How do you repair a bad first impression?

Resetting after a shaky first meeting is something every professional faces. A difficult first impression doesn’t have to be permanent.

The community’s reflections highlight that repair comes from small, intentional actions:

• Pause and check whether the “bad impression” is real or self-imposed.
• Reconnect with transparency and curiosity.
• Focus on meaningful, visible progress.
• Listen deeply to understand goals and context.
• Build trust through consistent behaviour over time.

We don’t always get the start we want. Even seasoned professionals can stumble in new environments - moving too quickly, misreading tone, or missing the lateral relationships that quietly shape outcomes.

In my experience, a bad first impression isn’t the end of the story. But it does take deliberate effort to put things right - with trust rebuilt one interaction at a time.

I’ve captured some reflections on how to reset, reconnect, and rebuild credibility when the start hasn’t gone to plan.

The early days of any stakeholder interaction carry weight. But what served you well in a previous context may be the very thing that undermines you in a new one. Operating at pace, or too slowly, without understanding the cultural, political, or operational landscape can create distance or even distrust.

Equally, neglecting to invest in relationships before they’re tested, particularly laterally, can lead to a sense that interactions are transactional. When stakeholders feel unseen, they may hold back the institutional knowledge or context you need to succeed. And without those trusted guides, the risk of misreading tone or priority grows.

Then there’s the pressure to add value fast. Recommending an overly complex or costly solution, or overpromising without clarity, can set the wrong tone entirely. If your audience doesn’t see you as someone who enables strategy and mitigates risk in practical terms, they may stop bringing you into the conversation altogether.

So, how can you put things right by rebuilding credibility and trust?

1. Pause and reset. If you sense things are off, don’t barrel ahead. Revisit key conversations. Clarify your intentions. And signal where your approach is evolving. This isn’t a self-critique - this is transparency and humility.
2. Invest in curiosity. Listening is a powerful trust builder. Ask thoughtful questions. Understand what your stakeholders are trying to achieve, and where they feel exposed. People remember when you make space for their goals, rather than just your own.
3. Make progress where it matters. If you're unsure where to focus, ask: “So what?” Not every win will make an impact, but targeted outcomes, delivered quickly in areas your stakeholders care about, can shift perception more powerfully than any apology.
4. Reconnect with intention. Rebuilding a strained dynamic often starts one conversation at a time. Reach out. Acknowledge the distance. Highlight what you value and what you’re hoping to achieve. Shared purpose is easier to find when the invitation feels personal.
5. Be consistent. Trust rarely hinges on a single moment. It’s built through steady delivery, listening thoughtfully, and the visible alignment of words and actions. Small signals, repeated over time, repair more than grand gestures.

Ultimately, first impressions matter, but they don’t define you. Leadership means making the effort to course correct in service of connection, clarity, and shared success. A reset is a positive act and will often go a long way to rebuilding credibility and trust.

I suppose the first thing that I’d do is to ask myself: did I really make a bad first impression? As lawyers, we’re wired/trained to be perfectionists and so, in reality, that first impression may not have been as bad (or bad at all) as first thought.

If it was, though, here are some practical steps you could take:

• Be honest with the stakeholder(s) and apologise if you’re actually in the wrong.
• Explain the reason/ intention behind the first impression (if appropriate).
• Prove your value/ trustworthiness over time. It’s often the case that a bad first impression can be forgotten or forgiven when a good long-term impression replaces it.
• Remember you’re human! Making mistakes is part of our nature, so go easy on yourself. Showing that you’ve learned from the mistake is what’s key. 

Above all, the rule I try to live by is to be candid/self-aware in my shortcomings. So, whether that’s a bad first impression, or making mistakes more generally, I find it important to firstly own the situation, and then to take proactive steps to rectify it.

• Be open
• Talk to the person you have made the poor impression to about how you are feeling and hopefully they will be more understanding
• You might not have made a bad impression of course, it might just be your perception! 

Come clean and say that you think you may have made a bad first impression.  You may be told you haven’t!  Then talk about what would make this and the next interaction go well.  What could I do differently?

