Years ago, I joined an organisation having already been warned about one particular colleague. I was told that she took a lot of time off and, more significantly, that she was not especially committed to the organisation. The first part turned out to be true. She did have periods of absence. The second part did not. Once I had the chance to work alongside her, I saw the quality of what she produced, the way she interacted with people, the thought she gave to her work and the contribution she made when she was there. She was, quite simply, a quality colleague. But by then something uncomfortable had already happened. I had arrived with somebody else’s interpretation in my head, and at some point I had allowed that interpretation to become mine.
I know that because several years later she reminded me of something I had said. I had questioned, or at least strongly implied, whether her time away from work reflected a lack of commitment. I barely remembered the conversation. She did. In fact, she mentioned it more than once. By then I knew how wrong that judgement had been, and I had apologised, but what stayed with me was the imbalance between the significance of the moment for each of us. I had said something and moved on. She had carried it. Four years after we first met, she could still remember a leader making her feel that she was not trusted or that her commitment was in doubt.
That experience sometimes takes me back even further, to the first day of my first post-graduate job, around 26 years ago. My new boss did not come to see me or even say hello during the day. Before a staff meeting, I unknowingly sat in her chair and was quickly told that I needed to move. She arrived late, walked slowly to the chair, looked around the room, sat down and said, “Power. I just love it.” Those were the first words I ever heard her say to me. I can still quote them more than two decades later. She may have forgotten them before the meeting was over. I did not. They became attached to a much wider experience of working for her, one that was difficult enough that I eventually left England. The point is not that her comment and mine were equivalent. They were not. It is that leaders rarely get to decide which of their words another person will carry.
That is why I have become increasingly interested in what happens before a leader decides who somebody is. We have to form judgements. Leadership would be impossible without them. We decide whom to appoint, whom to trust with greater responsibility, when somebody needs support, when performance needs challenging and when a pattern has become too significant to ignore. Experience should make us better at this. After 26 years in education and nearly 20 in leadership, I would be concerned if I had learned nothing about reading situations or people. But experience creates a danger alongside the advantage. The more patterns we recognise, the easier it becomes to believe that because something looks familiar, we already know what it means.
Absence is a good example. Attendance matters. An organisation cannot function if people simply do not turn up, and repeated absence can have a very real effect on colleagues. But attendance and commitment are not synonyms. I have worked with people who were physically present almost all the time yet contributed remarkably little, and with others whose circumstances meant they had periods away from work but who were completely invested when they were there. Their work was excellent, their relationships mattered to them and their contribution was obvious. If two people have the same number of absences, it does not automatically follow that the leadership response should be identical. Circumstances, patterns, impact and behaviour matter. Fairness is not achieved by pretending context does not exist.
Earlier in my leadership, I did not always find that comfortable. I could worry so much about being seen to have favourites that I overcorrected. Sometimes the tougher decision felt safer because nobody could accuse me of favouritism afterwards. With experience, I have become less interested in looking impartial and more interested in whether I can stand behind the reasoning. Consistency still matters, but I now think of consistency more in terms of process and principle than identical outcomes. People deserve time. They deserve an attempt to understand what is happening. They deserve decisions based on evidence rather than labels. If that process reveals different circumstances, different responses may be entirely fair.
There is a phrase I use frequently when somebody tells me that a decision is unfair: “Help me understand why you think it’s not fair.” Sometimes they identify something I have missed. Sometimes I have information they do not have and cannot appropriately share. Sometimes we simply reach different conclusions. Being heard does not mean getting the outcome you wanted, and listening cannot become a false promise that every challenge will reverse a decision. But the phrase matters because it keeps open the possibility that the leader’s picture is incomplete. Everyone in an organisation has information that other people do not. A leader may know more about the wider decision; the person affected almost certainly knows more about their own circumstances. Neither should confuse having part of the picture with having all of it.
I have learned to be particularly wary of the stories that attach themselves to people. Someone we rate highly makes a mistake and we think, “That’s unusual for them.” Someone who has acquired a reputation for being difficult makes exactly the same mistake and we think, “There they go again.” Track record should matter. Reputation should make us more cautious. They are not the same thing. A genuine pattern is evidence accumulated over time. A reputation can be an interpretation repeated often enough that it begins to sound like evidence.
The opposite problem is just as dangerous. I once appointed someone who interviewed extraordinarily well. I thought they were going to be excellent. They turned out to be one of the worst hires I have made: unreliable, lazy and very different from the person I thought I had appointed. What makes that example uncomfortable is that colleagues began telling me there was a problem before I was ready to believe them. I discounted some of what I heard because several of the people raising concerns had their own clique and had previously been highly critical of colleagues whom I considered very good. I had reason to question the source. But then the same concerns began coming from people whose judgement I trusted more consistently. Eventually I saw the behaviour myself. They had been right.
