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It is becoming difficult to talk about the next few years in consulting without AI appearing within the first few sentences. There is a fairly tangible reason for that. If parts of analysis, research and presentable output can be produced substantially faster, the position of three different players changes at once.

It is a little like moving on from candles, losing our fear of electricity and finally daring to switch on the light. It does help, of course, if a competent electrician has checked the wiring first and made reasonably sure that using the switch will not electrocute us.

With AI, we are roughly at that stage. The light is unquestionably brighter, the switch is convenient, and everyone would quite like to use it. Someone still needs to understand what is running through the wall. The user also needs to know that if a little thing is sticking out of it, with yellow metal inside and plastic around it, picking it up and examining it while wondering hmm, what could this possibly be? is probably best avoided.

Consulting firms need to recalculate where the value sits for which they can continue charging a premium. The people working inside them need to work out which parts of their knowledge and labour will remain scarce. Clients would do well to become rather more precise about what they are buying: information, analysis, access, judgement, responsibility — and which of those they actually received.

An AUD 440,000 Warning

There is already a fairly tangible example.

In 2025, Deloitte Australia produced a 237-page assurance review for the Australian employment department for AUD 440,000. The report was later found to contain non-existent academic references and a quotation supposedly taken from a Federal Court judgment that had never actually appeared in it. The revised version disclosed that an Azure OpenAI GPT-4o-based tool had been used for part of the work. Deloitte ultimately refunded the final instalment of the contract.

The easy conclusion would be: there we are, AI hallucinated again. Except that for an AUD 440,000 expert report, the client was hardly buying advice from a language model. It was buying it from Deloitte.

A consulting firm can, of course, use AI. It can use search engines, databases, modelling software, Excel spreadsheets or anything else that makes the work faster and better. For the client, however, the name on the finished product carries the promise that somebody checked the wiring before the light was switched on.

In internal correspondence, the Australian department explicitly raised the possibility that the citation problems affected confidence in the report’s findings. At that point, AI has already moved beyond a technology discussion.

A model can make mistakes, as the accompanying exhibit rather helpfully demonstrates, and humans are hardly strangers to the activity either. At the end of the day, somebody still has to check the machine’s work, notice the error, put their own name to the result, and the client still buys somebody’s professional credibility.

So What Is a Partner For?

In a recent post, Ben Appleton lands on much the same issue through McKinsey’s new “distinguished partner” role. He argues that as AI reshapes consulting, domain expertise, commercial judgement, senior relationships and the ability to turn complex specialist knowledge into organisational change will become more valuable. His word for the next generation of partners is “translator”.

Rather than the approving I too think something impressively sophisticated comments that so often flood a thread, thoughtful professional objections and additions made consulting’s still-living reason for existence unusually visible.

Julius Hollmann thought much of this sounded rather familiar. A good McKinsey, Bain or BCG partner has always been expected to understand the client, grasp the problem, connect different disciplines and carry a decision through. He also argued that T-shaped, lateral and out-of-the-box thinking may become more valuable, while some specialist roles narrow. Samik Das approached the change from a similar direction: in his view, the partner’s role has essentially always involved change management, while the more immediate organisational consequences of AI may emerge closer to engagement-manager level.

That is an awkwardly good question for McKinsey’s new label. If the most important capabilities of the “partner of the future” turn out to be the same ones that made a partner good yesterday, there are at least two possibilities. Either the relative weight of those capabilities is genuinely changing, or the industry is repackaging an old expectation in AI-compatible language.

Here, “translator” already means rather more than rendering technical language comprehensible to a board.

Rolled into a single “future partner” profile, all of this could quite easily become another carefully wrapped competency list, lacking only “strategic mindset”.

The comments pulled the package apart. Luca De Angeli suggested “orchestrator” rather than “translator”: somebody has to connect domain expertise, strategy, technology and the operating reality of the business. Olivier Burnouf, referring to a McKinsey interview with Sven Smit, added the data constraint: much of the most interesting information used in larger research exercises simply is not sitting there waiting for AI. It may be proprietary data, newly created information, or knowledge held by people. Sridhar Peddisetty separated the production of intelligence from the decision itself. Vinod Venugopal put CFO-quality, traceable data underneath “qualified subjectivity”.

It becomes harder to describe the partner’s job as simply translating whatever the machine says into understandable human language. Someone first needs to know what the machine worked from, what was missing, where professional judgement entered the process, and how far the final product placed in front of the client can be traced back.

What Trust Does

Trust performs a very concrete function in this chain. A board receives an analysis, listens to the people behind it, asks questions, argues and eventually decides. It does not reconstruct every data source, rerun every model or spend three days checking footnote 184. If it had to, very few decisions would ever get made.

At some point, it accepts that other people have done work it is not going to repeat. A Deloitte, McKinsey or BCG logo forms part of that. So does the partner’s name, the method, the origin of the data, the checking process and the fact that, if something goes wrong, there is somebody available to answer the question: how exactly did you manage this?

Within such a system, trust saves time, permits division of labour and allows decisions to be made even where nobody can see the entire chain alone. Which is also why discovering that it was placed badly can become expensive.

In the Deloitte case, that assumption was damaged: that somebody had actually looked through what went into the finished product.

The operational consequences of trust become particularly visible when the issue is no longer the credibility of a report or a client relationship, but whether an institution gets money again the next morning.

Monday Morning, 2008

If you are experiencing a slight sense of déjà vu: yes, the time machine is taking us back to 2008.

For an entire weekend that September, bankers, regulators and political decision-makers tried — to put it more sophisticatedly — to assess the chances of the system surviving. Less sophisticatedly: who would still be standing on Monday morning. And, as a minor footnote, that particular Monday morning went on to shake rather a large part of the world.

Without taking another trip through the entire mechanics of Lehman’s collapse, I covered that in more detail in Too Big to Believe: The behavioural logic behind Lehman’s collapse and the role of confidence. Here, I am pulling out only the thread of trust. The length of this article is already making a reasonable attempt on the reader’s patience.

Lehman’s short-term funding continued to function for as long as enough counterparties kept saying yes to financing it for another day.

The bank relied heavily on short-term funding. In the repo market, it repeatedly had to convince the other side that the collateral was acceptable, the money would come back, and Lehman would still be there tomorrow. While that continued, Lehman could maintain its short-term funding. Once increasing numbers of counterparties no longer wanted to take the same risk for another day, Lehman ran out of time very quickly.

Nobody needed a perfect view of Lehman’s entire balance sheet for that to happen. It was enough for growing numbers of counterparties to become uncertain about assumptions they had previously been willing to make. Trust here was not a mood. It had funding consequences.

None of this makes AI the next financial crisis, nor does a consulting report operate like the repo market. Even my imagination would have to work rather hard to sustain that comparison.

The narrow common point is that in both cases somebody has to make a decision without being able to verify everything independently. Somewhere in the process, information, a person or an institution has to be judged reliable enough for the next step to be taken.

That bleak weekend in September 2008 shaped the financial world for years. Eventually, the system recovered. Would the consulting industry have as much time if its own ominous Monday morning really were approaching?

If the friend walking beside us has just stepped into a brown, suspiciously well-formed pile, and a few metres ahead there is another one directly in our path, analysis still has a certain practical use: we can walk around it.

On this still-hypothetical Monday morning, the trouble would look rather different. Clients would simply start calculating differently: what they are paying for, what they can produce themselves, and which parts still genuinely require the person or firm whose name, judgement and professional responsibility they have been buying.

When the Client Discovers How Easy It Is to Press Enter

One of consulting’s longstanding advantages has been information asymmetry. More markets, more benchmarks, more experts and more hours of human work sat on the other side of the table. Clients paid for that access and processing too.

The Enter key has already shaved a surprisingly large piece off it. You still have to ask a question first, of course, and how you ask it is not entirely irrelevant. But even a less tech-savvy executive can reach a usable first analysis within minutes that, only a few years ago, might have set at least a small project team in motion.

That does not make the executive a McKinsey partner. It does, however, give them something against which to compare what the McKinsey partner puts in front of them.

The client will probably continue not to recheck every reference in a 237-page report. That is part of what external expertise is bought for. The material arrives, questions are asked, a decision is made, and everyone moves on. If something later goes seriously wrong, the reconstruction can quite easily reach the lawyers’ desks.

At that point, the origin of the data suddenly becomes interesting. So does which model touched it, who checked the output, who approved it, what the contract promised and whose name appeared at the end.

In the Deloitte case, the name carried the weight: Deloitte delivered the report as a professional product, and the client was paying for that name as well.

AI is beginning to pull at the same business model from two directions. Expert-looking output can be produced increasingly quickly and cheaply. Checking it, standing behind it professionally, defending it, implementing it and still being there months later has not become a cheap pastime.

Clients, meanwhile, have more and more tools with which to reach a usable first answer themselves. A growing share of the consulting premium will therefore depend on what happens after Enter: whether somebody spots the missing data, stops the weak inference, stands behind their own professional judgement, and remains there when things go wrong.

If those elements are missing, an AUD 440,000 report eventually prompts a rather prosaic question:

Why, exactly, did it require a consultant?

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There is a small piece of truth in it, something to point back to. Something happened, something was said, there was a role, a presence, a small achievement. So you cannot simply call it a bare-faced lie.

Only by the time the story is finished, that small true part is carrying a much larger picture on its shoulders. Like a shell game. The damn little ball is somewhere, of course. We are just no longer looking where it was first shown to us.

From the details, a picture begins to form in which someone appears larger, deeper, braver, more professional, more sensitive, or more significant than the details would otherwise support.

Then we may get a pinch of mannered performance too, just to make sure the effect lands.

The person speaking in long, winding sentences while saying remarkably little. The voice lowered almost beyond hearing. The oddly stressed letters. The performed modesty. The overly polished professional language under which there is barely anything concrete left. Meanwhile, you start to feel that perhaps you are the one who cannot quite follow the flow between the sentences.

My question is: why?

What is the purpose of this inflated shell that appears to hold itself up?

The whole thing is arranged so that the listener reads the person out of the event: more modest, deeper, more sensitive, more important.

For a while, it is just tiring.

When enough of this kind of speech surrounds you, the precise sentence starts to sound poor. A statement that covers only what happened suddenly feels insufficient.

The person who presents reality at its actual size can easily look clumsier next to those who build a larger life out of every crumb of truth.

A social setting teaches you what kind of voice you need to use about yourself if you do not want to disappear. First, someone adds something that could perhaps be true. Then it still feels a little thin, so they add another layer.

A role becomes an important role, presence becomes contribution, contribution becomes a professional turning point, and the professional turning point becomes a method of their own.

If that has worked nicely, they take another event and paint that one too. Then a third. By the time they are done, the separate stories look like one glossy, meaningful explanation. At least from a distance. If we squint a little, the difference has already disappeared.

At the end of the day, the person who simply remained precise starts to look as though they are the one who is lacking.

A note in the margins of the weekend.
Lilien Gerlach | Behavioural Analyst Notes

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Only recently did I realise that it now has a catchy English name, has become a trend and comes with an inspirational story: naked quitting.

Naked quitting means resigning before you have another job lined up. The current English term is new. The behaviour behind it, and the original name for it, are much older.

The term can be traced back to the Chinese word luǒcí. Its literal meaning is roughly “naked resignation”: leaving without another job, a secure transition or guaranteed income for the months ahead.

By late 2010, the term was already being discussed in publicly available sources as a Chinese workplace buzzword. One article from December 2010 explicitly asked whether resigning without another job was a liberating decision or a reckless impulse. Another listed luǒcí among the important workplace terms of 2010. In those articles, the risk to income, the expected length of the job search and the possibility that the decision had been made too hastily were still central to the phenomenon (Huaxi Metropolis Daily, 2010; Qilu Evening News, 2010).

Around 2011–2012, the English-language Chinese press was already calling it naked resignation. The definition had not changed: someone resigned before finding another job. Reports at the time mentioned work overload, dissatisfaction, changing employee expectations and shifts in China’s white-collar labour market. One person interviewed by China Daily had enough savings to last at least a year and was therefore willing to spend months waiting for the right job. Even in this early account, which emphasised autonomy, the financial background was a visible condition (Wang, 2012).

In 2015, a resignation letter containing just ten Chinese characters went viral. Gu Shaoqiang, a secondary-school teacher, wrote after eleven years: “The world is so big. I want to see it.” A photograph of the letter spread rapidly across Chinese social media and received tens of thousands of reactions and shares (Yao, 2015).

Here, resignation became a symbol of freedom, postponed dreams and taking back one’s own life. A later report described the teacher as the heroine of a generation of workers hungry for adventure. Leaving without a safety net was no longer presented simply as a risky labour-market decision. Attention shifted to the kind of person capable of making it: someone who recognises their own desires and has the strength to follow them (Chinanews.com, 2015).

In 2018, a China Youth Daily survey of 1,972 workers aged between 18 and 35 found that 23 per cent had resigned without another job offer. Nearly half had considered it but had ultimately not done it. This was a survey reported in the press, so it should not be treated as a precise national prevalence figure. It does show that naked resignation had by then become a recognisable and widely discussed workplace behaviour (Xinhua, 2018).

By 2024, the term naked quitting had appeared in the English-language press. On 17 March 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary language blog recorded it among its new words and defined it as leaving a job without having another one to go to. This documented a new use of language; it was not evidence that the behaviour itself began in 2024 or 2025 (Cambridge Words, 2025).

What Changed?

The early Chinese term named the absence of a safety net. In today’s Western articles and posts, resignation increasingly appears as proof of personal autonomy, self-respect and courage.

