Two years ago you had a bad stretch. You missed a couple of dates, or you were sharp with someone in a review, or you disappeared into a problem for three weeks and nobody could get an answer out of you. You heard about it, you took it seriously, and you fixed it. You genuinely did.
And it is still in your review. Still in the offhand comment someone makes in a planning meeting. Still the thing your manager gently raises as an area to keep working on.
This is one of the more disheartening things in a working life, and it is worth understanding before you react to it, because the temptation is to argue, and arguing is the one move that reliably makes it worse.
Reputations lag behind behaviour by about a year, sometimes more. That is not people being unfair. It is how impressions work. Somebody formed a view during a period when it was accurate, filed it, and has not had a reason to open the file since. Worse, the impression gets retold. The person repeating it in a calibration meeting may never have worked with you at all.
You do not fix a stale impression with an argument. You fix it with evidence somebody else can see and a small amount of patience.
Make the new behaviour leave a trace. If the old note was about dates, the dates you now hit should be visible in writing, in the channel, where they can be scrolled back through. If it was about going quiet, the updates you now send are the proof. Unobserved improvement does not update anyone.
Say it once, without heat, to the person carrying the story. That was true in the year we shipped the reporting work, and I have worked hard on it since. Here is what I do differently now. Once. Repeating it turns you into the person who talks about it.
Find one witness. Someone who works with you weekly and will say, in a room you are not in, that it is old news. That sentence from a third party outweighs anything you can say about yourself.
And when you carry a note about somebody else, put a date on it. Most of them expire.
– Asael Shinder
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