Looking back, I was not only giving the new employee the benefit of the doubt. I was giving my own decision the benefit of the doubt. I had chosen this person. Accepting the evidence also meant accepting that my judgement at interview had been wrong. That is an uncomfortable form of confirmation bias because it can masquerade as fairness or patience. We may tell ourselves that we are refusing to rush to judgement when, in reality, we are protecting a judgement we have already made. I left the organisation not long afterwards, which meant other people inherited the consequences of my poor appointment. Leadership decisions do not become less consequential because our intentions were good.
This is why I still want to hear inherited knowledge when I join an organisation, even though I am cautious about inherited conclusions. If an outgoing leader says, “I’ll tell you who the difficult people are,” I am willing to listen. Experience has value. It would be wasteful to discard everything somebody has learned simply to prove that I am independent minded. But I do not want their conclusion to become my verdict. Different leaders create different relationships. Someone who struggled under one manager may flourish under another. Someone described as difficult may have been difficult for that particular leader to lead. Equally, the warning may turn out to be entirely accurate. A fresh start should not mean wilful blindness.
I have seen that from both directions. I have given people a fresh start and watched them become reinvigorated, only for old habits eventually to return. At times I probably backed off too quickly. I trusted the agreement rather than checking the follow through. Over the years I have become particularly wary of what I privately think of as the “super agreeable” response: the person who enthusiastically says, “Absolutely, yes,” to everything in a difficult conversation. Agreement can sound like understanding and commitment when it demonstrates neither. One practical habit I developed was asking the other person to record the agreed notes after a difficult meeting. It is revealing. Instead of both of us relying on enthusiastic nodding or later arguing about my version of events, I can see what they actually understood, and we can correct any difference there and then.
That does not mean I trust people less. If anything, my starting philosophy remains unusually simple: when I employ someone to do a job, I start by trusting them to do it. I do not see why a new colleague should have to pay for the behaviour of somebody who disappointed me previously. But trust is not the absence of follow through, boundaries or accountability. I can trust someone’s intention and still check whether something happened. I can believe in somebody and still ask for evidence. The more difficult lesson is that once trust has genuinely been broken, it changes. Even in close family relationships, love can remain unconditional while a particular situation carries a little more doubt because of what happened before. Perhaps trust begins broadly and becomes more specific as evidence accumulates.
That matters because one of the easiest pieces of leadership advice to give is, “Would you judge somebody else the same way?” It is a useful question, but the honest answer should sometimes be no. If two people have behaved differently over a sustained period, their track records are relevant. If someone has repeatedly broken an agreement, it would be strange to pretend that history does not exist. The discipline is not to ignore patterns; it is to make sure there really is a pattern before deciding we have seen one. Relevant history should inform judgement. A label should not replace it.
I have also become more conscious of the speed at which judgement happens. When I was a younger leader, I was far too willing to vocalise whatever I was thinking. If somebody brought me bad news, my frustration might be immediately visible or audible. I was not necessarily frustrated with the person standing in front of me, but they had no way of knowing that. With experience I became much more controlled. If something serious lands in front of me now, I am far more likely to contain my initial reaction, ask questions and take time before deciding what I think. I do not need to process every negative emotion in front of the person who has brought me the problem.
“Help me understand” has become useful for exactly that reason. It is not magic wording, and curiosity should never become a technique for avoiding accountability. What the phrase gives me is a gap between stimulus and judgement. It gives me time to process what I have heard and gives the other person space to add information before I reach a conclusion. That gap matters. A leader’s immediate reaction teaches people whether it is safe to bring bad news next time. If the messenger repeatedly receives the emotional impact of the message, eventually the leader may discover that problems arrive later, filtered or only when they can no longer be hidden.
The same principle applies when honesty is required. I value candour, probably more now than earlier in my career, but I have learned that honesty and brutality are not the same thing. The content matters, but delivery matters enormously. A difficult conversation can create emotion; the leader’s responsibility is not to become emotionless but to stop their emotion controlling the conversation. It helps to talk about behaviour or something the person can change rather than turning the discussion into a judgement about their whole being. Tone, body language, listening, paraphrasing and the language we choose all affect whether honesty becomes usable information or simply an injury the other person remembers.
I know that because I have been on both sides of memorable leadership comments. My colleague remembered my judgement about her commitment years after I had forgotten saying it. I still remember “Power. I just love it” after 26 years. Leaders can spend considerable time thinking about the decisions they make and surprisingly little time considering the sentences that accompany them. Yet sometimes the sentence lasts longer than the decision. Once we decide that somebody is lazy, difficult, uncommitted, weak, brilliant or indispensable, that judgement begins to leak into the opportunities we offer, the mistakes we notice, the explanations we believe and the language we use.
