In early days of my career, I recall a very senior leader who every one loved. His successes were spoken about. They were anecdotes on what he did ion that one meeting were repeated. His year or year achievements were something the whole business relied on.
But there was another set of stories brewing at a deeper level. The inappropriate jokes, the public flirtatious behaviour, the favourite female team member each quarter. Considered as rumours, people laughed about it, until one day, a real complaint dropped. I still remember the hushed, serious and baffled faces in the senior management around those days.
Every workplace has one like this: the manager who is considered a great achiever, someone everyone genuinely likes, the person who is generous with credit, remembers birthdays, makes time for juniors and is often life of every celebration.
So when a complaint eventually names that person, the first reaction in the room is not, “Let’s understand what happened.” It is more likely be a version of, “That doesn’t sound like him,” said with genuine conviction by people who are not necessarily trying to protect anyone, but who have spent enough time experiencing the person’s warmth, generosity and leadership of that person. To them, the allegation feels inconsistent with the person they know.
Why likeability (and achievements) changes what we are willing to see?
I have seen how quickly a strong positive impression of someone can start influencing the way everything else about them is interpreted, particularly when the information in front of us is uncomfortable or ambiguous.
The manager who is known for being supportive, stays late with a junior colleague, and people assume there was a perfectly legitimate reason; the manager who regularly messages their team at night sends a message at 11 pm, and it is seen as work ethic rather than an intrusion; a comment that might have made people uncomfortable coming from someone else is explained away because, “That’s just not how he meant it.”
The interesting part is that none of this usually feels like bias to the people doing it, because they are drawing on their own genuine experiences with that person, and those experiences matter to them.
The problem begins when those experiences become a mental road map for examining what has been reported.
This is particularly difficult in POSH because the person at the centre of a complaint may have spent years building trust, relationships and goodwill within the organisation, and that goodwill does not simply disappear when a complaint is made. In fact, it can become the lens through which everyone starts interpreting the complaint itself.
The better the reputation, the stronger the instinct to question the complainant or to mitigate the allegation.
The impact of this on the person who complained
The impact on the complainant can be much deeper than simply feeling that people do not believe her.
When a room starts looking for reasons why the complaint cannot be true, the complainant can gradually become positioned as the person who is the trouble maker, has disrupted the team, questioned someone everyone respects, or created a problem where others previously saw none.
That changes the environment around her. The lack of a bias free hearing and investigation can have far reaching impact.
People who might otherwise have spoken about something they experienced may become more hesitant, because they have already seen where the room’s sympathies lie. Colleagues may choose to stay out of it, conversations become quieter, and the complainant can find herself carrying not only the difficulty of making a complaint but also the weight of having challenged someone who is socially well regarded.
This is where organisational culture matters enormously, because people watch what happens when someone raises a concern against a senior well liked person, and they remember it.
This breaks the pattern
I have never found much comfort in policy language that simply tells people to treat everyone equally, because most people sincerely believe they are capable of doing that until they are faced with a situation where their own relationships and impressions are involved.
What makes a difference is a process that is consistent enough to hold its ground when those instincts show up: the same seriousness, the same timelines, the same standards of inquiry and the same willingness to examine uncomfortable information regardless of how senior, popular or trusted the person involved happens to be.
For an Internal Committee, this also means developing the self-awareness to recognise that instinctive reaction of, “But I know him, he would never do this,” and understand that it is something to examine rather than something to rely on.