Someone had been miserable in a bad job for a long time. One morning, or after one particularly awful meeting, they decided they had had enough. They resigned without knowing what would come next. The first relief—the sense that one decision had ended the oppressive feeling in a single stroke—may have been followed by the panicked thought, “Oh God, what have I done?” By the time they had gathered their things, they were riding the rollercoaster of relief and a new kind of anxiety all the way home.

But once the story is told in public, it does more than record a feeling. It interprets the decision for an audience. It tells us how to see the person who resigned: as someone who was afraid, but acted anyway.

And now let’s name the elephant in the room: what do they live on until they have another job?

The Financial Conditions of Courage

Leaving without another job carries very different levels of risk for people in different circumstances. A few months without income may be manageable for someone with substantial savings, an earning partner, family support or a profession in which their skills are easy to sell. The same decision may create a housing or debt crisis for someone supporting a household alone.

Using Australian longitudinal data, Gerards and Welters (2020) examined how liquidity constraints affected unemployed people’s job searches and subsequent employment. Jobseekers facing serious financial hardship searched more intensively. It did not shorten their search, and the pay or hours in the job they found were no better. Those who found work while under severe financial pressure were less satisfied with their pay and hours, were more likely to think about resigning again, and had less stable employment over the medium term.

The study looked at unemployed jobseekers, not specifically at people left without work after naked quitting. It matters here because it shows what can happen when the financial room to manoeuvre runs out after resignation. A person may put more time and energy into the search without finding a job any faster or on better terms. As their reserves shrink, they also have less freedom to be selective or to wait.

A working paper by Clymo and colleagues (2022) looks directly at the relationship between wealth, quitting and being laid off. Using worker panel data, they found a U-shaped relationship: both low-wealth and high-wealth employees were more likely to move from employment into non-employment, but for different reasons. Their model suggests that workers with less wealth may accept riskier jobs to get out of unemployment more quickly. Some wealthier workers may leave voluntarily because they can afford more time out of work.

This has not yet been published as a peer-reviewed journal article, so it should be treated as preliminary evidence. It does not prove that every wealthier person resigns simply because they can comfortably afford to. It does support the point that wealth is not a minor background detail. It helps determine who can afford time outside work and who has to find a new income as quickly as possible.

That difference rarely appears in accounts of naked quitting. Courage gets a full paragraph. The financial runway gets, at most, a throwaway half-sentence.

A household budget is not merely the minimum required to stay alive. There may be children, a mortgage, insurance, transport and regular healthcare costs. People may also pay for subscriptions and activities that keep them connected to their cultural and professional world. They may need that one break a year that allows them to carry on. It is easy to dismiss these as optional comforts when you are not the one who has to give them up.

Someone who takes all of this into account and stays in a bad job for the time being may be making a rational assessment of risk. They may know perfectly well how much the work is harming them. They can also see the consequences of resigning.

An article about naked quitting therefore offers a useful picture only if it presents the financial conditions of the decision alongside the courage. How long would the savings last? Was there another income in the household? Were there dependants, loan repayments or substantial fixed costs? How likely was the person to find another job at a similar level?

Without those details, the account presents as personal virtue what is partly economic room to manoeuvre.

Why Do We Post It? Or, Lord, Let Me Share My Courage with the World

Let’s be honest: if the relief after resigning were enough in itself, it would be enough simply to feel good.

A social-media post serves another purpose. It turns the resignation into a public statement of identity. The text usually provides the preferred interpretation in advance: this was courage, choosing myself, drawing a boundary, breaking free. From the opening lines, the writer offers an interpretation in which the decision appears not as recklessness but as a personal achievement.

My reading is that many of these posts process the expected criticism in advance. The writer calls it courage before someone else can call it financial recklessness. Admitting the fear raises the moral value of the decision:

I didn’t know what would happen. I was terrified, but I did it anyway.

The sentence directly communicates fear. Indirectly, it also says that the writer did what many people cannot. They can present themselves as an example to follow without ever saying so outright.

This is where we can recognise one possible structure of humblebragging: self-promotion wrapped in a complaint or apparent modesty.

Across nine studies, Sezer and colleagues (2018) examined humblebragging. They defined it as self-promotion disguised as a complaint or modesty: the speaker wants to make a positive quality or achievement visible while avoiding the social cost of openly boasting. Participants judged humblebraggers as less sincere and less likeable, and in some studies as less competent. The strategy could work even worse than straightforward complaining, because at least the person complaining was perceived as more honest.

The research did not examine posts about resigning. It is relevant to naked quitting because of the structure of the communication. Admitting uncertainty and fear may ask for sympathy, while “I did it anyway” makes courage and agency visible.

I am not, of course, saying that every post about resigning is a humblebrag. Some people are asking for help, sharing information, making workplace abuse visible or simply announcing that their situation has changed. A single text cannot tell us the writer’s internal motivation with certainty.

The structure can still be observed. Uncertainty and fear provide the complaint or modesty layer. The underlying claim is that the writer managed to do what many others cannot. The account may ask for sympathy and admiration at the same time.

Naked quitting can therefore become a strange kind of status signal. The person posting appears to have jumped without any safety net. The wealth, partner’s income, family support or strong position in the labour market that made the jump possible may remain outside the account.

Does Someone Else’s Courage Make Me a Coward?

A bad job is already difficult enough. Social media can add comparison: someone else recognised their value, drew a boundary and had the courage to act. I am still sitting here.

Fukubayashi and Fuji (2021) used two studies to examine the relationship between career-related social-media content, social comparison and career frustration. The first involved 309 Japanese employees. The second used a seven-day experience-sampling method and collected 1,254 responses. Viewing positive career posts was associated with social comparison. Upward comparison—seeing the other person’s position as better than one’s own—was associated with greater career frustration. In the first study, comparison was also linked to the feeling that one ought to escape one’s current career situation.

The research did not specifically examine naked-quitting posts, and the two studies do not show that every resignation success story causes frustration. Applying the relationship here is defensible because these posts are also positive career content and can offer a direct basis for comparison: someone else was in the same bad situation and still left.

The reader gets the carefully constructed story of the person who acted. On their own side are the mortgage, the children, an uncertain labour market and savings that may last who knows how long.

They now have two problems. Their job is bad, and they may also feel that they are not brave enough to leave it.

And What About Those Who Could Leave, but Stay?

There are also people who have savings, a realistic chance of finding another job and no immediate financial obligation that makes leaving impossible. Yet they remain for years in a workplace that is deeply anxiety-inducing or damaging.

There may be perfectly rational reasons for this too. Mitchell and colleagues (2001) used the concept of job embeddedness to examine what ties people to their work and their wider environment. They distinguished three areas: links to other people, teams and groups; fit with the job, organisation and community; and everything a person would sacrifice by leaving. Job embeddedness helped predict intentions to quit and actual voluntary turnover beyond job satisfaction, organisational commitment, perceived job alternatives and job search.

This helps explain why being able to afford to leave does not mean someone will leave. They may fear losing their professional identity, status, colleagues, established position or the chance of returning to the same field later. As an eternal optimist, or by avoiding a direct reckoning with the situation—perhaps through endlessly reframing it—they may also hope that things will soon improve.

When those reasons no longer explain staying, and the situation involves persistent anxiety, paralysis, self-damaging adaptation or recurring relational patterns, therapy may be relevant. The question then is what keeps someone in a harmful environment even when leaving is realistically possible.

That, however, is a different story. It does not justify applying the same psychological explanation to people who stay because they are financially constrained.

The Missing Sentence

Resigning can be a brave decision. Leaving an oppressive or humiliating workplace may require considerable personal effort.

It is not fair to praise the courage while quietly leaving out the rather significant fact of financial security.

If someone tells us how afraid they were, the heroic account has room for the small print too: how they paid for housing, their children’s expenses and everyday life in the months that followed.

As long as we are shown only the decision itself, the reader or listener is left to imagine the background that made it possible. What each person reads into that, and how they interpret it, is probably material for another essay—also not a short one.

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References

Cambridge Words. (2025, March 17). New words – 17 March 2025. About Words – Cambridge Dictionary blog. https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2025/03/17/new-words-17-march-2025/

Chinanews.com. (2015, July 25). Teacher’s resignation: A love story not an adventure. People’s Daily Online. https://en.people.cn/n/2015/0725/c90882-8926221.html

Clymo, A., Denderski, P., & Harvey, L. A. (2022). Wealth, quits and layoffs [Working paper]. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4248008

Fukubayashi, N., & Fuji, K. (2021). Social comparison on social media increases career frustration: A focus on the mitigating effect of companionship. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 720960. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720960

Gerards, R., & Welters, R. (2020). Liquidity constraints, unemployed job search and labour market outcomes. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 82(3), 625–646. https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12345

Huaxi Metropolis Daily. (2010, December 9). Resigning without another job lined up: Carefree or impulsive? [Chinese-language article]. Sina Education. https://edu.sina.com.cn/j/2010-12-09/1001197016.shtml

Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102–1121. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069391

Qilu Evening News. (2010, December 14). 2010 workplace buzzwords: “Rubber people,” exam-job seekers and naked resignation make the list [Chinese-language article]. Sina Education. https://edu.sina.com.cn/j/2010-12-14/1529197322.shtml

Sezer, O., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2018). Humblebragging: A distinct—and ineffective—self-presentation strategy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 52–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000108

Wang, W. (2012, January 31). ‘Naked’ resignations on the rise. China Daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-01/31/content_14510459.htm

Xinhua. (2018, August 12). One in five Chinese youths resign without new job. China.org.cn. https://www.china.org.cn/china/2018-08/12/content_58518822.htm

Yao, Y. (2015, April 25). Quitting jobs to fulfill dreams no longer taboo in China. China Daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2015-04/25/content_20537275.htm

Lilien Gerlach | Behavioural Analyst Notes

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The manager is reading a version that has already been selected, processed, arranged, and described. The system has chosen which information counted. The recruiter may have accepted the summary. The platform may already have marked one profile as a cleaner match and another as lower fit. The hiring discussion may then begin from an order created outside the meeting and visible to everyone in it.

This article follows how AI-supported HR output becomes decision material, and where HR can still check whether a person has been read accurately enough to decide on.

On 19 May 2026, the European Commission published draft guidelines on the classification of high-risk AI systems under the EU AI Act and opened a targeted consultation. The consultation was originally due to close on 23 June and was later extended to 23 July 2026. The guidelines are intended to help providers, deployers, and market surveillance authorities assess whether an AI system should be treated as high-risk. For many organisations, the document will first move through legal, compliance, procurement, and technology teams. They will identify systems, review vendor material, classify tools, and prepare documentation.

For HR, the classification question reaches directly into the way an AI-supported result becomes a judgement about a person. Under Annex III of the AI Act, employment-related systems can fall into high-risk categories when they are used for recruitment and selection, including targeted job advertising, application filtering, and candidate evaluation. The same area also covers systems used for work-related decisions such as promotion, termination, task allocation, monitoring, and performance or behaviour evaluation.

Not every AI-supported HR tool will automatically be high-risk. Classification depends on the intended use, the system’s influence on the decision, and whether it involves profiling or materially affects access, evaluation, promotion, termination, task allocation, or monitoring.

In recruitment, selection, performance evaluation, promotion, internal mobility, and worker management, AI outputs can influence access to work, pay, status, future opportunity, and reputation. In these settings, a score or recommendation helps shape how a person becomes available for decision. The governance question for HR is practical: can the organisation reconstruct how that judgement was produced?

AI enters a process that already reduces people into formats

HR decisions have always relied on formats: the CV, application form, interview note, assessment report, performance rating, calibration grid, succession chart, and manager comment. Each one turns a longer working life into something that can be compared, discussed, stored, and moved into a decision.

Reduction is part of HR work. A hiring panel cannot read an entire career. A promotion committee needs evidence in a form it can compare. A performance review process needs categories. A succession meeting needs names, roles, risks, and readiness levels. The risk appears when the shortened version carries more authority than the evidence behind it can support.

AI is now being added to this existing system of reduction. It is used to parse CVs, score applications, summarise interviews, rank candidates, flag risk, analyse performance patterns, support workforce allocation, and identify potential. These tools may improve consistency, reduce administrative load, and help managers handle large volumes of information. They can also make a shortened version of the person look complete.

A parsed CV can give a messy career history an orderly shape. A behavioural score can make different people look comparable. An interview summary can make an incomplete exchange look processed. A risk flag can sound as if something has been detected. A ranking gives the meeting an order before anyone has discussed the work behind it.

The output can be useful while it stays tied to the evidence that produced it. Once the wording moves without its source, later decision-makers may discuss the wording as if they were discussing the person.

The judgement trail

An AI-supported recommendation reaches the manager after several prior choices have shaped it. A data source was chosen, a workflow approved, and the available information processed before a recruiter, HR business partner, or manager read the result. In many cases, someone then turned it into a note, shortlist, dashboard, promotion pack, or leadership update. The judgement trail follows how information about a person becomes a claim used in a decision.

It should show what data entered the system, what context stayed outside it, what the model produced, who reviewed the output, how the result was rewritten for HR or management use, where disagreement was possible, and which forum used it. A technical audit trail can show that the system processed data and produced an output. The judgement trail shows how that result acquired authority inside the organisation: who read it, who accepted or challenged it, which wording carried it forward, and how it affected the final decision.

The EU guidance gives this HR practice question a regulatory frame. Classification tells an organisation which systems may fall under high-risk obligations. The judgement trail shows whether the organisation can account for the way those systems affect actual people decisions. A tool can be classified correctly while the organisation still lacks a clear account of how its result entered a hiring, promotion, performance, or workforce decision.

