When Your Manager Has Already Made Up Their Mind About You

Some situations at work are not about performance at all. They are about perception, politics, comfort or simple personal preference. Chapter I.3 of The Lessons That Stayed is built around this uncomfortable fact.

El Hassane Ben Ahmed describes a manager who formed a judgement about him before he had any fair chance to show what he could do. The manager never said it. Instead there was a series of small decisions that became impossible to ignore once seen together. Meetings he should have attended happened without him. Ideas he raised were ignored until someone else repeated them. Mistakes, even minor ones, stayed in memory for months, while successes passed without a word.

At first he did what most capable people do. He worked harder, convinced that better results would change the dynamic. They did not.

“Some situations are not about performance. They are about perception, politics, comfort, or simply personal preference. The professional who mistakes a perception problem for a performance problem will exhaust themselves solving the wrong thing.”

Why first impressions harden

This is not mainly a story about deliberately unfair managers. It describes the normal operation of human judgement in complex social settings.

Daniel Kahneman’s work on fast, automatic thinking explains the mechanism. A manager’s first read on a new team member is an intuitive judgement: quick, emotional and resistant to change. Revising it would require deliberate, effortful thinking, which busy managers rarely apply to people they have already categorised.

Expectations shape results

Shifting standards

Research by Monica Biernat and Diane Kobrynowicz found that evaluators apply shifting standards to people they view negatively. They demand more for the same recognition, and they interpret identical performance as lower quality. Two people can deliver the same result and receive two very different assessments.

Exclusion that never announces itself

The most damaging form of pre-formed judgement is rarely public criticism. It is quiet exclusion: the meeting that happens without you, the information that does not reach you, the opportunity that goes to someone else without explanation. Because nothing is said, there is nothing to contest.

The high performer’s trap

Capable people are trained to believe that excellence fixes everything. So when they sense disapproval, they respond the way that has always worked: more effort, more discipline, more delivery.

In this situation that instinct backfires. Carol Dweck’s research shows that people whose sense of worth is tied to performance are especially vulnerable when effort stops being rewarded. They increase their investment and get less recognition in return. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter identify exactly this mismatch, high effort and low reward, as a primary driver of burnout.

What working harder cannot fix

The chapter makes a precise point: performance that cannot reach the evaluator unfiltered cannot change the evaluator’s assessment. If every piece of your work passes through the lens of a fixed opinion, producing more of it simply produces more material for the lens to distort.

What can be changed

The book identifies three interventions that genuinely can shift the dynamic.

1. Change who evaluates you. A project with another leader, a cross-functional assignment, or a new reporting line gives your work a fresh observer without the first impression.
2. Make your work directly visible. When other senior people see your work first-hand, your manager’s account is no longer the only one. Written records, shared deliverables and presentations you give yourself all help.
3. Have one calm, specific conversation. Ask what success would look like in your manager’s eyes, and agree on concrete expectations. A reasonable manager may revise their view. An unreasonable one will at least have been given the chance, and you will have learned something important.

What cannot be changed

Some judgements are structurally fixed. If a manager has no reason to revise their view, pays no social cost for keeping it, and is never asked by the organisation to justify it, the person on the receiving end cannot change it alone. Recognising this is not giving up. It is accurate diagnosis.

Protecting your credibility while you decide

Pre-formed judgement tends to push high performers into a visible escalation of effort: longer emails, more justification, more anxious checking-in. To others this reads as insecurity rather than competence, and it can confirm the very impression you are trying to change.

The discipline the chapter recommends is not indifference. It is composure. Keep your standards, keep your records, deliver steadily and stop performing for approval. Then make a clear-eyed decision about whether staying is still the right choice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes staying has become more damaging than leaving, and the book addresses that question directly in Chapter I.4.

A few signals to watch

• You are regularly left out of meetings or decisions in your area of responsibility.
• Your ideas gain traction only when someone else repeats them.
• Your mistakes are remembered and mentioned; your successes are not.
• Feedback is vague, while expectations seem to move.
• Other leaders who see your work directly view it very differently from your manager.

If several of these hold over months, you are probably dealing with a perception problem rather than a performance problem, and the strategy needs to change accordingly.

Approval that was never available

The lesson at the centre of this chapter contradicts what high performers believe about their own agency. What Ben Ahmed eventually understood was not that he should have worked harder. It was that he should stop trying to win approval that was never honestly available.

“Excellence does not fix a perception problem. The professional who recognises that distinction early will make better decisions about where to invest their capability, their patience, and their time.”