When Personal Crisis Hits: 5 Tips to Manage Your Professional Reputation

Life is wonderful!  Life is amazing. But sometimes, stuff happens. And when it does, our personal “bandwidth” – our capacity for handling life and work – is asked to stretch.

This is normal. After all, encountering crisis and disruption is part of life. We may suffer the death of a loved one or experience a divorce. We may be called upon to manage a life transition for an aging parent, or to deal with a teen in trouble. No one is immune. Managing this effectively is key to keeping you on track both personally and professionally.

You see, as others at work and in the community learn about your situation and sympathize, they also expect your performance and abilities will be compromised. They assume this, because they think it would certainly affect them in that way.

So, whether you are able to continue working at capacity, in their minds, others will tend to subtly discount your ability to lead and perform well. This can have dire consequences on current and future opportunities for you.

How do you avoid this? How do you care for yourself, the situation, and manage perception so that you maintain your professional reputation?

Here are 5 tips to manage your personal and professional life when crisis hits.

1. Take care of you, first. If you don’t take care of yourself first, by getting enough sleep, eating well, drinking water, and continuing to exercise, your capacity to manage stress, think clearly, and make decisions will be affected. It will also show through fatigue – the way you carry yourself, the energy with which you talk and approach situations. So make sure you are practicing some radical self-care.
2. Manage the crisis itself by getting a plan and proper support. Identify the outcome you want to solve the problem, then reverse-engineer into a plan of action. Then, intentionally identify your support system. How do you need and want to be supported? Do you need resources? Advice? A listening ear? Probably all three! Identify those people who can serve as support and reach out to them. Let them know what is happening, and that you would like to call on them for help as the need arises.
3. Don’t over-share with others. Keep your processing and the bulk of your sharing with your support system. A minimum of information on a “need-to-know” basis is key. Any sharing beyond this with colleagues, clients, and community is inappropriate and potentially harmful to your professional reputation in the eyes of others. In other words, no unnecessary details, and no ongoing updates with blow-by-blow developments as the situation progresses. A simple, “Thanks for asking, we are happy to have things settled down, now,” is helpful for curious minds.
4. Prioritize and trim your workload and outside activities. Time to get lean and mean. Take a morning to prioritize, triage, delegate, so that you identify those initiatives and activities that are critical and necessary, those that can be delegated, and those that can be put on hold. This will provide mental and emotional space to best support your performance – and others’ perception of it.
5. Lead a personal PR campaign. Announce to the world that you are on track and running! Deliberately connect with key stakeholders in your organization and outside in the community and subtly form an alliance with them to reinforce your viability. Identify those persons of influence and schedule time with them to catch up. What new trends or developments are occurring in your community, industry, or global marketplace that might affect them? Talk about a new project or the update on an existing one that might pique their interest, and share how it will positively impact. This takes a bit of planning, but you will have formed an unwitting circle of professional support to combat any doubts as to your current abilities.

And a final word on managing your personal situation and your work performance:  Schedule periodic reviews into your calendar until the situation is resolved. How are you doing? What needs to shift? It’s important to avoid allowing a situation to become chronic. If crisis mode is your “new normal,” ask for help.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.