Risk Is Year-Round. Learning Should Be, Too
Ethics and Compliance
An employee rarely speaks in team meetings. Their manager decides they lack initiative and mentions it in a performance review.
But the employee may need time to think before speaking or struggle to get a word in during fast-moving meetings. They may have concerns they’d rather raise one-on-one, or they may simply prefer to listen.
The manager has turned an observation into a judgment that could affect the employee’s assignments and chances for promotion.
For HR leaders, this is why cultural competence matters: it helps people question what they think they know before making decisions about someone else.
When a Guess Becomes a Judgment
These situations may sound familiar:
- An employee challenges a proposed approach, and their manager decides they aren’t a team player.
- A colleague speaks directly, and teammates call them difficult.
- An employee asks no questions after receiving feedback, and their manager assumes they agree with it.
First impressions can be wrong. People have different ways of speaking, disagreeing or showing respect. Personality and the situation matter, too. Cultural competence means staying open to those differences without assuming you know why any one person acts as they do.
The trouble starts when a manager acts on a guess. “They aren’t a team player” can make its way into a performance review. “He’s difficult” can affect who gets picked for a project. Soon, an assumption sounds like a fact.
Before deciding what someone’s behavior means, ask what you may be missing.
Give Managers a Simple Way to Check
HR can help managers avoid assumptions by building a habit around four steps: Recognize → Ask → Listen → Adapt.
- Recognize when you may be making an assumption.
- Ask a question before deciding what someone’s behavior means.
- Listen to what they tell you.
- Adapt what you do next based on what you learn.
For example, if an employee asks no questions after receiving feedback, a manager could ask, “How do these priorities look from your perspective?”
The employee might raise a concern, ask for time to think or say they’re unsure what to do first. Now the manager has something useful to work with. They can answer the question, clarify the next step or set a time to talk again.
Check the Basis for Decisions
Managers won’t always know what’s behind someone’s behavior, but they need to recognize when they’re guessing — especially before that guess affects someone’s work or opportunities.
Performance reviews and promotion discussions are useful places for HR to ask managers to separate what they observed from what they inferred. If a manager says an employee “lacks confidence” or is “difficult,” ask what the employee did and whether the manager has talked with them about it. That small check can keep an assumption from shaping someone’s opportunities.
