I have been pulled into HR meetings because a manager decided the environment wasn’t the problem — I was. Not because my performance said so. It didn’t. I was the highest performer on the team. But a decision had been made, without structure, without evidence, and without ever asking what in the environment or the role design was creating a barrier. The decision came first. The justification followed.
I have been passed over for a promotion I had earned. The person who got it was a friend of the manager. Not more qualified. Not a stronger performer. Familiar. A decision dipped in recency bias and relationship comfort, dressed up as merit. Nobody named it. Nobody had to. There was no record. There was no question that should have been asked first. There was just an outcome, and I was expected to accept it.
I failed a probation — not because my work failed, but because my vibe didn’t pass someone’s unspoken test. Their HR team believed, with apparent conviction, that being dyslexic was a personality type. That it correlated with introversion or extraversion. That it told them something about cultural fit. They had historically hired a certain kind of person. I was not that kind of person. No one asked the question that would have changed the outcome. No one had a structure that required them to.
These weren’t exceptional cases. In nearly thirty years of working — from my first job at seventeen to building ANCHOR at forty-six —, I have seen versions of these decisions hundreds of times — made fast, made without the right question, and made in ways that nobody was ever required to account for.
The thing that connects all of them isn’t malice. Most of the managers involved were not cruel people. They were people operating without infrastructure — making decisions in corridors and one-to-ones, under pressure, with no structure to slow them down and no question that required them to think differently before they acted.
And every one of those decisions had a cost that extended far beyond the meeting room. A promotion withheld is not just a missed opportunity. It is a financial impact. It is a career trajectory altered. It is the compounding effect of being consistently undervalued in ways that are hard to name and harder to prove. A failed probation is not just a setback. It is rent. It is confidence. It is the gap between where someone could have been and where the decision left them.
The standard response is coaching. Train the employee to navigate the environment better. Build their resilience. Help them communicate differently. But you cannot coach someone out of another person’s bad decision. All you are doing is delaying the inevitable — quiet quitting, loud quitting, or leaving entirely. And you cannot train a manager to decide more effectively whose entire world concept has never been given another door to open. Training does not change the decision. It never did. Only infrastructure changes the decision.
