Correcting a Bad First Impression - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, FAAN

I have a nursing colleague who felt she had made a bad first impression on the new chairman of the board for her hospital system. She was presenting nursing quality information and acknowledged that she sometimes does take too long to reach her key points. The board chair cut her off ten minutes into her presentation and asked her to get to the point and report the data. She felt deeply embarrassed and did not have an opportunity to discuss it with the board chairman after the meeting. Her CEO was not happy with her either and was now requiring a preview of anything she planned to share with the board. She now wondered how she could correct this bad first impression.

Impressions Form Quickly
From her research on executive presence, Sylvia Hewitt has noted that flash judgments are made quickly within 250 milliseconds and once made, they tend to stick. Leaders with executive presence are able to capture and hold the attention of audiences with their communication keeping it straightforward and brief. They can successfully read a room, maintain eye contact and hit just the right tone to keep people engaged. Clearly, this professional colleague had not done this and now her leadership was in question. Is possible to recover from a bad first impression? In an excellent new book titled No One Understands You and What to Do About It, Harvard researcher Heidi Halvorson observes that it is possible to correct a negative first impression. Although first impressions are important, people can and do revise their opinions of others all the time. She offers the following two approaches to overcoming this challenge:

1. Bombard them with overwhelming evidence that the first impression is wrong.
Attention getting evidence that is contrary to an initial first impression is likely to get noticed according to Halvorson. In my colleague’s situation, her subsequent presentations to the board need to be on point and concise. A single presentation is unlikely to change anyone’s perspective but multiple presentations delivered in the right way could be the key to turning things around.
2. Make them want to revise their opinion about you. Halvorson observes that most people want to think of themselves as fair and unbiased. One of ways of helping people see this in themselves is in the power of labeling where you can actually harness their sense of fairness by complementing them on things like “their keen perception” or “unbiased assessment of problems”. This is something that the nurse leader could bring up to the board chair as part of a casual conversation. Offering to help them with a challenge or problem and demonstrating a good outcome is another good strategy. Halvorson suggests that sometimes being very upfront about the problem can help to clear the air – ex. “I know I got off to a bad start in your eyes with Honesty can be a game changer in any relationship and goes a long way toward changing someone’s perspective. If you use this approach, you need to be very careful not to repeat past mistakes.

Overcoming a bad impression requires that all future behavior be consistent with how you want to be perceived. It is easier to have a bad impression of people that we don’t know well or work with closely. Geographic proximity and working together on a team will often soften the bad impression that someone has of you because they will be better able to observe your strengths. Small, repeated interactions can help to rebuild trust. Recognize that no everyone will be willing to change their initial impression of you but it is worth trying to especially in situations where your relationship will be ongoing.

Read to Lead
Halvorson, H. No One Understand You and What to do about It. Boston: Harvard Press; 2015
Hewlitt, S.A. Executive Presence. New York: Harper Collins; 2014.