So…You’ve Been Canceled at Work. How to Recover Your Professional Brand

What happens when you make a mistake at work, and everyone knows it? Whether a comment was taken the wrong way, an unfiltered moment in a meeting, or showing up unprepared, reputational hits can feel career-ending. In this episode, we talk about processing, recovering, and cleaning it up, without losing yourself in the fallout.

You’ll learn:

• How to handle the awkward “in-between” after a professional misstep
• Strategies to take ownership without spiraling into shame or defensiveness
• How your Leadership Identity can help you reconnect with your values, strengths, and next move
• 4 Tips to recover
  
  

Mentioned on the Show:  Access the Make Your Power Move Assessment and Program, for $47.  Designed to help you clarify your Leadership Identity, understand why it matters, and learn how to navigate your career authentically and confidently.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Workplace Cancelation
• 1:13 Process Your Emotions First
• 3:57 Recovering from an Aggressive Exchange
• 5:59 When You Say Something Inappropriate
• 7:19 Bouncing Back from Being Unprepared
• 9:20 Tools for Leadership Identity Recovery
• 11:04 Reflection and Moving Forward

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, welcome back to the Career Refresh. I am your host, jill Griffin. This is the place where we are exploring reinvention, leadership, career strategy, and today I want to talk about high achievers good human beings who usually get it right until they don't. Yes, we are going to talk about what happens when you are canceled at work. Ready, let's get into it. Maybe you said something a little off, or there was a tense exchange with someone above you on the org chart, or maybe you blew it in a meeting and now you're being quietly benched, or so it feels that way. Whatever the reason, the outcome feels the same. You're in that awkward in-between feeling and you're not fired, but you're not exactly in favor either, and you're feeling it and we're just going to say, for this episode, whether it's true or not, meaning that you're feeling it. We're going to believe that for you. It's true that you are feeling that you are now on the sort of a canceled list, the benched list. You're on the outskirts, okay. So let's talk about how to process it, how to recover for it and when we need to clean it up. So first, what I want you to think about is the process. Your nervous system is going to be on very high alert and you may be replaying that moment over and over again, wondering who saw it. If they're thinking, is it gossip happening, it's fixable. I just want you to breathe and, before you perform an apology or send a frantic follow-up email that feels graspy and clingy, I just want you to pause right. And why do I want you to do this? Because I want you to really think about what did you intend with the action, inaction, reaction and was it received? Get clear on what actually happened and what your role is in this. This might be a time to like grab pen and paper, open your notes app and actually write down versus just continuing to think about it through your head. And I want you to get clear on what you think happened. And I'm going to ask you to resist the urge to outsource the feedback. Right, there's a.

Speaker 1: 2:07

We want to start asking people what they think. Maybe our friend, professionally, that might've been there, or what do they think. I don't want you to go fishing for everyone's opinion. However, if there is someone you trust who is very neutral and maybe was there that might be a way to go about getting some different perspective on this, but this is not someone who's going to tell you what you want to hear. This is someone who's going to help you get perspective on the situation. This is not a defense tour. This is not time to be seeding out what you want people to be telling others. Right, we're not doing this. This is not getting them to like, agree with you so that they can help you clean it up. That's not what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 2:46

This is about owning your humanity without spiraling into shame or guilt or the. However it's going to show up for you, the I'm not worthies, right? So shame is the. Sometimes I look at it as like. It's the moment in which you see yourself or the incident through the eyes of someone else and you're like oh my God, they think blah, blah, blah about me, right? That's the way I would think about shame.

Speaker 1: 3:11

Brene Brown often defines shame as the belief that something is inherently wrong with you, making you unworthy of connection or love or the project right? The difference just from guilt because guilt is also out there too is that the key difference is the focus. Shame is focused on you being wrong, or you being unworthy, or that you're bad, whereas Guilt is more about the behavior that you did. The behavior is wrong or bad or dumb, or insert adjective. So while you can't rewrite what happened, you can decide what you're going to do next. So the next thing I want you to do after your pause is I want you to recover with intention. So I'm going to give you a few real life examples and how people in these examples recovered and how they moved forward. So we're going to break down different scenarios. The first scenario is that there was an aggressive exchange, so maybe a senior exec, you feel like they came at you but you didn't back down and maybe you even finished it. Can I see anyone hand raise, hand raise, right? So now you're wondering if you went too far.

Speaker 1: 4:25

And recently a client shared how they felt personally attacked by an executive leader and I have their permission to talk about this and this leader was pointing out an issue that was continuing to happen. So, while this client understood that this was a problem, it was nuanced. So when the executive was asking closed-ended questions, limiting the response to simple, often binary choices like yes, no, true, false, multiple choice either, or really backing my client into a corner, the client again, they felt that this was nuanced. It wasn't as easy as a yes or no. So as the pressure was ranking up, so did my client's response. So as the executive was raising their voice and really backing them into a corner, so was my client. So I want you to think like Jack Nicholson, few Good Men, that famous court scene where Jack yells you can't handle the truth. Pretty much how my client responded Whoops.