That is where a judgement can become self reinforcing. If someone feels repeatedly ignored because a leader has already decided what kind of person they are, eventually they may stop trying to change the leader’s mind. They disengage, withdraw or become defensive. The leader can then look at that behaviour and think, “See? I was right about them.” A positive label can distort judgement too. We forgive evidence because it does not fit the person we believe we know. Either way, the danger is not having an opinion. It is allowing an opinion to become a box from which contradictory evidence cannot escape.
Teams can help, particularly when the stakes are high. For small, reversible decisions I am comfortable relying heavily on experience. For decisions with greater consequences, I increasingly want more eyes on the problem. Recruitment already recognises this. We use panels and multiple interactions because we know one person’s impression can be incomplete. The same logic should not suddenly disappear after appointment. But a group is not automatically wiser. Four people can share the same bias, reinforce the same reputation or belong to the same clique. Four people independently seeing something I have missed is important evidence; four people repeating one another is not necessarily four pieces of evidence.
I remember a discussion about a member of staff where most of my team believed one course of action was necessary and I initially disagreed. I wanted to give the person more benefit of the doubt. I did not rush the decision. I left the meeting, reflected on what had been said and slept on it. By the next day my judgement had shifted. I went back to the team and told them that although my view had been different the day before, having thought about their evidence, I believed I had been wrong and would change my approach. Their reaction was mainly relief. I do not think admitting I had changed my mind weakened their confidence in me. If anything, acknowledging that I could be wrong probably strengthened it.
There have also been occasions when I have listened to the majority and still held my position. Sometimes I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. That is an important limitation to admit because there is no process that makes leadership judgement infallible. Sometimes you gather the available facts, listen to experienced people, examine your own assumptions, give the decision time, trust your instincts and still get it wrong. Good leadership cannot guarantee the correct judgement. What it can do is make the route to that judgement more responsible, more open to challenge and more capable of correction.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to time. Before making a consequential judgement about somebody, I think we owe them time when time is available. Not delay for its own sake, and certainly not endless patience while somebody’s behaviour repeatedly damages everyone around them. Time should be used. Find out more. Gather stronger evidence. Build enough of a relationship for a more honest conversation to become possible. Ask broader questions. “Tell me about your time here. What are you finding easy? What are you finding difficult?” Sometimes we learn more by creating space for somebody to tell us what we did not know enough to ask.
There is a limit. Giving somebody time should not mean asking everyone else to tolerate repeated harm indefinitely. Fair process can be consistent while outcomes differ. We can give people the same basic discipline of enquiry, evidence, opportunity and reflection, then respond differently to what that process reveals. Eventually a leader has to decide. Curiosity without accountability becomes avoidance; accountability without curiosity can become injustice.
Experience has made me more confident in my ability to judge people, not less. I do think I am better at it than I was 20 years ago. But I hope experience has also made me more willing to accept that I may be wrong. Those two things need not contradict each other. Perhaps the danger comes when experience improves only our certainty. “I’ve seen this before” can be the beginning of useful pattern recognition, or it can be the sentence that closes down everything we have not yet seen.
I have known leaders whose opinions of me changed over time, sometimes only after considerable effort. I have known others whose opinions seemed fixed regardless of what I did. When you believe there is nothing you can do to alter somebody’s view of you, it becomes tempting to think, “What is the point?” That response may then appear to prove the leader’s judgement, but the leader has helped create the conditions in which it emerged. We should be very careful about putting people into boxes and then congratulating ourselves when they stop trying to climb out.
So I am less interested now in forming an opinion of somebody quickly than in gauging one. There is a difference. An early impression can be useful. A gut reaction after years of experience can be useful. Other people’s warnings can be useful. None of them has to become a verdict. If the decision is low stakes, experience may be enough. If the consequences are significant and time is available, take it. Let the first impression encounter the person. Let reputation encounter evidence. Let your interpretation encounter theirs. Let certainty wait long enough to discover whether it deserves to become certainty.
Because eventually we will all get somebody wrong. When that happens, the responsibility does not end with admitting privately that we made a reasonable mistake. Own it. Change the decision if it can still be changed. Apologise where an apology is owed. Learn enough from it that the next person does not have to carry the cost of the previous judgement. The aim is not to become a leader who never forms opinions. It is to become one who remembers, particularly when another person’s career, confidence or sense of belonging may be affected, that an opinion formed today does not have to become the person they are allowed to be tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.