On first impressions
In my university days, there were people who were had good grades in their first year - either by luck, chance, hard work or whatever other factor there was. There were also people who had bad grades. Throughout my time at uni, it was more likely for the first group to continue on that track than it was for the second group to get on the good-grades track.
I imagine there’s a lot of reasons why that was the case - including the fact that the people who attained those grades by hard work were more likely to stay hardworking.
One of the reasons I saw firsthand as being the cause for this was reputation. There was a bias (we can argue on the reasonability of that bias) towards people who had made a good “first impression”. It wasn’t put to words, but it had an air of “why invest in this talent when they haven’t made an approach to impress on first attempt” to it. I strongly disagree with this bias and its existence, but it is a real one. So real is it that I’ve seen the same in the workplace.
I’ve had coworkers whose standing with the manager was clearly fucked from month one. It didn’t matter what they did to impress the boss. It could be something insignificant like joining meetings a few minutes late in the first few weeks, or something as significant as failing to communicate blockers on their first big project. These impressions stuck and defined their time working with that manager. The manager never opened up to trusting the person, and never even tried to.
Like those professors in my uni who wrongly went the route of being more careful and attentive with the scripts of students on good standing and marked the scripts of students who started out on low grades with recklessness, the manager simply resigns themselves to the idea that this talent is not worth investing in - sometimes maybe even subconsciously. “The manager should’ve gotten past their own bias” - I know. “The skip level manager should’ve seen this and intervened” - I know. “Capitalism is yadayada” - I also know.
On the flip side, the people who made a good first impression typically enjoy the benefits of that positive bias over many months and years of working with that manager, even in their “down” moments.
Beyond clear positive or negative biases, first impressions trickle down to everything. If you’re known as the guy who stays up late to get work done, there’s a good chance you’ll be held to those standards, even when you move to finding more productive ways that help you do more within regular hours.
I don’t have much of an advice for anyone on this topic. But it’s almost a new year and it’s worth thinking about the kind of first impressions you want to make going forward. In an ideal world, there’s always second chances - but I think you’ll agree this is no ideal world. Equally, and maybe even more importantly, it is worth thinking about the biases you’ve formed against your coworkers, reports, and the people you interact with at work that’s solely rooted in your first impression of them. Undoing that bias may be a goal worth chasing in the new year.