Innocent Until Proven Underperforming

There was a project near the end of my time at Accenture where I was doing too many jobs at once. I'd stepped into more than one crisis, was covering roles that weren't really mine to cover, and was trying to hold it all together at the pace I'd always held things together (which, in hindsight, was less a pace and more a dare).

When something went wrong under those conditions - a decision I'd made got questioned, a piece of work got criticised, someone pushed back on a call I'd made - my first reaction was to defend it. My second reaction, and we're talking seconds here, not days, was to turn on myself.

Underperforming.

Should have seen that coming.

Should have caught it.

I didn't examine that word very closely at the time. It felt less like a judgement and more like a fact (the kind of fact a person doing the job I was doing was supposed to be able to state plainly about herself). I'd used the same word on other people plenty of times before that. Someone hadn't delivered to the standard I wanted, hadn't thought something through the way I would have, hadn't executed the way the role required.

Underperforming.

It was tidy. It closed the loop. Efficient, even, in the way that skipping the middle of a story is efficient. You get to the end faster, you just have no idea what actually happened in it.

We extend a presumption of innocence to people we've never met, on the strength of nothing more than a shared agreement that the alternative is worse. Innocent until proven guilty is one of the more remarkable ideas we've collectively decided to operate by. It asks us to withhold judgement even when the evidence looks bad, even when it would be so much faster not to. And yet the presumption runs exactly backwards the moment it gets personal.

At work, and especially in our own heads, the reflex is guilty until proven otherwise. Underperforming until proven - what, exactly?

The proof is whatever we'd said it should be (mostly said in our own heads). If something doesn't live up to that, why spend the time and effort to go looking for the reasons. Easier to just label it.

What eventually interrupted that pattern wasn't a mentor, a performance review, or a moment of professional insight. It was my own life falling apart at the same time everything else was demanding more of me than I had to give. When your own capacity to think clearly and execute the way you used to starts slipping for reasons that have nothing to do with your competence, you start to wonder about everyone else who's ever slipped for reasons you never asked about.

Which meant I needed to get slower to label and quicker to ask why.

I'd love to tell you that curiosity extended to myself just as quickly.

It didn't.

I kept calling myself underperforming long after I'd stopped doing it to other people (a level of consistency I could not seem to manage anywhere else in my life). Grace, it turns out, is not evenly distributed by default. You can build real empathy for the people around you and still reserve none of it for the person doing the actual carrying. That took years longer to shift, and if I'm honest, it's still something I need to consciously remind myself to do.

That's not only a personal pattern. It's happening at scale, right now, in boardrooms, which love a label tidy enough to fit in a press release. Watch how many leadership departures get filed under underperformance once the real story would be more complicated to tell - more embarrassing to a board that didn't ask the right questions soon enough, more expensive to a culture that made raising a concern too costly, more revealing of a system that rewarded the appearance of control over the substance of it.

By the time a board reaches for that word, the actual story has usually been sitting there for a while, unheard, because naming it earlier would have required someone to ask a harder question than the one "underperformance" answers.

I don't think the lesson here is to stop holding people, or yourself, to a real standard.

Standards matter.

What I think the lesson actually is:

The word "underperformance" should never be the first thing you reach for. It should be, at most, the last word - the one you arrive at only after you've asked what's actually true, and you've genuinely ruled out everything except the standard itself.

Most of the time, if you're honest, you won't get there.

You'll find something else first - something that needed noticing, not naming. Something that needed support from you, as a leader. Or as a colleague. Maybe even as a friend.

I spent long enough guilty until proven otherwise to know which question actually matters here. It isn't whether the standard was fair. It's whether you asked what was true before you reached for the word that ends the asking.