Inside HR workflows, the issue appears in ordinary handovers. A recruiter reads a score and turns it into a shortlist note. A hiring manager reads an interview summary and asks fewer follow-up questions. A talent team uses a potential rating in a succession meeting. A line manager sees an attrition-risk flag and starts treating an employee as less committed. A performance dashboard shapes how a calibration discussion describes contribution. Each handover changes the weight of the original result, because each one gives it a new use.

The small steps that turn people into decision data

The shift begins in the ordinary materials of HR work: the CV field, the interview note, the transcript, the score, the summary, the shortlist. A candidate becomes a keyword pattern. A career history becomes a sequence of titles, gaps, tenure lengths, and sector labels. An interview becomes a transcript, then a summary, then a few behavioural tags. A manager comment becomes a performance indicator. A promotion case becomes a readiness rating. An employee’s activity becomes a productivity signal. A development need becomes a risk category.

These translations are useful while they remain connected to observed behaviour and relevant evidence. Trouble begins when later discussion treats the translated phrase as if it still carried the full case. Take a candidate with an irregular career path. A human interviewer may learn that the person moved sectors after a market contraction, took time out for caring responsibilities, joined a smaller firm after relocation, or accepted a lateral move to gain operational experience. A system may process the same history through tenure, title progression, keyword match, and gap patterns. The eventual output may appear as “inconsistent trajectory” or “limited role fit.” If that wording reaches the selection meeting without the surrounding context, the meeting may never examine the career logic behind it.

Inside organisations, the same mechanism can appear in performance analytics. A tool may show lower visible activity during a quarter. The missing context may be project recovery, client escalation, mentoring, cross-functional coordination, illness, restructuring, or a manager who failed to record contribution accurately. If the result later appears as “lower engagement” or “reduced productivity,” the employee may be discussed through a narrower version of the work they actually performed.

What AI adds to an existing compression

Executive search has long worked with a similar compression, even without AI. A long career becomes a shortlist paragraph. A credibility judgement becomes a few lines in a candidate note. Client discussions may turn on phrases such as “credible with investors,” “too operational,” “limited scale exposure,” or “difficult to read.”

An executive search consultant who writes “difficult to read” should be able to explain the observation: which part of the interview, reference conversation, career pattern, or client discussion produced that wording. That explanation may be incomplete. The client can still ask, the consultant can answer, and the judgement can be tested.

AI changes the scale and speed of the same compression. A phrase that once shaped one search process can now be generated, repeated, ranked, and carried across hundreds of profiles before a hiring manager begins the discussion. If similar wording appears in an AI-generated summary or ranking note, the organisation may not know whether it came from a relevant behavioural signal, a weak proxy, or a missing piece of context.

A phrase in one search process can be questioned by someone who remembers the interview, the client conversation, or the reason for the note. A generated label in a large HR system may pass through several screens and meetings before anyone asks what it was based on. By then, the organisation may have acted on it without treating it as a decision.

Where judgement can distort

Distortion first enters at data entry. Fields, keywords, documented outputs, historic ratings, recorded activity, and labelled achievements are easier to process, so they become easier to use. Work that is harder to document receives less weight. Many organisations depend on work that is relational, corrective, preventive, cross-functional, or politically difficult to name. That work often leaves a poor data trace.

Studies of algorithmic pre-employment assessment tools show how much rests on earlier choices: what data is collected, what outcome is predicted, how bias mitigation is claimed, and how validation is carried out. Raghavan and colleagues’ analysis of algorithmic hiring vendors is useful for HR leaders because it follows the design choices that shape the score. By the time the score appears, earlier choices have already narrowed what it can mean.

Context loss creates the next risk. Career breaks, migration, caring responsibilities, restructuring, role ambiguity, industry disruption, and poor previous management can all shape a person’s record. HR needs to distinguish between context that would be inappropriate to use and context without which the evidence will be misread.

Management language changes the output again. AI output often leaves its technical form and reappears in managerial language as “risk,” “fit,” “readiness,” “potential,” “trajectory,” “engagement,” or “evidence strength.” These words travel easily in leadership settings because they sound decision-ready. They also reduce the visible uncertainty in the original case. Once a person has been described as “low fit” or “high risk,” participants may discuss the category rather than the observations behind it.

Review is another weak point. Process documents often treat human oversight as the safeguard: someone reviews the output before the decision is made. In practice, a reviewer may accept a result without understanding it. A busy manager may use a ranking because it saves time. A recruiter may rely on an AI-generated interview summary and stop looking for what the summary left out. Research on automation bias has shown that human reviewers may over-rely on algorithmic advice, including in settings where other available information would support a different conclusion. Oversight has substance when the reviewer understands the output, can see the relevant evidence, and has authority to challenge the recommendation.

The final risk appears when the person affected by the decision cannot correct the reading before it becomes final material. A candidate or employee may receive the outcome without seeing how the judgement formed. They may be told they were not shortlisted, not selected, not promoted, not ready, or not meeting expectations. The process can be administratively clean and still leave the affected person with no clear way to correct the record.

Contestability before the decision

A people decision becomes much harder to repair after the final material has been locked. Before that point, HR can create review points where a score, summary, rating, or label is checked against the evidence it claims to represent.

In recruitment, that review point sits before the shortlist is finalised. A recruiter or HR business partner compares the AI-generated shortlist note with the original CV, application material, and any available human observation. A career break, lateral move, sector change, or missing keyword can then be checked before the wording reaches the hiring manager’s pack.

In selection, the review point sits before an interview summary is circulated. The interviewer can add a short note when the generated summary misses the main point of an answer, removes relevant hesitation, overstates certainty, or turns a qualified response into a cleaner claim than the candidate made.

In promotion and succession work, the review point sits before the pack goes to calibration. A readiness rating, potential marker, or mobility note should be checked by someone close enough to the work to see whether the generated description reflects actual contribution. If the summary narrows the case too far, the correction should travel with the pack.

In performance review, the line manager should state whether activity data reflects the work actually performed. Recorded activity may miss project recovery, client escalation, mentoring, cross-functional coordination, or work done to prevent a visible problem. If the dashboard under-represents contribution, the context should be added before the calibration discussion uses the signal.

These are evidence checks. They give the organisation a way to separate an accurate signal from a poor proxy before the proxy becomes part of the official record.

The practical question is where the organisation allows correction to happen. A candidate who receives a rejection after a ranked shortlist has already been accepted has little room to correct the reading. An employee who first sees a label during a final performance conversation is already arguing against a settled description. A manager who wants to override a risk flag needs a way to explain why the signal does not fit the case.

The meeting may never discuss the full case. It discusses the wording that reached the pack. Contestability has to exist before the wording becomes final decision material.

Contestability also affects internal behaviour. Employees learn which decisions can be questioned and which labels are treated as settled. A manager who sees “lower engagement” on a dashboard may begin the next conversation from suspicion. An employee who knows the context may have to repair a judgement that has already travelled through the system. The later the correction appears, the harder it becomes to change the decision material.

The EU guidelines move this beyond an internal HR quality discussion. If a system is used in employment or worker management, and its output affects access, evaluation, promotion, termination, task allocation, or monitoring, the organisation needs more than a general assurance that a person remained in the loop. It needs a record of how the loop worked.

What HR should map now

HR should begin by identifying every point where AI or AI-supported tools enter people decisions: targeted job advertising, CV parsing, application filtering, candidate scoring, interview transcription, interview summarisation, assessment interpretation, shortlist generation, performance analytics, promotion calibration, succession planning, internal mobility, learning recommendations, attrition-risk modelling, workforce allocation, and productivity monitoring.

Some of these uses fall squarely within Annex III employment and worker-management categories. Others become legally and organisationally significant when they materially influence access to opportunity, evaluation, promotion, task allocation, monitoring, or employment conditions.

The inventory should show how each output enters a decision, in addition to where the tool is used. For each point, HR leaders should ask five questions:

What human activity became data?
The aim is to see whether the system is reading evidence that belongs in the decision. A sales number, interview phrase, job title, response pattern, or activity log may be relevant. It may also be a poor proxy for capability, judgement, potential, or contribution.

What context was left out?
The missing context may be irrelevant, or it may change the meaning of the pattern. HR has to know which kind of absence it is dealing with.

Who reviewed the output?
Naming a reviewer is a thin control if the reviewer cannot see the underlying evidence or challenge the system’s recommendation. Oversight has to leave a trace of what was checked.

Where could someone disagree?
Correction has to be possible before the output hardens into a decision. Disagreement may come from a recruiter, candidate, employee, line manager, HR business partner, works council, legal reviewer, or decision panel. The organisation needs that path before a dispute appears.

How did it reach the final decision?
The same score carries different risk depending on its place in the workflow. It may remain background input. It may set the order of the shortlist. It may appear in a leadership pack. Someone may rewrite it into a recommendation. It may enter a calibration meeting as a category.

For example, an AI-supported shortlist entry should record more than the score. It should show which evidence the system used, which context remained outside the model, who reviewed the output, whether the reviewer accepted or challenged it, and how the result appeared in the hiring manager’s material. If a recruiter overrides a ranking because interview evidence changes the interpretation, that override and its reason should travel with the shortlist.

The leadership problem

High-risk AI in HR crosses several functions: procurement sees the vendor, IT sees the integration, legal sees the classification, HR sees the workflow, and the hiring manager may see only the ranked shortlist. The candidate or employee may be the only person who knows which part of the profile was misread.

Each function can do its own part correctly while the organisation still lacks a clear account of how the judgement moved from evidence to decision. The judgement trail gives leaders a shared way to examine what happened before the case reached the meeting. Managers need enough process knowledge to see how the output entered the decision, what evidence it carries, what it omits, who reviewed it, who could challenge it, and how it influenced the final decision.

Organisations adopt HR technology to increase consistency, reduce administrative load, and improve speed. These aims are understandable in high-volume HR work. AI may also correct some weaknesses of purely manual processes. It can apply the same screening rule across a larger candidate pool, surface patterns that busy teams might miss, and reduce some forms of informal inconsistency.

Those gains still leave an evidential test. A tool can process information consistently and still process a poor proxy. It can reduce administrative work and still give decision-makers a thin version of the person. It can produce a plausible recommendation while leaving the organisation unable to show why that recommendation deserved weight.

HR AI governance needs a way to separate processing efficiency from evidential sufficiency. A tool may process information efficiently. A decision may still require more context. A system may produce a plausible recommendation. A leadership team may still need to ask whether the person has been made readable in the right way for the decision being made.

The practical test

The European high-risk AI discussion gives HR leaders a dated regulatory reason to examine a problem that has existed for years: organisations often decide from shortened versions of people.

A practical test is to choose one AI-supported people decision and follow the path from input to output to human review to decision forum. Identify what became data, what disappeared, who reviewed it, who could challenge it, and how the output reached the final discussion. Then ask whether the final decision-maker saw enough evidence to justify the conclusion.

That path will usually show whether the gap is in compliance, evidence, managerial interpretation, or the handover between them. When a people decision is supported by AI, HR should be able to show how the judgement moved from input to output to human decision.

An organisation can have a policy, a vendor file, and a human sign-off, and still be unable to show how the person became readable enough to decide on. The judgement trail should show how that reading was produced, where it was checked, and whether it was accurate enough to justify the decision

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The scene is easy to file under generational anxiety. Young people, AI, jobs, fear, bad timing. Convenient categories. Too convenient.

Graduation is already a strange ceremony. It congratulates people for surviving one system of measurement, then sends them into another that has learned to smile while measuring them. School at least had the vulgar honesty of grades. Work prefers vocabulary.

There is something almost too Huxleyan about it now. The ceremony is polite. That is part of the problem. Nobody says: welcome to the invisible exam. That would ruin the catering.

The old white-collar promise was simple enough to survive for decades. Study, perform, enter a profession, and knowledge will become security, autonomy, status and progression. The promise was unevenly distributed, and many people knew that even while repeating it. It still shaped the story families, universities, employers and workers told about education and work.

A degree did more than certify learning. It suggested entry into a world where the mind would be used, judgement would matter, responsibility would grow, and performance would slowly become a professional life. The prestige of white-collar work depended on that sequence: knowledge, contribution, progression, security.

The pressure now begins where work struggles to prove what it does with a person’s knowledge.

Many office roles are full of activity. Meetings, preparation, status updates, summaries, presentations, alignment calls, careful wording. People work. Often they work a great deal. The question is what the organisation does with the judgement inside that work.

A person sees a problem early. The organisation thanks them for the input. By the next meeting, the problem has become a sensitivity. By the final deck, it is a footnote with no owner. The employee learns something from this. Accuracy is allowed to travel when it stops embarrassing the room.

This is where the subject connects to The Lies That Hold the System Together. The book examines the point where official organisational stories separate from daily experience. That separation rarely needs a dramatic lie. It can happen through polite language, diluted warnings, internal proof of activity, and decisions that never quite meet the information people already have.

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A company speaks about value while employees spend much of the week proving that work happened. It speaks about responsibility while the space for judgement remains narrow. It speaks about autonomy while people learn which observations arrive too early and which sentences cost more than the meeting can afford.

White-collar work still has to prove that knowledge can reach consequence.

That proof appears when a specialist sees a risk and the decision changes. It appears when a customer complaint moves as operational information, not reputation management. It appears when a manager receives bad news and keeps it intact long enough for someone to act on it.

That is the part of work people still want to believe in.