Simon McCall - In-house legal consultant

This is a slightly loaded question! You shouldn’t always try and correct a bad first impression.

I once hired someone for a role in a rather conservative bank, who came to work dressed in a beautiful white suit. I am sure some people could have regarded that as a breach of etiquette. But she was amazing at her job, and to be honest, the white suit cheered me up no end. 

So, if you are an agreeable person and you prize workplace harmony, then this is a simple question to which the answer is simply, apologise and promise to do better next time. And as people can have massively divergent views on how to behave, and what counts as rudeness, to get on well with people pay close attention to how others might perceive you and adjust your behaviour accordingly. 

But there has to be a tolerance for difference in the workplace. I have come across plenty of people at work who march to the beat of their own drum, even if it is not to others’ liking. I don’t mean people who enjoy being rude. It could be someone who dresses differently, who speaks differently, who doesn’t subscribe to the same world-view as everyone around them. It could be the person who is so caught up thinking through a difficult problem that they forget to dial into a call. 

And we should all hesitate before rushing to condemn a colleague for some supposed infraction of an unspoken rule. Sometimes people can have too strong opinions on things that really ought to be no concern of theirs, and a lack of empathy and imagination.

Why should we assume the problem is with these folk, instead of with the person who has formed the unfavourable view of them? If we all tried to reach agreement with everyone around us all of the time, nothing would ever change. 

The starting point is being clear: did you actually create a bad first impression - or was it simply that you were having to do your job, and the person affected did not like the outcome of your work because your job is to look after the short term and long term legal compliance interests of your employer entity - this does not mean you can, nor should, be pleasing any particular person within your employer.

So, be clear, are you uncomfortable because your "I want to please everyone" instincts conflicted with the need to do your job properly - or did you really and unnecessarily upset someone?

If you did create a bad impression, then be clear how and why you created a bad impression: for example by 

• being poorly prepared for a meeting because you planned your time poorly, 
• not listening well, 
• not being empathetic, 
• exhibiting poor body language or other communication behaviours (talking too much, too little, talking over, being a "know it all", 
• putting your personal risk appetite ahead of the business' one in decision making etc). 

Once you know what you did wrong  and why you did that - then you need consistently to demonstrate (without overdoing it) to that person and to others in their work environment (so that other people say positive things to the person that you affected) that what happened was an isolated incident and that you have learned from it. 

If you really offended them, then a proactive apology combined with demonstrations of how you will sustainably do better in future (rather than self-justifications for what you got wrong) will go a long way to improve things too.  

Bruce Macmillan – General Counsel

The first thing to consider doing is to ask yourself “What makes me so sure I made a bad impression?”.  

What evidence is there of this? 

• Could there be some assumptions or imposter syndrome at play? It can be worth asking a trusted colleague or friend to hear the “evidence base” for your concern. 
• Or ask yourself what your appraisal would be if a friend or colleague told you this had happened to them. Would your appraisal be the same?  Alternative explanations may be available. 

If you are pretty sure that you haven’t made the first impression you wanted, what are the options available to you?  

• Do you want to address it when you next encounter the individual or the group in question?  
• Can it wait that long and if not, what options are available to you to correct? 
• Is there follow up work you can do to show more of what you think you can deliver?  

How comfortable would you be asking for a call or meeting and naming it directly – “I don’t think I made a very good impression the first time we met, and I’d value hearing from you what would have made for a better encounter?”.  What would you want to come away with from a conversation like that?   

It could be worth considering whether there were external factors that contributed negatively. Can you design them out in future? This could the fact that the venue or medium was poorly suited to the interaction.  Were you tired? Hungry?  Did you need to build in more prep time or ask for more clarity on what was needed ahead of time?  

In short, were there factors that contributed that are within your control to change for the next interaction and if so, what are the steps you need to take to make those changes? 

That might, again, asking for feedback from the individual or group in question on what would improve things next time around.  This might even open up a broader dialogue about what went well and what could be done differently.