When people evolve faster than their reputations

How tight is the hold of first impressions?

Maya Angelou said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

Amen, Dr. Angelou. This piece of wisdom has perennially served me well and I wholeheartedly agree.

The thing is, people also evolve.

You would hope that as the years pass, we all become different people than what we used to be. This is growth.

I’m not sure how much people change their values, but I hope we all change our practices and our priorities. Values are “who they are.” I imagine that abusive people are more likely to stay abusive, bigots stay bigots, and serial harassers typically continue to harass. That’s simple.

But for people who aren’t harmful, why not leave plenty of room for growth. If people aren’t going to change how they are, maybe they can change how they are?

A person can grow out of a lot of things and grow into new things. They could show that they're naïve, overconfident, unskilled, or don't plan ahead. But all of these things can be fixed. In the course of professional development in a healthy work environment, those are areas where we all would expect improvement. I've known plenty of people who, when I first got to know them as adults, were some combination of those things. Over the years, they became more savvy, humble, talented, and deliberative.

How hard is it for people who have experienced personal and professional growth to shake off or transcend the reputations that they established when they first arrived?

Sometimes I think back on someone from a museum where I used to volunteer on occasion. It was weird to me that she worked there for a long time and was obviously highly capable, but remained underemployed at the customer service desk. She started working there as a teenager, and over the years she grew tremendously but some folks there still saw her as the teenager that she used to be. I don’t see this as any shortcoming on her part, but a failure of leadership at the institution.

I think this kind of dynamic can be particularly insidious in the university setting for junior faculty. There is a really rough learning curve for new professors, considering that we receive no training for all of the roles that we are expected to perform. It would be absurd to expect new faculty to be great at teaching, running a lab, institutional governance, mentoring, and all that other stuff. Of course new faculty are learning on the job! Of course by the time someone is coming up for tenure, they are a very different person than they were when they were hired!

Early impressions can have a lasting impact. Much of what we do as professors is separate from our colleagues. We only work closely with peers when we are in department meetings and other various service obligations. We hear about teaching secondhand and we usually aren’t experts in the research being done by our peers in our own department. So when we spend enough time with someone to form an opinion of some sort, how often do we have the chance to update that opinion?

For example, there was a new guy on campus a few years ago, and my first couple interactions were unquestionably problematic. I heard similar experiences from others. He showed me who he was, and I believed him. I made a point to steer clear of him. But more recently, people who I trust have had much different experiences with him. How much should I be following Dr. Angelou’s advice here? What is the space difference between “who he is” and “how he does?” Likewise, ten years ago, one administrator left my campus to much cheering. But now this person is back in a new capacity. A person can change in the course of those years. What does it look like to hold out hope for positive change but keeping in mind that they showed us who they are?

When I showed up at my current institution, I was hired as an Assistant Professor. When you include my time in previous visiting and tenure-track positions, I arrived eight years of professoring experience. I was hired with a big cohort of new faculty, and compared to these completely fresh folks, I arrived with more savvy. I didn’t need to figure out the many basics of being a professor, because I’d already made that journey. Even though I wasn’t doing anything different, the people at my new institution saw a different person than the people that I just left. The observation of growth (or the failure to observe) provides a different perspective than getting to know a new person without that history.

While people have the chance to grow, let’s face the reality that a lot of people just don’t grow. As an undergrad, one of my intro bio professors had been teaching the same class for two decades and had not changed a single thing about it. In full sincerity. He would show up to class every day with a slide carousel. I’m not so old that teaching with slide carousels was a normal thing! Folks had long moved on to a combination of powerpoint, overhead projectors, chalkboards, and whiteboards. One day when I showed up for class, the projector wasn’t working. The AV folks were called in and they couldn’t get it back up promptly. So the professor just cancelled class. That was it. Without his projector, he couldn’t teach. He wouldn’t have any idea what he would be saying at the front of class unless he was prompted by his slides. Which he’d been doing semester after semester, for decades.

I once visited him in his office, and his bookshelf was filled with slide carousels. He had every course in his teaching load all in the can, ready to go, nothing to be changed.

So, yeah, some folks just don’t evolve.

This post came to mind because I’ve just spent a bit of time looking through who I was. If you dig far enough into the archives on this site, you’ll see person who is rather different than I am now. I’ve changed my mind about a few things, but in more places, I’ve simply just moved along and am coming from a different perspective and my priorities have shifted. Also, I was less empowered and now I have to navigate with some more responsibility. But like Dr. Angelou implies, I’d like to think I have the same values.

When someone shows us who they are, we should believe them. But if it’s not putting anybody at risk, then it might be worth listening so we can believe who they’ve become.