AI arrives at an uncomfortable moment because many white-collar jobs had already lost part of this route. When a role is largely made of text movement, internal coordination, summary production and status updates, generative systems make an old problem harder to avoid. They ask a blunt question many organisations preferred to leave in human fog: where, exactly, was the judgement the organisation needed?

This is why an optimistic AI speech can sound so misjudged at a graduation ceremony. The graduate has just left a system where evaluation had a visible form. They enter a system where performance, visibility, loyalty, judgement and organisational tolerance mix in less explicit ways. The speech asks them to be excited about the future. The labour market asks them to trust an older bargain whose evidence has become weaker.

People already inside white-collar work know this from the other side. Good work rarely travels by itself. It needs someone to keep it recognisable while it passes through the organisation. Sometimes it loses force because it has been made acceptable before it has been made useful.

The workplace rarely calls this an exam. It has more elegant methods.

The better version of white-collar work is easy to recognise when it happens. Someone sees something before it becomes expensive. The organisation lets the observation remain sharp enough to be useful. A decision changes. A process changes. A customer is handled differently. A risk is understood earlier.

The person can see that their work reached something.

That matters more than most corporate language about meaning. People can tolerate dull tasks, conflict and repetition for longer than motivational literature likes to admit. What corrodes judgement is the repeated experience of seeing something clearly and learning that clarity must be reduced before it can move.

After a while, people adapt. They observe more cautiously. They take less responsibility where responsibility has no consequence. They learn what the organisation rewards: the useful observation, the well-timed silence, the pleasant version of the truth, the visible performance of being busy.

The mistrust around the old career promise should be treated as information. Graduation language still draws from an older dictionary. It speaks as if education leads into a professional world where knowledge naturally becomes contribution. Many people inside that world already know how often the route breaks.

White-collar work still has to prove that knowledge can reach consequence. That proof is created in daily work: when an observation reaches the people who can use it, when a warning survives the meeting in which it first becomes inconvenient, when a person’s judgement changes what the organisation does next.

A degree may get you in. Office status may make the role look safer than it is. The evidence sits in the path between what a person knows and what the organisation does with it

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Last week I decided to try something from The Lies That Hold the System Together, a book I had just finished. There was a part in the book about what happens to a message after a meeting, and it felt a bit too familiar.

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So yesterday, at the end of our Monday meeting, I did something different. I skipped the usual motivational round and the reframing, and asked everyone to write down one sentence: what in today’s discussion do you think will need a decision? Honestly, they looked at me as if I had asked them to hand over their phones.

Then the answers came in. Three out of five people had written something different from what I had in mind. One wrote: ‘We’ll keep an eye on this.’ I had been thinking we needed a decision by Friday. Another wrote: ‘The supplier side is still taking shape.’ No name, no deadline, no cost.

Reading it was pretty grim, but at least I don’t have to rely on my hunches anymore. Hmm... Not bad. I caught where my message had been shortened. I noticed which sentence had lost the decision. It became clear who had heard risk and who had heard an admin task.

Right, people are already coming over... I’ll come back to this later. Looks like Monday’s meeting has an afterlife today.

P.S. Hard to put into words, but this is a strangely special Tuesday morning.

Have a similarly odd little Tuesday, all you leaders in the middle.

Lilien Gerlach — Notes from a behavioural analyst Author of The Lies That Hold the System Togethe

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By Thursday morning, it appears in a short update. The client name is still there, but the decision request has become “needs further alignment”.

By Friday, it enters the pre-read for the leadership meeting. The client name is gone. The date is gone. The owner has become “the team”. The issue now sits under “delivery dependency”.

On Monday, leadership receives the pack. The issue is visible. It has a line, a status, and a short explanation. The version on the table still looks professional. It also carries less decision value than the first version.

That last passage before a decision is easy to underestimate. It is where information is shortened, renamed, moved under safer headings, and separated from the person who first raised it.

Blame turns this into a personal drama too quickly. The more useful question is traceability: can leadership still see who changed what, why it changed, and whether the original decision request is still attached to the issue?

Before the meeting, leaders can already be assessed by whether they ask what happened to the information on its way to the table.

Who removed the date?
Who changed the owner?
Who replaced the client name with a category?
Who changed the decision request into something to monitor?
Who kept the status colour unchanged while the wording underneath became more careful?

The last mile before a decision is not just preparation. It shapes what leadership believes it is deciding on.

The Lies That Hold the System Together will be published next Monday, 8 June 2026.

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Let’s review 8 behaviour signs and decide afterwards.

• The person who raised the concern disappears from the wording. It becomes “feedback”, “noise”, “a concern”, or “some comments”.

• The issue stays in private conversation for weeks before it enters a report, dashboard, risk register, or leadership pack.

• Dates, numbers, client names, costs, deadlines or ownership are replaced with general language.

• A warning is renamed as a “dependency”, “timing issue”, “alignment point”, “sensitivity”, or “area to monitor”.

• More evidence is requested at the point where the existing evidence would already require a decision.

• The status colour remains unchanged while careful explanatory text is added underneath.

• People describe the problem accurately at the coffee machine after the meeting, then present a cleaner version in the formal forum.

• The issue moves to the next meeting, next review, next quarter or next phase without naming the decision that was avoided.

Are there consequences? Definitely.

Can that affect your life in an organisation? Probably much more than you can imagine.

Just to mention a few: budgets, project priorities, accountability, careers, customer relationships, and the quality of the decision itself.

The Lies That Hold the System Together will be published next Monday, 8 June 2026.

I will share the link here on Monday.

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As a market move, it works. Professionally, it is much more troubling.

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A book of this kind takes a concept with clinical and forensic origins, turns it into workplace survival advice, and then leaves the reader to decide whether the pattern fits their own boss, colleague, or HR partner. The cover, title, and examples say: look around, you may already know who this is. The internal warnings about caution arrive later, and they carry less force than the promise itself.

The route by which the material reaches people is secondary. It may be a book, a talk, a workshop, a conference recommendation, or a professional conversation. The same mechanism is at work: a lay audience receives a category that can be applied to its own workplace relationships. The issue is not reading as a form of information-gathering. The issue is labelling, indicated here by a popular psychology product.

In a workplace mental health setting, this kind of material gains professional cover. The participant encounters it in a programme where people are talking about HR, wellbeing, leadership, boundaries, stress, and organisational responsibility. Something they can buy or hear in that setting may easily be treated as part of responsible workplace thinking.

The employee in this situation is a lay user. They work with partial information. They see a few meetings, read a few emails, hear stories from others, and carry their own experience. They do not have access to every decision paper, they do not see the leadership conversations, they do not know every version of the story, and they are usually not in a protected investigative position. They do have a boss, a performance review, an internal reputation, financial dependence, previous grievances, and a few events that can now be arranged under a new category.

This is where the popular psychology market promises more than the material can professionally support. The product serves a desire for identification while borrowing the language of responsibility. It may include warnings about caution, but the use situation barely changes. The participant receives a concept, a few memorable signs, and an interpretive frame that can easily be placed onto specific people.

Books of this kind may have some limited observational value. They can direct attention to the fact that workplace harm often appears outside open conflict. It may appear when someone builds reputation from other people’s work, shifts responsibility downwards, withholds information, presents a tidy picture in formal forums, behaves differently in smaller settings, and the person who raises a concern then finds their own position damaged. These patterns can be examined at organisational level. The problem arises when the participant receives a personality category in place of a procedure.

Caponecchia, Sun, and Wyatt studied how 307 Australian employees applied psychopathy-related labels and behavioural criteria to colleagues. The study found that lay employees may apply the psychopathy label and its criteria to colleagues at a rate that exceeds scientific prevalence estimates. The authors point to the risk of misclassification and stigma even in cases where the starting point was genuinely unacceptable workplace behaviour (Caponecchia, Sun, & Wyatt, 2012).

That study does not prove that every book or talk of this kind causes measurable harm. There is no good estimate of the size of the risk. We do not know exactly how often lay labelling leads to harm, how often it remains a harmless reader impression, or how often it helps someone notice a genuinely damaging pattern. The article’s claim is narrower: the use situation carries a labelling risk that HR and workplace mental health settings need to take seriously.

Harmful workplace behaviour exists. Some leaders and colleagues use other people’s work to build their own reputation, shift responsibility downwards, collect and redeploy information, present different faces to different audiences, and over time cause significant damage to people, teams, and decisions. These patterns need to be seen. Workplace handling requires precise language, multi-source inquiry, and procedure.

A lay label gives a final explanation too early. A leader presents other people’s prepared material as their own result across three projects. After a complaint, the complainant’s reputation deteriorates. After a decision failure, responsibility moves downwards. A detail from an informal conversation later appears in another context. These may indicate a behavioural pattern. They may indicate an organisational risk. They may point to poor leadership, political manoeuvring, weak controls, abusive practice, or undocumented decision discipline. A personality label pulls these possibilities towards one internal explanation.

Professional assessment is a different operation. The PCL-R, used in psychopathy assessment, is a twenty-item instrument used in clinical, research, and forensic contexts, together with a semi-structured interview, file material, and external information. This kind of assessment requires training, access to information, evaluative responsibility, and the right application context. A workplace participant works from partial experience. They sense behaviour, hear stories, and see power relations, but they do not have the data and procedural conditions required for a professional assessment.

Smith and Lilienfeld point in the same direction. Their review argues that media and professional attention around workplace psychopathy has moved ahead of stable empirical evidence. The phenomenon can be studied, and destructive workplace behaviour exists, but the popular explanatory frame often spreads faster than the method needed for responsible use (Smith & Lilienfeld, 2013).

At this point, two genres need to be separated. Lay psychoeducation can have a place in workplace mental health. Well-designed programmes can help leaders notice overload, help employees know where to turn, reduce stigma, and support earlier intervention. That is a different genre from putting a clinical-forensic category into circulation as a language for identifying dangerous people at work. Responsible mental health literacy teaches help-seeking, support, early signalling, leadership response, and organisational risk management. A person-hunting logic directs attention elsewhere.

This is especially sensitive in an HR setting linked to mental health. Workplace mental health is an organisational responsibility: assessing psychosocial risks, examining leadership behaviour, handling complaints, protecting people from retaliation, running documented procedures, and involving external expertise where needed. A book promising recognition of dangerous personality types is a cheap and visible substitute. It is easy to consume. It has a good title. It gives an immediate explanation. It does not do the organisational work.

For an employee in a subordinate position, labelling language carries a particular risk. Once spoken, it can turn back on the speaker. The organisation may hear the label before it hears the events behind it. A diagnostic-sounding label is immediately open to attack. A behaviour-based report is more examinable: who did what, when, in which decision situation, on whose information, with what consequence, where it was recorded, and how it repeated.

That does not provide automatic protection. In a closed, punitive, or loyalty-driven organisational culture, even a carefully documented report can be risky. The risk is handled through reporting channels, anti-retaliation protection, leadership response, HR procedure, and legal-organisational control. The advantage of behaviour-based language is narrower: it makes the issue more examinable because it ties the report to an event, a decision, a document, and a consequence. Protection has to come from the procedure.

Research on employee voice and silence has long shown that employees weigh up who they can tell, what the consequences may be, whether their position will be damaged, whether they will receive support, or whether they themselves will become the carrier of the problem. Morrison’s review shows why voice and silence have become a major research area: speaking up has consequences for both individuals and organisations (Morrison, 2023). In this context, giving a clinically derived label to people in lower-power positions is a risky educational gesture. The employee receives a language with which to explain what they see. They do not receive the protected organisational position in which they can use that language without consequences.

In these cases, HR’s work is behavioural and procedural. Where an organisation sees recurring complaints, fear, turnover, responsibility-shifting, reputational attacks, information withholding, or appropriation of other people’s work, the events need examination. Who did what, when, in which decision situation, on whose information, with what consequence. Where it appeared in writing. Who received it. Who changed it. Who left it unchanged. Which decision went through in the same form. Which team saw the pattern repeat.

That examination starts from complaint handling, exit interviews, internal moves, performance reviews, sickness and turnover patterns, meeting notes, emails, project delays, customer complaints, and decision trails. In severe cases, employment law, compliance, organisational psychology, or other external expertise may be needed. HR’s role is to turn the report into an examinable event, the event into a procedure, and the procedure into consequence.

A behavioural analysis frame looks at observable movement. In what situation does the behaviour appear. In front of whom does it change. What information disappears. Whose responsibility increases. Who receives the credit. Who carries the error. Which document preserves the trace. Which decision remains unchanged after the signal. How many independent people describe a similar pattern.

This frame makes handling more precise. Manipulative, abusive, or exploitative conduct becomes an organisational issue when repetition, decision points, documents, affected people, and consequences can be seen. A label moves quickly but does little organisational work. Behavioural description moves more slowly, but it is better suited to preventing an issue from remaining a personal impression.

The behavioural patterns found in popular books and talks can be turned into usable organisational material. The diagnostic label has to be removed, and the patterns have to be translated into a behaviour-based reporting protocol. The practical question is what repeated behaviour appears, which decisions it affects, who is harmed, where the trace is, and what organisational response follows.

A responsible HR guide would provide four things. Label-free behavioural description: what to record, which event, which decision point, which document, which consequence. Multi-source inquiry: how to handle different complaints, data, exit patterns, and documents together. Protection from retaliation: whom the employee can approach, who accesses the information, what happens to the report, and how the reporting person is protected. A threshold for external expertise: when HR needs employment law, compliance, organisational psychology, or another external specialist.

The workplace mental health market offers quickly consumable psychological language for situations where employees may be experiencing harm, fear, or loss of influence. That quick language can easily become a personality label where the organisation does not run a system in which concrete behaviour can be reported and examined.

