When a Performance Rating Drops After a Manager Change
Someone gets a new manager. Six months later they are being managed as an underperformer. The work has not changed and the person doing it has not changed. What changed is who is assessing it.
Why this happens without anyone behaving badly
Managers weigh different things, and most of what they weigh stays unwritten.
One valued how carefully something was checked. The next wants it faster. One read quietness in meetings as focus, and the next reads it as disengagement.
Both assessments can be reasonable. The one that counts now is the current manager’s.
What it does to the person
This is the part I see in the counselling room.
Someone who was told for years that they were good at this is now being told they are not. Most people cannot hold both assessments as true at once, so one of them has to go. Usually the older one does, and they start doubting work they used to be sure of.
Others go the other way and decide the new assessment is simply wrong. That protects them for a while and makes the next conversation harder, because it is now a conversation between two people who think the other has got it wrong.
Why this is hard to see from outside
The organisation sees a rating that dropped. The review itself does not show whether the work declined or the criteria moved.
Both produce the same paperwork. The difference becomes visible when someone asks what changed around the person rather than in them.
For international teams this compounds
Where a manager and employee come from different working cultures, the gap between two assessments widens.
What one manager reads as appropriate deference, another reads as a lack of initiative. They are reading the same behaviour as different signals.
That happens within a culture too, between two managers who simply value different things. Across cultures it happens more often and is harder to name, because both sides assume their own reading is the obvious one.
What helps
A rating that dropped after a manager change is worth treating as a question rather than a finding, at least for a cycle.
Where someone has already taken the new assessment as a verdict on themselves, that is harder to undo than it looks. By the time it reaches me, the person has usually accepted the verdict. They set themselves a standard higher than anyone asked for, and go over their own work long past the point where it was fine.
Workplace mental health support for organisations is what stops a difficult period becoming how someone works from then on.
Related reading
Two ways to make a decision, and the strain in between
Kelly Kim is an NIP-registered psychologist and workplace mental health specialist supporting international and Korean organisations in the Netherlands.
