Today a former student called and was upset that her employer was bad-mouthing a former employee, the students’ close friend, to one of her clients. The students’ initial feeling was to confront her boss. Its only natural to fight back when we or our friends are attacked. She then thought about telling other people what she had witnessed, thus trying to correct the information and prove to others what a jerk she worked for. Instead, she held her breathe for 24 hours and came to the realization that her boss, through his own actions had already done more harm to his own reputation by being incredibly negative and vindictive than she could ever do. In fact, had she reacted on her first instincts, she would have either lost her job or else lowered her own reputation by being sucked into a childish game of “he-said, she-said.” Instead, she now has her job and reputation in tact, and has time to begin looking for the employer for whom she wants to work.
Real world: We can’t control what others say about us or our clients. It’s a free country and regardless of how we feel about it, unless we can prove intentional malice or intentional misrepresentation of the facts, we have very little recourse. We each can however choose how we will react.
We can fight back by hurling insults and false accusations at the aggressor. This will most likely lead to an escalation of insults and make us look unprofessional and petty in the public eye.
We can choose to throw a little gasoline on the fire by showing and/or telling everyone we can about how mistreated we were. Although we may garner some sympathy, we have also identified ourselves as whiners and complainers. Had we chosen not to act at all, most of the people we told would never have seen or heard the information that we now hope they don’t believe. Right or wrong, by ”protesting too loudly” we have now not only spread the insult, but have made those we told wonder if there might be some grain of truth to it.
Finally, we can accept the fact that the person may have been blowing off steam, might have a real grievance, or might just be a very negative person. (Remember the more negative a person is, the less people listen to or believe anything they say.) Instead we can choose to bury the insult with a flurry of positive, contradictory evidence thus making the negative seem more unreliable and much more difficult to locate. This is one of the strategies that is making more and more companies require regular blogging from their PR and marketing departments, as well as their top executives, and in some cases, from each of their employees.
You, or your client, may not be able to control all the information that is out there, but you certainly have the power to make sure that there is a great deal more positive information than negative information available for the world to see. By using blogs, twitter, FB, etc., you have the power to flood the information highway with whatever information you want the world to see. You may still have the occasional basher, but with a continuous outpouring of positive messages, you can relegate their disparaging rants to the 6th page of a Google search where no one will ever see them.
You have the power to be a negative, immature child or to be a competent, positive professional. It is up to you to determine which the world will see.