Psychological concepts in HR and workplace mental health settings acquire workplace use. They attach to people, conflicts, leaders, HR figures, and decisions. Difficult workplace behaviour patterns need to be discussed. The responsible form ties them to behaviour, evidence, procedure, and protection.

The employee needs an organisation where a concrete event can be reported, the report can be examined, retaliation can be handled, and HR does not hand over to the reader the work for which it should be running a system.

Lilien Gerlach
From a behavioural analyst’s notebook

References

Caponecchia, C., Sun, A. Y. Z., & Wyatt, A. (2012). ‘Psychopaths’ at work? Implications of lay persons’ use of labels and behavioural criteria for psychopathy. Journal of Business Ethics, 107(4), 399–408.

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107.

Risk Management Authority. (2019). Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R).

Smith, S. F., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18(2), 204–218

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Who finds out first? Who does the information go back to? Who writes their performance review? Who assigns the next shift? Who might decide on a possible transfer? The employee uses these questions to calculate what may happen the next day on shift, in the next review, in a transfer decision, or in the first leadership discussion.

A recent case gave this question a concrete point of reference: the Tata Consultancy Services back-office case in Nashik.

According to Reuters’ report of 11 May 2026, India’s National Commission for Women (NCW) found a “toxic workplace environment” at TCS’s Nashik unit. The Commission identified harassment, bullying, and breaches of India’s rules on workplace sexual harassment. The unit under review had around 150 employees, within a company that employs more than 584,000 people globally.

In a global company, the presence of central regulation seems self-evident. The local employee still reads the situation from their own environment. They see who can be approached. Who responded before. Which issue stayed verbal. Which complaint was followed by a change in someone’s shift pattern. Who received protection, and who was left alone. They learn how the complaints route works from these cases.

According to the investigation reported by The Times of India, the Nashik office lacked the local information needed for complaint handling. Employees could not clearly see whom they could contact, how the members of the internal committee could be reached, and what route a report would follow.

The final detail is this: the investigation also found that several female employees had wanted to complain, but held back because of fear, social pressure, family stigma, and concern about transfer or dismissal.

The organisational life of a complaint

For the employee, the existence of a procedure, a committee and a legal obligation is not enough. Before submitting a report, they need to see how the system works in their own workplace situation.

Who takes over the case? Who writes it down? Who follows it up? Who prevents the information from returning to the same local circle whose conduct the employee was trying to report?

An organisation can handle such a situation in two ways. In the first, the report triggers the prescribed process: the case is recorded, the complainant can see the next step, and local actors cannot informally reverse the whole matter. In the second, the employee sees that the report exists as a procedural option, while the consequences appear first in their own working day.

This is where the official route of the case separates from what the employee expects to happen the next day. Fear of retaliation rarely appears as an open threat. Employees often fear consequences that are difficult to prove later with a single document: a worse shift pattern, exclusion from a task, a more distant leadership response, or a weaker review under the language of collaboration or attitude.

These consequences are not always visible from the outside. They still shape the decision, because the employee is not thinking in legal categories. They are thinking about the next working day.

A complaint is also a social event. Others watch what happens to the complainant: whether the issue becomes a written case, whether the procedure starts, whether the complainant’s work changes, whether they receive protection, or whether the whole matter slides back into the familiar local way of working.

Silence in this setting is learned risk calculation. Employees use previous cases to assess what they risk if they speak. If, in the past, a complainant received worse shifts, was left out of a project, or their case circulated verbally for weeks, others learn from that. The mere existence of a policy is not enough.

Why this case caught my attention

TCS employs more than 584,000 people. From the outside, an employee in a company of that size appears to be part of a large system: policies, internal committees, legal frameworks and compliance processes surround them. At the moment of complaint, the risk moves very close. The employee does not have to work the next day with the whole company. They have to work with the people who may see the report, shape their schedule, influence their tasks, review their work, or signal informally to others how they should be treated.

Even in a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, the consequence of a report may appear first in the employee’s next-day workplace environment, not in the central system.

The complaints channel is tested where the employee returns to work after submitting the report

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Leadership research has long tried to define what makes a leader credible. The classic answers are familiar enough: be reliable, communicate clearly, understand the area you lead, be consistent, show empathy, and do not turn authenticity into an over-produced performance. Transformational leadership organises the question around inspiration, role modelling and a shared purpose (Bass, 1985; Bass & Riggio, 2006). Leader–member exchange theory focuses on the quality of the relationship between the leader and the employee: where there is more trust, respect and reciprocity, commitment and cooperation can become stronger (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). The model of authentic leadership emphasises self-awareness, transparency, acting in line with internal values and balanced decision-making (Walumbwa et al., 2008).

These concepts are useful, though they can easily sound as if the company were a moral training programme and leadership credibility were a matter of a few competencies to develop. Organisations are more stubborn than that. They operate through shareholder expectations, market pressure, internal status games, bonus systems, headcount limits, information hierarchies and risk-averse decision routines. The leader tries to remain credible inside this space. Sometimes that requires personal integrity. Sometimes political judgement. Sometimes the ability to turn a message arriving from a spreadsheet into a human sentence without stripping all reality out of it.

Leadership credibility therefore cannot be treated purely as a personality trait. Employees often read the system through the leader. They watch what is actually backed, and what is not. Which value lasts only until it costs money. Which promise survives an uncomfortable decision. Which piece of information suddenly becomes confidential just as responsibility for the decision would become visible. From a behavioural analysis point of view, this matters because credibility is formed not only by what leaders say about themselves, but also by what their repeated decisions allow people to infer.

Trust as an economic resource

It is easy to talk about trust as if it were a soft human factor. Companies like trust for very hard reasons. Trust speeds up cooperation, reduces the need for control, makes information flow more easily, and lowers the internal energy loss created when everyone starts looking for a second meaning behind every sentence. A classic model of trust argues that trust is built, among other things, on perceptions of the other party’s ability, benevolence and integrity (Mayer et al., 1995). In a leadership context, this becomes very concrete: does the leader understand what they are talking about; do they take employees’ situation into account; do they stand by what they previously represented?

Organisational trust is therefore more than a matter of mood. It reduces operating cost. Where employees believe that the leader is not manipulating important information, fewer defensive routines are needed. Fewer extra checks, fewer cautious people copied into emails, fewer corridor explanations in the background. The organisation does not become paradise. It simply burns less energy protecting itself from itself.

Then comes the less celebratory part. Many organisations are happy to consume trust, but less willing to pay the cost of maintaining it. Producing trust requires time, consistency, explanation, predictability and sometimes short-term loss. Quarterly targets are a simpler genre. They do not enjoy long explanations. They prefer numbers, ideally before month-end.

This is one of the basic tensions of leadership credibility. Organisations often want leaders whom people trust while running incentives that reward behaviour that damages trust. Fast cost-cutting, reports polished on their way upwards, conflict-avoiding decisions, optimism communicated too early, problems named too late. None of this is automatically malice. Much more often, it is adaptation. The trouble begins because employees adapt as well. They say less, ask more cautiously, and pay closer attention to which truths are still worth bringing into the system.

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The middle manager as a translation point

Leadership credibility becomes especially interesting at middle-management level. Senior leadership often speaks in strategic language; teams live with operational consequences. The middle manager stands between the two. They translate cost pressure, shareholder expectations, restructuring, headcount limits, AI implementation or an “efficiency improvement programme” into everyday sentences. That is already a difficult role. During translation, something is always decided: how much reality remains, and how much becomes manageable corporate language.

“We are increasing operational efficiency” can be an accurate business statement. It can also be a polite way of saying that the same work will need to be done by fewer people. A “more flexible operating model” can mean better decision speed. It can also mean that uncertainty has finally been given a friendlier name. The lovely thing about corporate language is that almost anything unpleasant can appear as a development opportunity if the font size in the presentation is large enough.

This is where the middle manager’s credibility becomes fragile. Their personal view of the decision is only one part of the matter. The way they handle the responsibility of translation also counts. If every uncomfortable decision is packaged as if it will bring long-term benefits for everyone, the team learns that the leader’s language does not inform; it cushions damage. If, on the other hand, the leader comments cynically on every senior decision, they start dismantling their own leadership role. Credibility often shows in how long a leader can remain accurate in a situation where the system encourages vagueness.

This is not a simple moral test. Middle managers often genuinely cannot say everything. There are legal, commercial, personal and strategic limits. Employees usually understand that. What they tolerate less well is unnecessary fog. The leader speaks imprecisely not because they are not allowed to be precise, but because precision would be more uncomfortable.

Transparency where information is power

Transparency is one of the favourite words of modern corporate language. Few organisations describe themselves as closed, opaque and selectively honest. Most companies promise open communication. Over time, employees learn that transparency can mean real explanation, and it can also mean carefully rationed information.

Information inside an organisation is not neutral material. It gives access, status, protection and influence. Those who know earlier what is changing can adapt earlier. Those who see the real numbers interpret official optimism differently. Those who understand where a decision came from can also see where questions might be asked. For that reason, transparency is more than a communication style. It also touches power relations.

Leaders often face genuine dilemmas. Information shared too early, while still incomplete, can create panic. Information shared too late can damage trust. Too much detail can drag attention away from the point. Too little detail can sound empty. Employees do not expect every strategic document to appear immediately on the shared drive. Given the usual state of shared drives, that would be a fairly modest danger anyway. What they watch is how accurately the leader speaks within the room they actually have.

“This information cannot currently be shared” is therefore a sensitive sentence. It may be entirely legitimate. It may be justified by data protection, commercial reasons or legal constraints. Credibility depends on how often it appears, in what situation, and whether it is later followed by a meaningful explanation. If the sentence appears whenever a question becomes uncomfortable, it stops functioning as a confidentiality boundary and becomes an organisational reflex. After a while, employees no longer hear the answer. They hear the pattern.

Empathy under budget pressure

Research on supportive and attentive leadership behaviour generally links it to higher trust, satisfaction and willingness to cooperate. For this article, the general value of empathy is less interesting than the practical room an organisation gives leaders to behave empathetically.

The organisational value of leadership empathy is not self-evident. A leader can be personally attentive while operating inside a budget that does not allow empathy to have practical consequences. They listen to an overloaded team, then continue with the same target and the same headcount. They acknowledge the risk of burnout, then remain unable to change the deadline. They speak in a human tone while the operating conditions stay the same.

In these situations, employees do not necessarily doubt the kindness. They look at its backing. Does anything follow from what the leader has heard? Does anything change in workload, priorities, expectations or the decision process? If nothing changes, empathy becomes a communication gesture. It makes the situation more civilised, but it does not change the conditions producing the situation.

That does not make empathy worthless. Leadership coldness rarely improves organisational functioning; it merely looks simpler. The problem begins when empathy becomes the cheaper substitute for system change. Listening without resources. Recognition without capacity. A caring tone alongside unchanged overload. This combination can reduce tension in the short term, but over time it teaches the organisation that human language and operational logic work in two separate departments.

Competence in uncertain conditions

Competence is one of the least romantic parts of credibility. Employees generally dislike following a leader who visibly does not understand the situation in which they are making decisions. Yet leadership competence today is rarely limited to technical expertise. Leaders often have to give direction in areas where they themselves are working with uncertain information: technological change, AI, market decline, geopolitical risk, supply chains, regulatory change, labour shortages and cost pressure.

In this environment, all-knowing leadership confidence quickly becomes suspicious. Employees notice when a presentation contains more certainty than reality does. No special training is needed. A few reversed decisions, three over-optimistic all-hands meetings and one strategic document containing the phrase “robust execution model”, while the hardest part of the project plan still has no owner, will usually do the job.

Credible competence here does not mean infallibility. A leader appears competent when they understand the nature of uncertainty, can distinguish between fact, estimate and hope, and do not confuse communication confidence with an information base. Research suggests that leadership effectiveness cannot be reduced to one single trait; technical ability, relational behaviour, decision quality and context all shape the result (Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Harms & Credé, 2010).

Competence becomes a credibility issue when the leader also has to handle their own uncertainty. If everything is presented as certain, and reality keeps forcing the leader to withdraw their own statements, employees do not only trust the specific decision less. They begin to recalibrate the leader’s ability to read the situation. This is one form of quiet trust loss.

Authenticity inside an organisational role

Authentic leadership theory argues that a leader builds lasting trust when they act with self-awareness, transparency and alignment with their values (Walumbwa et al., 2008). This is a strong idea, but it is easy to misunderstand inside an organisation. A leader is never present purely as a private person. They carry a role. They represent responsibility. Sometimes they have to communicate a decision they did not initiate. Sometimes they have to stand behind a target they do not personally see as ideal, because their leadership role requires them to implement it.

Authenticity, then, cannot mean unlimited self-expression. A leader cannot say everything simply because it feels honest. The organisation is not a therapy room, even if after some meetings there may be a case for one. Leadership authenticity is better measured by how far the leader can speak without distortion inside the role they hold. They do not over-dramatise their own honesty, they do not perform being the team’s friend while holding decision power over them, and they do not pretend every uncomfortable decision is a shared adventure.

Employees often sense this difference very accurately. They do not expect the leader to be completely personal in every situation. They expect the leader not to build false closeness where the relationship is in fact asymmetrical. A leader can say that they are unable to discuss certain things. They can also say that the team has to work with a decision, even if it is difficult. That is usually more credible than packaging every structural constraint as personal enthusiasm.

What does the employee learn from this?

