Meet the authority in handling A-list f*ck-ups: Judy Smith, the inspiration behind TV’s The Fixer, knows how to save your skin
IF YOU WATCH THE FIXER, you’ll know that Olivia Pope is the one woman on TV you’d want on your side. As a ‘fixer’, she can make any indiscretion disappear. What you might not know is Olivia is based on real-life crisis manager Judy Smith, who in her 20-year career has fixed some of entertainment’s biggest crises. Remember when the Sony e-mails were leaked, including one calling Angelina Jolie a ‘spoiled brat’? Smith cleaned up that mess. Monica Lewinsky and cigar-gate? Yup, she fixed that political shit heap too. We got her to share her strategies for bouncing back from workplace failure. As Olivia would say: it’s handled.
THE SITUATION
You’ve messed up at work
So those confidential documents you were tasked with looking after are now halfway back to Jo’burg in the pocket of seat 21B on SA352 – while you got off in Cape Town.
(Those tiny plane bottles of wine have a lot to answer for). Own it. ‘When you take ownership of a problem and admit there was an error, people tend to be forgiving,’ says Smith. When tennis player Maria Sharapova failed a drugs test recently, she called a press conference to announce she’d been suspended before the news leaked. The result? She was applauded for coming clean. Whatever you do, don’t try to cover it up. ‘When you deal with mistakes by hiding things and then people discover them, that’s way worse than saying “I made this error” and moving on from it.’
This story is from the September 2016 edition of Cosmopolitan - South Africa.
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This story is from the September 2016 edition of Cosmopolitan - South Africa.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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