Speaker 1: 5:23

So here's what we did. We didn't wait, we didn't hide, we waited Again. We needed to pause, we waited enough. So the blood pressure got back to normal. But then we addressed it. They reached out. They wrote an email that said the exchange got heated and I've reflected on my part and how I could have handled it differently. My intent was clarity, not conflict, simple, direct. The executive did not apologize we didn't expect them to but he was able to clear the air and move forward. This is not groveling. This is about leadership. This is about taking accountability and moving forward.

Speaker 1: 5:55

So there's one scenario, another scenario, this one's about me. You said something inappropriate. It was a joke that was missed, a comment that crossed the line, criticism that leaked out sideways. Oh Lord, there was a time when I knew that I was going to be speaking to a new senior leader from the London office and at the time I was always traveling. I was on the road. My husband and I rarely saw each other, maybe once, twice a week if we were lucky. So when this leader asked what I did over the weekend, I said I had a conjugal visit with my husband. Like WTF, who am I? I don't even know what that came from. Well, actually I do know where it came from, because at the time there was a BBC show called Prisoner's Wives and everyone was talking about it, and because there was the London connection, it probably in my brain just made it click. I was mortified and it got super awkward. So it's not about judging, it was not about joking your way out of it. It was really being clear and humble and I said something like oof, I see how that landed. I'm sorry. It wasn't my intention to cause any discomfort and I'm committed to doing better. Simple, easy, moved on. I owned it and then made a promise to do better. Another scenario was you weren't prepared and it showed, and now you're feeling you froze, you fumbled and now you're feeling like you're being left out of things.

Speaker 1: 7:19

There was a time in my career, very early on, where I was often referred to as a rock star and I was given an opportunity to build and design an innovation day, a thought leadership day. I wrote the hook, I pitched top speakers and journalists and authors and I designed a thought leadership event. And then you know what I did. I didn't think that I would be doing the opener for the event. I kept putting myself in the junior box and when the executive leader thought that I was going to open it and I was going to look like a champ, I didn't think that that was going to be me. I'm used to the executive leader taking the opening, them taking the credit, showing that this is what they put together and taking that win.

Speaker 1: 8:03

At this point, just to a little bit of my defense at this point, I had ghostwritten articles for leaders. I had provided quotes in their voice for the Wall Street Journal and various trade magazines. I wrote copy for the earnings call and someone else reported it. So I just assumed that was going to continue. I'm just the thought person who's putting things out there and someone else is going to be the front person. But except that in this case they were giving me the chance to lead the whole thing, oof gosh. So I quickly welcomed. Everyone set the tone. Definitely not my best work, but it was a great lesson in always being prepared. The day ultimately went fantastic and I will tell you, my opening sucked and I felt it. I felt like uh-oh, they gave me a chance and I blew it. So what did I do? I dressed it, just said clearly I wasn't my best, that was on me and I've already taken steps to ensure that that will never happen again. And then I over-delivered consistently, quietly, confidently, did it until I got back into you know, went back to neutrality and eventually went back up to that status.

Speaker 1: 9:11

These are real world scenarios that happen that I hear people talk about often and your reputation recovery is really showing about who you're going to be next. You show up on time, prepared, you show up with emotional intelligence, there's no side comments, there's no gossip, you don't blame. There are two books I also find really helpful if you're in this experience. One is Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, and this is really helpful if you're working through sort of the vulnerability and some of that shame that may happen with leadership missteps. And then the second is Presence by Amy Cuddy, and that's offering you tools for regaining confidence with yourself and trust both internally and externally, after a public embarrassment or failure.

Speaker 1: 9:52

But listen, there's also something else you can do, and if you feel like you've lost your footing or you're questioning who you are as a leader, I want you to go back and think about who you are as a leader and what I call leadership identity this is the work that I often do with clients is when everything feels scrambled and this is not about your title or your resume. It's about your values, your strengths, your voice and how you lead. Even when the spotlight feels a little bit shaky, it's hitting that reset button. It's coming back and reconnecting with all the amazing bits of you because they're still there, even after a stumble. And if that's something you need, if that's something that you're interested in, I'm going to put the information in the show notes because I have built a tool and a guidebook. It's an assessment that will take you through this. I'm going to drop that. The exact link in the show notes is on my website.

Speaker 1: 10:40

But this is the strategic, practical dare I say, a little bit of a wink and a smile way to reconnect with who you are. It is designed to get you back in alignment when you feel like you weren't necessarily at your best right. So you may not recover the relationship. You may not always be forgiven and that's going to be painful. But what you can recover is your sense of self. You can work through that guilt, that some shame, without making it part of your identity. And, to recap, I want you to name the feeling. I want you to name it. I don't want you to catastrophize right. Yes, it's possible to co-mingle failure with your success.

Speaker 1: 11:17

One moment in your career does not cancel. It's not all or nothing. Talk to someone safe, get perspective. This might be a mentor or coach, keeping it neutral. This is not finding a hype squad. This is really talking to someone who will help you through this with truth and kindness. And I want you to be gentle on yourself and know that you're allowed to be long, you're allowed to repair, you're allowed to grow. And getting canceled doesn't mean it's forever. It just means it's a moment of reflection and recalibration. I want you to be thinking about so from this place. Where do I want to go and who do I want to be next? All right, friends, I want to hear from you. Have you been canceled? How did you work through it? You can email me at hello at Jill Griffin coachingcom and, as always, stay intentional, be kind and do the work. All right, I'll see you next time.