Inside organisations, employees constantly learn which behaviours are worth it. They rarely describe it this way. They do not sit down in the morning and decide to update their model of leadership credibility. They watch simpler things. What happens to the person who brings bad news? Does the person who asks a clarifying question receive an answer? Is there any consequence when a leader promises something? Does the same rule apply at higher levels? How long is honesty treated as a value, and when does it become “a negative attitude”?

Research on employee voice and silence suggests that people weigh up whether speaking up about a problem, idea or criticism may carry personal risk, and whether it is likely to have any meaningful effect (Morrison, 2023; Milliken et al., 2003; Detert & Edmondson, 2011). This connects directly to leadership credibility. If a leader says they are open to feedback, then handles uncomfortable feedback with defensiveness, dismissal or silence, the team learns. Next time, less information arrives. It may not appear as visible resistance. It often appears as subtle editing.

This is one of the key points in organisational behaviour: loss of credibility does not always produce conflict. Often, it produces professional silence. People do not slam doors, hold revolutionary meetings in the tea kitchen, or write a manifesto for the internal newsletter. They simply become more cautious. They document more. They commit less verbally. They leave more questions inside their own heads. From the outside, the organisation continues to function. Less reality reaches the places where decisions about that reality could be made.

Why is it difficult to be credible today?

The conversation around leadership credibility often suggests that the answer lies in better self-reflection, better communication, more empathy and greater transparency. These are genuinely necessary. The picture remains incomplete, however, unless we examine the system in which these behaviours have to be practised. Leaders behave differently where short-term financial targets override everything else. They behave differently where uncomfortable information is punished on its way upwards. They behave differently where leadership bonuses are tied to cost reduction while the company values include respect for people. The latter is at least linguistically harmonious. Organisationally, less so.

The organisational conditions of credibility are therefore at least as important as the leader’s personal qualities. A leader may be fair, but if they regularly have to represent decisions for which there is no real explanation, their voice starts to wear thin over time. They may be empathetic, but if they have no room to reduce workload, the backing behind their empathy weakens. They may be competent, but if the organisation prevents the real risk from being named for political reasons, that competence cannot become fully visible.

This does not absolve the leader. Organisational constraint does not remove individual responsibility. It makes the question more precise. Leadership credibility is shaped by what the leader does with the room they have been given. How much they distort, how much they clarify, how much reality they allow through, and when they choose the accurate sentence over the more comfortable one. This is rarely spectacular heroism. More often, it is a series of small decisions from which employees gradually work out how much it is worth believing the leader.

A behavioural analyst’s comment

Everyday workplace half-sentences often show the state of an organisation more accurately than official culture surveys. Not because they are major pieces of evidence on their own, but because they are tied to repeated situations. Employees learn which sentences were followed by real change, when consequences failed to appear, which promise had operational backing, and which remained a communication gesture.

This connects to the earlier view of trust. The backing behind trust first becomes visible not in the leader’s intention, but in what the organisation does with accurate information. If bad news, an uncomfortable question or raw feedback regularly creates risk for the person who says it, employees will not necessarily start arguing. Often, they start editing. They speak more briefly, write more cautiously, leave more traces behind them, and become increasingly accurate at judging which sentence may carry what price.

This is one source of professional silence. From the outside, it does not always look like resistance, because the form remains the same: the meeting takes place, the report is produced, the status update enters the system. The content changes. There is less early warning, less half-formed concern, fewer uncertain but important signals. The organisation is not simply losing information. It is weakening its own ability to recognise patterns.

The behavioural reading therefore does not look for moral judgement. It looks at the adaptation that appears when the backing behind leadership statements repeatedly proves weak. Loss of trust often becomes visible before any major rupture. It appears first in how employees speak, document, ask questions and take risks.

Closing

Leadership credibility today is more than a leadership development topic. It is an economic, organisational and behavioural question. Behind a leader’s behaviour stand incentives, information hierarchies, shareholder expectations, decision risks and cultural patterns. Employees do not describe it in those words. It is unlikely that someone by the coffee machine will say: “the political-economic conditions of managerial credibility are problematic.” Fortunately.

The sentences are usually simpler. “We’ve heard this a few times now.” “Let’s see what actually happens.” “I wouldn’t say that now.” “Put it in an email as well.” These sentences are small, but they reveal a great deal about the state of the organisation. Where leadership statements regularly have weak backing, people often avoid open dispute and adjust their own behaviour instead: they phrase things more cautiously, document more, and bring less raw information into the shared space.

The organisation still works. Meetings continue, reports get written, targets enter the next quarterly plan. Meanwhile, more and more people learn that the accurate sentence has a price, while the vaguer sentence often carries less personal risk.

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Sources and further reading

Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. Free Press.

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.

Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611–628.

Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader–member exchange theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219–247.

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755–768.

Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734.

Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W., & Hewlin, P. F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence: Issues that employees don’t communicate upward and why. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1453–1476.

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107.

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126

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A job interview does more than test whether someone can answer questions under pressure. It gives an organisation an early reading of how that person handles disagreement, hierarchy, and interpersonal risk. Research on employee voice and silence is useful here. Voice concerns the discretionary act of raising ideas, concerns, or objections that matter to the work. Silence concerns the withholding of those concerns. Employees often remain silent because they expect negative consequences, because they assume speaking up will not change anything, or because they have absorbed tacit rules about when candour is unsafe [1–3].

Picture a job interview. A professionally competent, promising candidate takes their seat. The usual questions come one after another, interrupted from time to time by questions that sound interesting at first glance, but seem secondary.

• Tell us about a situation, within whatever details you are able to share, where you disagreed with your colleagues on a professional matter.

• You have to work from a report, and it contains an error made by your highly regarded line manager. What do you do?

Questions like these are already doing more than checking polish. They sample how a candidate narrates disagreement, whether they can name an error tied to status, and how much of their judgement remains intact when the answer may carry a social cost. Interviews are strongly social-evaluative settings, and the research literature treats impression management as a central part of what happens inside them. Applicants do not simply report who they are. They actively shape what is visible, and that shaping can affect interview ratings [4–6].

Then, at certain points in the interview, the candidate starts to weigh up how far their answer should reflect what they actually think. In an effort to avoid conflict, the answer often loses some of its original shape and force: the reservation becomes milder, the problem is named less precisely, and the professional judgement is not expressed in full. It may also be that the candidate wants the job badly enough to try to give the answer they assume an ideal candidate would give [6–8].

Compromise in an interview rarely begins with a blatant invention. More often, it begins with truncation. The candidate removes the part of the answer that would create friction. A substantive disagreement becomes a matter of communication style. A firm professional judgement becomes a cautious preference. An error made by a senior person becomes a delicate ambiguity that “needed clarification”. Research distinguishes honest from deceptive impression management, which matters because not every polished answer is false [7]. The pressure to manage the impression remains real, and interview anxiety is one of the factors that can push candidates further in that direction [7, 8].

In the short term, this can even look advantageous. A smooth, easy-to-work-with manner is welcome in many places. In the interview itself, however, that adjustment also changes the signal that becomes available. Less friction is created in the room, but less of the candidate’s professional judgement is made fully visible.

That short-term advantage is easy to understand. Candidates know that likeability, composure, and fluency can influence interview evaluations. Meta-analytic work on impression management shows that applicants’ self-presentational tactics do shape ratings, so softening an answer can feel like a rational adjustment to the setting [4, 5]. The difficulty is that the adjustment changes the signal the organisation receives. It does not only lower friction in the room. It also lowers the visibility of judgement.

In that sense, the interview can function as an early behavioural sample of how a person handles professional judgement under social pressure. Detert and Edmondson’s work on implicit voice theories shows that people carry taken-for-granted rules about when speaking up is risky or inappropriate [3]. Those rules are often enacted before a person is formally inside the organisation. The interview can be the first moment when the candidate demonstrates, in public, whether they preserve their view under pressure or convert it into something easier to receive.

From there, the reading needs to stay narrow. A compromised answer in a job interview can show that softening, partial withholding, or careful editing of professional judgement is available to the person under social pressure.

None of this is to say that interviewers themselves do not shape the interaction. Their own clarity, consistency, and tolerance for disagreement also affect whether a candidate’s compromise is a choice or a response to a perceived demand.

A job interview concentrates evaluation, hierarchy, acceptance and risk into the same short exchange. In that setting, a clear professional view can carry a social cost. The person responds by diluting, editing or holding back part of what they actually think. That response may be occasional. It may also belong to a broader pattern. The interview shows the response. It does not show its full range.

That reading also has support in the organisational literature. Managers do not respond equally to every form of speaking up. Burris found that employees who used more challenging forms of voice were viewed as worse performers and had their ideas endorsed less than employees whose voice was more supportive in form [9]. The finding comes from a specific organisational context and is not a universal law, but it illustrates a pattern that has been observed across multiple studies. A candidate who senses this possibility during an interview is not imagining a social risk that exists nowhere else. They are responding to a real organisational pattern. What the interview can show is that, under that kind of anticipated risk, the person may choose adaptation over full signal accuracy.

There is, however, an important qualification. Preserving professional judgement does not require theatrical bluntness. Research on applicant self-verification suggests that accuracy in self-presentation can work in favour of strong candidates. Moore and colleagues found that candidates with a stronger drive to present themselves accurately were, among high-quality candidates, more likely to receive an offer, partly because they were seen as less inauthentic and less misrepresentative [10]. This does not mean that every direct answer is rewarded. It means that faithful signalling is not automatically a disadvantage. In some cases, it reads as credibility.

If this pattern appears repeatedly in working life, it can reduce how much of a person’s actual judgement reaches shared decisions. The effect does not come from one compromised answer in one interview. It appears when softening, withholding, or careful editing becomes a recurrent way of handling professional risk. How much this matters, however, will vary across organisations, sectors, and national cultures – the cost of compromise is not the same everywhere.

That is where the broader organisational cost can begin. Teams learn through reporting errors, asking difficult questions, and surfacing concerns while there is still time to act on them. Edmondson’s work on psychological safety showed why this is difficult: behaviours that help teams learn often carry embarrassment or interpersonal threat [11]. Later meta-analytic work linked psychological safety to learning behaviour, task performance, and constructive contribution [12]. When the weakening of one’s own signal becomes a repeated way of handling professional risk, the organisation loses part of its access to what that person knows [1, 11, 12]. The loss is practical before it is moral. It affects what enters discussion, what gets corrected, and what remains invisible.

That also raises another question: out of these versions — not saying it, not saying it fully, and saying something quite different — which, if any, still falls within acceptable limits?

The most useful distinction here concerns signal accuracy. There are situations in which not saying something yet is understandable: the judgement is still forming, the facts are incomplete, or the timing makes the message impossible to hear properly. The decisive change often happens one step later, when the person does speak but weakens the answer enough that the receiver hears less concern, less certainty, or less independence than is actually present. Saying something quite different goes further still. At that point, the organisation is being given a misleading preview of how that person is likely to operate once hired. That matters because recruitment is, among other things, an act of inference under uncertainty. The organisation is not only selecting a skill set. It is estimating what kind of judgement will be available to the work later on [1, 10].

So what is the cost of compromise? And is it worth it?

Lilien Gerlach, behavioural analyst

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References

[1] Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-054654

[2] Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W., & Hewlin, P. F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence: Issues that employees don’t communicate upward and why. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1453–1476. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00387

[3] Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2011.61967925

[4] Levashina, J., & Campion, M. A. (2007). Measuring faking in the employment interview: Development and validation of an interview faking behavior scale. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), 1638–1656. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.6.1638

[5] Peck, J. A., & Levashina, J. (2017). Impression management and interview and job performance ratings: A meta-analysis of research design with tactics in mind. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 201. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00201

[6] Melchers, K. G., Roulin, N., & Buehl, A.-K. (2020). A review of applicant faking in selection interviews. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 28(2), 123–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12280

[7] Bourdage, J. S., Roulin, N., & Tarraf, R. (2018). “I (might be) just that good”: Honest and deceptive impression management in employment interviews. Personnel Psychology, 71(4), 597–632. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12285

[8] Powell, D. M., Bourdage, J. S., & Bonaccio, S. (2021). Shake and fake: The role of interview anxiety in deceptive impression management. Journal of Business and Psychology, 36(5), 829–840. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-020-09708-1

[9] Burris, E. R. (2012). The risks and rewards of speaking up: Managerial responses to employee voice. Academy of Management Journal, 55(4), 851–875. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0562

[10] Moore, C., Lee, S. Y., Kim, K., & Cable, D. M. (2017). The advantage of being oneself: The role of applicant self-verification in organizational hiring decisions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(11), 1493–1513. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000223

[11] Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

[12] Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

Conflict of interest is usually described as though it begins with a moment of private moral failure. Someone sees a clear choice, recognises that one path serves the organisation and the other serves them, then quietly backs themselves. It is a satisfying story because it is easy to understand and even easier to condemn. It also flatters the organisation, because it suggests the system was sound and only the individual went astray.

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Inside organisations, the reality is often less dramatic and more interesting. Conflict of interest frequently appears long before anyone experiences it as a conflict at all. A buyer is rewarded for cost savings. A quality lead is recognised for keeping complaints low. A divisional head advances on the strength of their own unit’s results. A consultant is more likely to be retained when a project continues rather than concludes. None of these arrangements looks especially sinister in isolation. In most companies they would barely raise an eyebrow. They would be filed under performance management, accountability or commercial discipline, which is one of the reasons the problem is so easy to miss.

The difficulty is that these arrangements do more than reward behaviour. They organise perception. They tell people what matters, where the visible risk sits, which outcomes will be noticed, and what a sensible professional is supposed to worry about. The buyer learns to see immediate cost with unusual clarity. The quality lead becomes finely attuned to failure rates, defects and the downstream consequences of short cuts. The divisional head sees threats to their own area quickly and the wider cost more faintly. After a while, people do not merely respond to incentives from the outside; they begin to reason from within them.

