something that is going to happen in our world depends on another person, we’re automatically and very unconsciously interested in being really right about that person – being able to predict them and understand them accurately.”  If you need to collaborate on, say, writing a report or arranging an event, that will force them to take a second look at you and re-evaluate their first impression.

It’s frustrating when we feel misunderstood by a colleague. A natural impulse might be to write them off, but if the relationship is important to your professional future, it may well be worth the effort to reshape their opinion. Steadily showing them a different side of you – coming in to work early every day for weeks, or consistently expressing praise rather than complaints to your team members – can make a big impact. And setting up a joint work project with a colleague with whom you have a strained relationship might not be everyone’s favorite option, Halvorson admits. But the results can be dramatic. “It’s actually the single best way to get people to revise their opinion of you,” she says.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.