“You’re better on the phone with clients than I thought you’d be.”
That was said to me by a colleague a long way junior to me, and it was meant as a compliment. I have thought about it for years, not because it stung, but because of what it revealed. For that sentence to make sense, he had to have already decided what I would be like on a call. He had done that without ever hearing me on one.
I started in tech young, working with clients abroad before I was old enough to drink, and I have since worked under more than thirty managers across managed services, manufacturing and a large cybersecurity company. The thing that varies least between all of those places is this: most of what people say about each other at work is a description of the speaker.
The fixed lens
When someone tells you what a colleague is like, listen to what it would take for that to be true. Often the judgement requires information they do not have, which means it came from somewhere other than observation.
The mechanism is not mysterious. People who are unsure of their own standing need a map of where everyone else sits, and they build that map quickly, out of very little. Once it is drawn, it stops updating. The person is now a fixed point: they are the one who is bad with clients, or not technical enough, or difficult. Evidence to the contrary gets filed as a surprise rather than as a correction. Hence “better than I thought you’d be.”
This is worth catching in yourself, because the cost is not to the person being judged. It is that you stop being able to see them work.
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anaïs Nin
The floor of a Security Operations Center
I worked in a SOC at a global tech company where this was on open display.
Some of the teams had effectively stopped. YouTube during shifts, Magic cards at the desk, long stretches of nothing. What struck me was not the slacking, it was what came with it: a constant low level complaint about everything, and underneath that, a clear sense of being above the work. The job was beneath them, so doing it properly would have been an admission.
The output problem was real but secondary. The bigger cost was atmospheric. It is very hard to be the person who cares in a room that has decided caring is embarrassing, and the people who did care either learned to keep quiet about it or left.
Homo Cliquus
The other pattern that shows up everywhere is the invite only group.
They are easy to spot once you know the signs, and they have almost nothing to do with seating. It is the glance exchanged when someone outside the group speaks. The agreement reached without anything being said. The weekend stories and the inside jokes at the lunch table, perfectly warm inside the circle and perfectly closed outside it.
I do not think these groups usually set out to exclude anyone. The instinct underneath them is old and not malicious: being inside a group is safe, and being outside one is not. The problem is what the instinct optimises for. A tribe is organised around cohesion and belonging. A business is supposed to be organised around getting work done and having good ideas survive contact with scrutiny. Those two goals pull in opposite directions more often than anyone admits.
The practical damage is in how the group handles people outside it. Not hostility, usually. Just a reliable tendency to find reasons not to help. Information stays inside the circle, requests from outside sit, and the whole thing is deniable because nobody did anything.
And the currency of these groups, likability, is not a measure of anything. It is a measure of how much you resemble the people doing the assessing. When recognition starts tracking it, you get a workplace where being pleasant to the right people outperforms being good at the job.
The manager who read complaints properly
One manager out of the thirty odd stands out, and what made him good was narrow and specific: he treated a complaint as evidence about two people rather than one.
When something came to him, he wanted to know what had actually happened, and he also wanted to know why this particular person was telling him about it now. That second question caught things. He spotted another manager quietly working to undermine someone. He caught an attempt to build a paper trail to get an employee dismissed who had done nothing to deserve it.
He was not cynical about it, which is the part I find hard to copy. He did not assume bad faith. He just declined to accept a complaint as a straightforward report of reality, and he went and looked.
That is most of what fairness is in practice. Not a policy. Someone willing to do the second piece of work.
And the ones who had just been promoted
The contrast was the first time managers, several of whom I had worked beside as peers.
The pattern was consistent enough to be predictable. They stopped asking the team things. Decisions got made alone that had no business being made alone, and the outcomes were worse for it. Then came the apology, which was usually sincere, and which changed nothing, because the apology was about the outcome rather than about how the decision got made. Other times there was no acknowledgement at all, and everyone simply worked around the hole.
I have some sympathy here. Being promoted out of a peer group is genuinely hard, and nobody teaches it. But the specific failure is worth naming: they treated asking the team as a sign they were not qualified for the job, when it is most of the job.
The line between coaching and complaining is the same line. Complaining names the problem and stops. Coaching names the problem and then stays for the harder part, which is what to do differently and what support exists for doing it. Plenty of feedback I have received, and plenty I have given early on, stopped at the first half.
"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept." - David Morrison
A-holes to A-players
Culture is not the stated values. It is the aggregate of what people are allowed to get away with, and it is set much lower down than anyone senior usually realises.
Everything above is small: one comment about phone manner, one team that stopped working, one lunch table, one manager who asked the second question, one new manager who stopped asking anything. None of it would appear in a report. All of it was the actual culture of those places.
The only reliable intervention I have seen is also unglamorous, which is being deliberate about who stays. Removing the resident a-holes and replacing them with a-players does more for a team than any initiative, because the behaviour that gets tolerated is the behaviour that gets taught.
The rest is just paying attention to your own judgements, and asking what it would take for them to be true.