That matters because conflict of interest inside organisations is very often sustained by people who can give a perfectly sincere and perfectly plausible account of what they are doing. The buyer is not usually sitting there thinking, “I know this will hurt the business, but the bonus is the bonus.” They are more likely to think they are showing proper commercial judgement. The quality lead does not experience themselves as an obstacle placed in the path of progress. They think they are preventing avoidable damage that somebody else seems oddly relaxed about. The divisional head who protects their own numbers can sound every inch the responsible operator. Everyone has a case. Everyone has a metric. Everyone has a vocabulary for seriousness. This is what makes the subject behaviourally rich and organisationally awkward.

Once you look at it this way, conflict of interest stops being just a question of motive and starts to look like a question of structured partiality. People do not need to be cynical in order to become predictable. They do not need to be corrupt in order to become skewed. They simply need to occupy a role for long enough, under a set of incentives that makes one slice of reality more salient than the rest. Over time, that slice begins to feel like the whole picture. The person then experiences their own judgement as objective, because within the boundaries of their role it is objective enough. The problem lies in the jump from locally reasonable to organisationally sound. Companies make that jump far more casually than they should.

This is one reason the standard ethical framing is often too thin. Of course there are cases involving concealment, self-dealing, undisclosed relationships and outright abuse. Those cases matter. They are also the easiest ones to recognise, because they fit the familiar script. The more consequential organisational problem tends to be quieter. It lives in ordinary operating arrangements that allow one team to collect the benefit of a decision while another absorbs the cost, or that reward short-term visible gains while pushing longer-term damage somewhere less photogenic. Nobody needs to lie for that to happen. A spreadsheet and a bonus plan will often do the job perfectly well.

Take a simple example. Procurement is rewarded for reducing cost. Quality is judged on complaints, defects and reliability. Finance likes the savings this quarter. Operations will be less cheerful six months later if failure rates start creeping up. By then, the original choice may already have been presented internally as a disciplined commercial decision, complete with numbers, approvals and the solemn tone organisations adopt when they would prefer nobody ask a second question. At each step, the decision can look rational. Across the system, it can still be wrong. That is what built-in conflict of interest looks like in practice: no melodrama, no villain, just a trail of locally defensible choices that add up to collective distortion.

The same logic appears well beyond procurement. Sales functions are often rewarded for volume, sometimes with only faint regard for what happens after the contract is signed. Consultants can find entirely respectable reasons for extending work that ought to be narrowed or finished. Leaders are praised for defending their teams, right up to the point where cross-functional co-operation would have served the firm better. In each case, the actor can remain sincere. In each case, the organisation may still be teaching them to interpret success too narrowly.

This is why ethics training, on its own, rarely gets very far. There is nothing wrong with teaching principles, clarifying standards or explaining why conflicts of interest matter. The problem is that employees are usually excellent readers of the organisation’s real priorities. They learn from patterns, not slogans. They notice what gets promoted, what gets excused, which trade-offs are quietly tolerated, and whose definition of “good judgement” wins when departments collide. If the system continues to reward local optimisation, it will not help much to assemble people in a meeting room and remind them to think holistically. They will nod politely, take the biscuits, and return to the same incentive structure afterwards.

From a behavioural perspective, the more useful question is not simply whether people have integrity, though integrity obviously matters. The sharper question is where the organisation has built competing interests into everyday work without making the trade-offs explicit. Where does one function gain from a choice whose cost emerges later or elsewhere? Where do performance metrics reward behaviour that another department must later correct, absorb or explain away? Where have role definitions quietly turned partial interests into apparently neutral judgement? These are better diagnostic questions because they focus attention on the machinery that keeps producing the problem, rather than on the occasional individual who becomes visible enough to blame.

There is also a credibility issue here, and organisations tend to underestimate it. Employees notice when the formal language says “act in the company’s best interests” while the operating model rewards narrower behaviour. They notice when collaboration is praised and territorial optimisation is promoted. They notice when leaders speak about long-term value but celebrate short-term wins that merely move cost across internal boundaries. People are generally much quicker at reading these contradictions than senior management would like to believe. In many firms, the credibility problem begins long before the compliance problem does.

That is why conflict of interest inside organisations should be treated as a serious matter of design and judgement, not just a niche ethics topic for policy documents and annual refreshers. It sits at the intersection of incentives, attention, role-based interpretation and institutional habit. It shapes what people notice, how they justify, what they defend and what they genuinely fail to see. Once that becomes clear, a good deal of ordinary organisational behaviour looks different. The issue is no longer limited to the rare case where somebody knowingly crosses a line. It is present in the far more common situation where the line was blurred by the system long before the individual arrived at the decision.

If an organisation wants to take conflict of interest seriously, it has to look beyond declarations of principle and into the structure of everyday work. It has to ask where it is rewarding one part of the system for creating costs in another, where it is calling something “objective” that is actually role-bound, and where its own measures of success are quietly teaching people to become partial in highly professional ways.

That is a less comforting view than the usual morality play. It is also much closer to how organisations actually function.

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The first break rarely looks dramatic

An HR business partner is asked why a candidate was rejected by a new AI-enabled sourcing tool. She looks at the screen and finds the same thing she found last time: a system recommendation, a red flag, and very little she could defend in a serious conversation. In a different organisation, a product lead notices that she has been talked over three times in a month. Again. The company still speaks confidently about candour, psychological safety and open culture. The meeting tells a more useful story.

These situations are usually filed under different headings. One belongs to culture. The other belongs to technology. One is about voice. The other is about decision-making. But they often produce the same conclusion inside the organisation: the official language is no longer a reliable guide to how the place actually works.

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A good many organisations still treat credibility as if it were mainly a communication issue. They sharpen the language, repeat the values, put leaders in front of employees, run the town hall, and train managers to sound more open. None of that is irrelevant. It is simply too far downstream. By the time credibility appears as a communication problem, it has usually already become an operating problem.

Employees do not decide whether an organisation is credible by listening to how it describes itself at its best. They decide by watching what happens when something awkward, inconvenient or consequential enters the room. They watch who gets heard, which concerns are politely absorbed, what can still be explained in ordinary language, and whether claims about fairness survive contact with an actual decision. That is where the real reading of the organisation begins.

Two research strands, one recognisable pattern

Two recent lines of research are useful here, not because they say exactly the same thing, but because they expose the same weakness from different sides.

One sits in the Nordic research stream on silence, harassment, uneven voice and preventive culture. Across that literature, a recurring point emerges: formal commitments to openness, safety or inclusion tell you rather less than organisations often assume. A workplace can describe itself as open and still teach its people, through repetition, that voice travels unevenly. Some contributions move. Others are absorbed without consequence. Some people can be direct. Others learn to edit themselves before they have even finished the sentence.

The other line comes from the University of Exeter work on algorithmic HRM, based on qualitative responses from 58 HR professionals in the UK and the US. What is striking there is not simple rejection of AI-supported systems. The response is more conflicted than that. People can see the appeal of consistency, scale and efficiency. They can also see opacity, uncertainty and a widening accountability problem. They are being asked to work with systems whose outputs may be operationally useful while remaining difficult to interpret and harder still to explain.

Put side by side, the two strands point to something many employees already know without needing the research vocabulary. Organisations increasingly ask people to trust systems that are becoming harder to read from the inside. That matters because trust at work is not mainly symbolic. It sits much closer to judgement than many leaders seem to realise.

When openness becomes selective

The cultural side of this is often discussed in the language of inclusion or psychological safety. That language is not wrong, but it can be oddly soft for what employees are actually navigating. People usually work out quite quickly whether openness is real, ceremonial, selective or mostly performative. They do not need a dashboard for that. Repetition does the job.

They notice who can push back without being recoded as difficult. They notice who gets interrupted and who gets interpreted charitably. They notice whether awkward truths survive beyond the meeting in which they were spoken. They notice when a contribution only becomes persuasive after a different person repeats it in a different voice. Long before leadership teams begin diagnosing culture formally, people inside the system have usually already mapped the working hierarchy of voice.

Once that mapping exists, something changes. The official language does not become irrelevant, but it does stop functioning as a reliable description of reality. Employees begin to read the organisation on two levels at once: what it says, and what it appears to mean in use. That is not the same thing as ordinary disappointment. It is quieter than that, and more consequential. The question is no longer simply whether people are technically allowed to speak. The question becomes whether the organisation can still be taken literally when it describes its own norms.

This is one reason psychological contract language still matters. Most people do not expect purity from institutions. They do, however, expect some recognisable alignment between what the place claims to value and what repeatedly happens once hierarchy, status, politics and inconvenience enter the picture. When that alignment weakens often enough, employees become more careful not just about what they say, but about what they believe. They conserve effort. They become more tactical with honesty. Some go quiet. Others remain verbally present but stop offering the part of themselves that would once have provided unvarnished judgement.

An organisation can function for a long time like that. It simply does so with less access to reality than it imagines.

When a system cannot account for itself

The technological side is different in form, but not in consequence. AI-supported HR systems are usually introduced with claims that sound entirely sensible: more consistency, less noise, less human bias, better handling of complexity, more disciplined process. The problem is not that these promises are ridiculous. The problem begins when the promise of better judgement outruns the organisation’s ability to account for the decision in human terms.

That is the pressure visible in the Exeter study. HR professionals are expected to stand behind outcomes that affect candidates, employees, pay, progression and access. Yet they may not be able to explain why a candidate was screened out, why a recommendation landed where it did, or why one profile surfaced while another disappeared into the system. They become the public-facing representatives of decisions whose underlying logic they only partly control.

That is a larger problem than many organisations admit. In trust-sensitive settings, “the system says so” is not an explanation. It is a gap where an explanation ought to be. People can usually hear the difference. They can hear when someone is exercising judgement and when they are trying to make presentable something they do not really own.

This is one reason the Mayer, Davis and Schoorman trust model still holds up. Trust in organisations has never depended on technical capability alone. People also look for good faith and integrity. A system can appear highly competent and still erode trust if the people operating it cannot explain it, challenge it, or connect its decisions to standards that feel intelligible and fair. Once that happens, ability, benevolence and integrity all come under strain at the same time. The organisation may continue to sound modern and rational while becoming harder to believe in ordinary conversation.

Employees usually pick this up faster than senior teams expect. They know when the HR partner in front of them is speaking from judgement and when they are trying to translate a decision they do not really own. Once that uncertainty becomes audible, the credibility problem spreads beyond the tool itself. It reaches the function, the process and eventually the wider institution.

The common problem runs deeper than opacity

It would be easy to reduce both cases to fairness, or to opacity, and both words matter. Still, neither quite gets to the centre of it. The deeper problem is that the organisation’s official story and its lived story begin to drift apart in ways that become patterned rather than incidental.

On the cultural side, the promise is that voice matters, while employees often experience a much more selective reality. On the technological side, the promise is that decisions are objective and evidence-based, while employees often encounter outcomes that become harder rather than easier to explain. In both cases, the organisation asks to be trusted while making itself less legible in practice.

That is not easy to manage from the inside. Most employees do not need perfect outcomes. They do need some sense that the system is coherent enough to be read, and fair enough to be taken seriously. Once those conditions weaken, trust rarely collapses theatrically. It drains through repeated ordinary encounters: a meeting where one kind of voice consistently travels further than another, a decision that cannot survive a second question, or a claim about openness that sounds plausible only while nothing uncomfortable is happening.

That is usually the point at which the private reading of the organisation overtakes the official one.

Why this now feels harder to hide

Part of the answer is cultural. Organisations now make larger moral claims than many of them used to. The language of openness, inclusion, safety, fairness and dignity is more polished, more public and more central to how institutions describe themselves. Once that language is in circulation, employees use it as a measuring device. That is entirely reasonable. If an organisation adopts the vocabulary of fairness, it should not be surprised when people become more exacting about patterned unfairness.

Part of the answer is technological. AI is moving into domains that shape careers, pay, mobility, access and standing. These are not remote process questions. They sit inside the lived experience of organisational life. When the systems operating in those spaces become harder to interpret, the credibility cost rises quickly because the stakes are no longer abstract.

There is also a simpler point. People have become better at reading systems. They may not always have formal proof, but they do have repetition, memory and comparison. They know who gets interrupted. They know which office dominates. They know when “speak up” really means “speak up if you already know how to survive the consequences”. They know when “data-driven” means nobody is prepared to explain the outcome properly, but the decision will stand anyway.

What leaders tend to miss

This leaves leaders in a more exposed position than the usual communication advice admits. It is not enough to articulate fairness, openness or objectivity at the level of principle. The harder task is to stop designing systems that repeatedly contradict those claims in use.

That is why credibility is better understood as an operating question than a messaging one. The real issues sit inside the machinery: who gets heard, how disagreement travels, whether difficult truths can be raised without social penalty, and whether AI-assisted decisions can be traced, challenged and explained by accountable humans. Most organisations are much more comfortable polishing the language than inspecting the machinery.

That asymmetry is now catching up with them. A leader may be completely sincere. A team may be acting in good faith. But where the wider system keeps sorting voice unevenly or producing decisions that nobody can properly account for, sincerity does not solve much on its own. Employees tend to trust what the machinery teaches them over what the values page says.

By the time leadership starts talking about rebuilding trust, many employees have already done something quieter and more consequential. They have worked out which voices count, which explanations hold up, and how far the official story of the organisation can still be relied upon. That private reading matters more than most organisations want to admit, because it governs how much candour, effort and belief people are still willing to invest.

Once credibility starts leaking at that level, the real trouble has usually already begun.

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The meeting stars eleven minutes late. It’s not the delay that matters, but the fact that no one remarks on it. Leo sits by the wall, laptop on his lap. On the screen, the first slide of the ‘Q4 Review – Executive Summary’ appears: tidy numbers, smooth charts, a red line that ticks upward at one point but not enough to disturb the picture.

The real number isn’t on this slide. It’s in another file on Leo’s laptop. On the dashboard, it shows as an amber alert;in the supplier contract, a structural problem is taking shape. Same data, different implication. The slippage isn’t a ‘temporary variance’ – it’s the start of a chain reaction affecting three deadlines. The difference between the two files is one of signal strength.

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‘Let’s walk through the main points,’ the regional director says, calm. No one in the room seems anxious. Leo knows that after the second slide comes the moment where he could still decide: the ‘Risk Outlook’ section. If he states the full range, the conversation shifts. If he emphasises the upper bound, the chart no longer looks harmless.

The CFO leans forward, tapping his pen. ‘Is this still within tolerance?’ he asks. ‘Only asking,’ he adds, ‘because the board won’t look at this level of detail next week.’

Leo notices the gesture. He doesn’t know if it means anything, but the word ‘tolerance’ and the mention of the board together are enough. The question isn’t really about the upper limit – it’s about whether the number can still fit the picture that needs to be carried forward next week.

‘Based on current information, yes,’ Leo replies. Technically accurate, and sufficient. The CFO nods. The pen goes still. ‘Fine. We’ll run with this, then.’ The presentation moves on, as if nothing had shifted.

Leo doesn’t feel he made a decision. He adjusted. To whatever still wouldn’t change the direction of the conversation in that room. Like when it’s warm and you don’t open the window, waiting for someone else to do it. The number didn’t shrink. It just had less air.

In the days that follow, the number doesn’t improve. The supplier asks for another week. The alternative route proves more expensive. When Leo opens the ‘Raw Assessment’ file again, the upper bound is now twenty-three percent. He doesn’t circulate this version.

In the next iteration of the presentation, the chart line is smoother. The risk is ‘under monitoring’. Status remains amber. The number hasn’t changed; the time spent discussing it has. At the second review, the CFO no longer asks about tolerance. He turns to timing instead, flicking through his calendar, talking about how the slippage might be compensated for in the next quarter. The emphasis is on the future. The present number gets less space.

A narrative gradually takes shape: volatile markets, global challenges. The problem is placed in a wider frame, becoming less personal. Leo increasingly senses what counts as noise in this space: the overly sharp number, the uncertain estimate, the sentence that would open a longer discussion. The system classifies numbers and adjusts the intensity of its responses accordingly.

By the end of the third month, the 18–22 percent range is no longer a topic. The focus has moved to the next quarter. The past appears as ‘lessons learned’. The supplier problem hasn’t gone away – it just receives less attention. Leo sometimes thinks back to that first meeting, to the moment he could have given the number a different weight. He’s not sure the outcome would have differed. But the tone of the conversation would have.

Change doesn’t begin with the data. It begins with how much room the data are given.

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When Accuracy Starts to Look Like Weakness

The hidden cost of leadership uncertainty

A senior leadership meeting in February 2026.

One executive says: we are looking at three risk bands, the expected outcome depends heavily on several factors, and there are also two points in the regulatory environment that could quickly change the picture, so we need to work with several scenarios.

Another says: the basic situation has not changed, the market is open. But the window is closing, and the competitor will get there before us if we hesitate. The pressure to act is greater than the uncertainty. We need to decide.

The second intervention projects more control. It sounds firmer, and signals more clearly that someone has a hand on the wheel. Decision research has long shown that confidently delivered judgements are often perceived as more competent and more credible, even when their objective accuracy is no higher. In group decision settings, more confident speakers can gain greater influence partly independently of their actual competence, and confidence itself can raise perceived competence.

More accurate analysis usually appears in a different form. It does not come as a single forceful sentence, but as assumptions, sensitivities, probability ranges, dependencies and constraints. It often speaks more cautiously. In the same situation, the firmer statement more readily signals direction and control.

This is visible in investment and capital allocation decisions as well. The possibility of a worse outcome may be present, yet still carry less weight than the full risk picture would justify. The decision may still be the right one. Research suggests that CEO overconfidence can, in some contexts, be associated with stronger firm performance, partly through greater strategic risk-taking. The question, then, is not whether the more decisive choice is automatically the worse one. It is how far the weighting is being shaped by the situation itself, and how far by the form in which it is presented.

The same dynamic appears in risk management in a different form. Early warning signals often land weakly inside organisations. They are fragmentary, conditional, and rarely sound as clear-cut as a fully formed recommendation or a strong assertion. Research has consistently shown that uncomfortable or risky information can lose force as it moves through an organisation, especially when speaking up carries personal or reputational cost.

A similar process shapes the distribution of influence. Over time, authority tends to grow around those who can speak about the same situation in a firmer, more action-oriented — in other words, more recognisably leader-like — way. Organisational credibility and influence are built in part through how someone speaks and the situation in which they speak. The quality of the leader–member relationship, and trust in leadership, complicate this picture further.

There is another cost in strategic adaptability. The more forcefully, clearly and authoritatively a direction has been set, the harder it becomes to revise it later without visible loss. At that point, correction no longer looks like professional recalibration. It looks like retreat. The organisation becomes less willing to return not only to the more accurate analysis, but also to the correction that may later be required.

Certain conditions strengthen this dynamic. Strong hierarchy does. High external visibility and high reputational stakes do. Time pressure does. So do cultural norms that equate confidence too readily with competence.

In that environment, certainty fits easily with prevailing expectations of leadership. Probabilistic thinking, by contrast, can start to look like hesitation or weakness.

Leadership still requires decisiveness. Strategic direction still requires commitment. The crucial distinction is this: direction can be clear without overstating what is actually known. A leader can give a clear steer while still speaking openly about assumptions, sensitivities and alternative scenarios. The problem begins when the organisation can no longer handle that distinction properly, and starts to treat calibrated uncertainty not as professional seriousness, but as a reputational burden.

The decline in decision quality does not come from one dramatic mistake. It comes from a pattern: the organisation rewards the forceful, rapid intervention over the more accurate, more careful analysis. The cost then works its way into capital allocation, the visibility of risk, the structure of influence and the organisation’s capacity to correct course. Once accuracy starts to look like weakness, the organisation begins to undermine the quality of its own decision system.

This belongs to corporate governance, not to the margins of communication style. The real question is what form of uncertainty a leadership setting can absorb without downgrading the speaker. If there is no room in the organisation for sentences that do not sound simple because the situation itself is not simple, then sooner or later it will stop rewarding the better judgement and start rewarding the better-sounding certainty.

Sources

Anderson, C., Brion, S., Moore, D. A., & Kennedy, J. A. (2012). A status-enhancement account of overconfidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 718–735.

Burkhard, B., Jansson, A., Michaely, R., & Oesch, D. (2022). CEO overconfidence and corporate performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Financial Economics, 146(2), 471–493.

Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.

Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611–628.

Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219–247.

Kennedy, J. A., Anderson, C., & Moore, D. A. (2013). When overconfidence is revealed to others: Testing the status-enhancement theory of overconfidence. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 122(2), 266–279.

Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W., & Hewlin, P. F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence: Issues that employees don’t communicate upward and why. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1453–1476.

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107.

Zarnoth, P., & Sniezek, J. A. (1997). The social influence of confidence in group decision making. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33(4), 345–366.

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I have worked with organizations that run almost entirely on speed. Quick alignments. Constant updates. Decisions adjusted in motion. In project-heavy or client-facing environments this rhythm is not chaos; it is competence. People respond, refine, and recalibrate in short cycles, and that is precisely how value gets produced.

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In many cases, it works remarkably well. The organization feels alert. Responsive. Capable.

What interests me is not the speed itself, but what it quietly does to attention.

In fast systems, issues that can be framed quickly and resolved within the existing flow move forward. They fit the tempo. Issues that require time, synthesis across teams, or the willingness to surface uncomfortable implications tend to linger. They are not denied. They simply never fully assemble.

This is how patterns stay invisible.

A difficulty appears in one context and later re-emerges elsewhere, described slightly differently. A risk treated as circumstantial begins to feel familiar months later. A delay that once had a reasonable explanation starts to echo previous explanations. Each instance makes sense on its own. The connection between them remains diffuse.

No one is negligent. The system is simply too busy responding to connect the repetition.

Over time, this has a cost. Not dramatic at first. It shows up as rework, as friction that feels personal but is structural, as capable people losing patience with problems that never quite disappear. In hindsight, the signals were obvious. They just never sat together long enough to form a pattern.

Speed is often an advantage. The vulnerability emerges when responsiveness occupies all available space and nothing in the design of the system protects the act of stepping back.

Drift does not begin with collapse. It begins when everything appears to function — and the same issue keeps returning under a new name.

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In a job interview, you are not simply sharing information. You are entering a risk-filtering environment. Every behavioural choice—what you emphasise, what you soften, what you avoid—is read as a proxy for how you will act when stakes rise and visibility increases.

Humblebragging is often dismissed as a social misstep: an awkward attempt to appear accomplished without seeming arrogant. From a behavioural perspective, this framing is insufficient. In interviews, humblebragging functions as a high-noise signal at the exact moment the system is trying to reduce uncertainty.

The behavioural lens: from likability to legibility

Interviewers operate under asymmetrical information. They cannot directly observe future behaviour, so they rely on signal legibility—how clearly a candidate links action, responsibility, and outcome under mild pressure.

Social-psychology research defines humblebragging as bragging masked by complaint or humility and shows that it reliably reduces liking and perceived competence because it is perceived as insincere (Sezer, Gino & Norton, 2017). In everyday interaction, that may register as annoyance. In an interview context, it registers differently.

Perceived insincerity is processed as behavioural ambiguity.

And ambiguity is costly in evaluative systems.

Why humblebragging elevates perceived risk

1. Impaired self-monitoring under evaluation
Humblebragging suggests difficulty calibrating message to context. When achievement is softened or displaced rather than stated cleanly, the system infers instability in self-presentation. The question triggered is not moral (“Why are they doing this?”) but predictive: If clarity drops here, what happens when pressure increases?

2. Contradictory signal load
A humblebrag carries two incompatible messages at once—achievement and disavowal. Evaluative systems resolve contradiction by discounting reliability. This is not a character judgment; it is a compression mechanism. Contradiction reduces signal value.

3. Elevated coordination overhead
By embedding outcomes in emotional cushioning, humblebragging implies that results may require ongoing narrative management. Interviewers do not label this “high maintenance.” They register higher future coordination cost.

4. Reduced agency visibility
Humblebragging blurs where responsibility sat. In interviews, locating agency matters more than celebrating outcomes. When agency is obscured, the system cannot test judgment quality.

What works instead: behavioural ownership

The alternative to humblebragging is not bravado or self-promotion. It is behavioural ownership: one actor, one decision, one observable effect, with clear boundaries.

• State your role without hedging.

• Describe the decision or intervention.

• Name what changed as a result.

• Acknowledge context and contributors after agency is clear.

This structure reduces interpretive load and increases trust—not because it is more likable, but because it is legible.

Conclusion

In laboratory settings, humblebragging makes people less liked. In interviews, it does something more consequential: it introduces behavioural ambiguity at the moment an evaluative system is trying to locate responsibility and judgment.

Interviews are not about modesty.
They are about predictability under pressure.

When clarity competes with cushioning, clarity wins.

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In a crisis, organisations often instinctively turn to the jovial leader. The one who reassures, keeps the connection alive, responds to every contribution, and lowers the emotional temperature in the room. This is understandable. Uncertainty produces anxiety, and joviality is one of the fastest ways to reduce it.

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The problem is not bad intent.

The problem is that joviality optimises for a different function than a crisis requires.

At the level of behaviour, joviality expands the conversational field. It invites more contributions, more reactions, more partially formed thoughts. The leader responds, connects, smooths, and keeps the relational flow moving. In stable environments this can be effective. In a crisis, however, it has a side effect: it increases interactional noise.

In a crisis, the core question is not whether everyone has spoken, but which information actually matters. Jovial leadership encourages people to speak more, explain more, and reassure more. Not because discipline is absent, but because the situation allows expansive communication.

This slows decision-making.

A crisis is not a democratic information-gathering exercise. Decisions do not improve because more voices are present, but because irrelevant signals are filtered out. Joviality tends to keep those signals in play.

There is a second, less visible effect. Jovial leaders often continue “holding the connection” even after the situation has shifted from exploration to decision. They ask follow-up questions, refine phrasing, open additional loops. This lowers tension, but it also delays closure of responsibility. In a crisis, that delay can be decisive.

By contrast, leaders who are later described as charismatic are often not more pleasant. They do not respond to every contribution or immediately fill silence. Behaviourally, they narrow the field: fewer contributions are made, but each carries more weight.

This does not work because of personality strength. It works because the situation demands a reduction of interactional options. Fewer paths remain open, and decisions emerge faster.

None of this implies that jovial leaders are poor leaders. It only shows that joviality is not optimised for crisis conditions. It builds connection and psychological comfort, but it does not select. In a crisis, selection matters more than comfort.

The question, then, is not who is jovial and who is charismatic.

The question is which behavioural effect a given situation requires.

In a crisis, decisions do not improve because everyone feels better in the room.

They improve because fewer things happen — and those that do, matter more.

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