Academic results can shape career opportunity, but they can be a poor measure of how far someone may ultimately progress. Leaders risk overlooking capable people when they treat early performance as a lasting verdict on career potential, writes Hamed Amiri

As exam results season approaches, thousands of young people across the UK will receive grades that seem to define what comes next.

Some will celebrate while others will be disappointed, but either way, those results will begin to shape how they see themselves: capable or incapable, promising or average, someone with options or someone whose future has already narrowed.

Grades matter, of course, but the wider meaning attached to them can last far longer than the results themselves.

For a time, I allowed my own academic record to become a judgement on my potential. When I arrived in the UK with my family at the age of 10, having fled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, I could not speak English. Like many young people starting again in an unfamiliar country, I had no clear sense of what my future might look like. I simply hoped I would be able to build one.

Years later, I chose Biology, Physics and Business for my A-levels. At different points, I imagined becoming a doctor, an entrepreneur and even an astronaut.

My ambitions, however, were far greater than my preparation. I finished with three U grades and took them as evidence that I had failed my future as well as my exams. They seemed to confirm that I might never achieve the things I had imagined.

The lasting damage came from treating one early performance as a permanent conclusion about who I was.

My own outlook only changed while my older brother was preparing for major heart surgery. We had grown up through many of the same uncertainties and had both experienced the reality of rebuilding our lives. Yet while I was allowing exam results to determine how I viewed my future, he was confronting something far more significant with courage and perspective.

Watching him forced me to reconsider the evidence I had been using to judge myself. I had learned a new language, started again in a country that once felt completely unfamiliar and adapted repeatedly. Those experiences demonstrated resilience and an ability to learn that no examination result had captured.

The past remained the same but my interpretation of it changed. I eventually graduated with a 2:1 in Computer Science, built a career in technology and continued taking on new challenges. The ability had not appeared overnight. I had simply stopped allowing an old result to outweigh everything I had demonstrated since.

Organisations often make a similar error around grades. They judge candidates using the earliest or most visible evidence available: qualifications, first impressions, confidence in meetings, one unsuccessful project or an early performance review. 

These judgements can, often unfairly, harden into fixed labels. Someone becomes reliable but unstrategic, technically strong but unsuited to leadership, capable but never quite ready.

And once established, such assumptions can be difficult to escape. Managers stop offering certain opportunities while, on the other side of the desk, employees notice what is expected of them and adjust their behaviour accordingly. They speak less, volunteer less and eventually stop putting themselves forward. The original judgement then appears to justify itself – a classic negative feedback loop.

However, the reality of such situations is different. Leaders see fewer signs of potential only because the person has been given fewer opportunities to demonstrate it.

It should be recognised that potential rarely arrives fully formed. Instead, it often reveals itself through adaptation: how someone responds after a setback, how quickly they learn, whether they remain effective in unfamiliar circumstances and whether they can apply lessons from one challenge to the next.

Research into self-efficacy has long shown that people’s beliefs about their capabilities influence the goals they pursue, the effort they invest and how they respond to setbacks. A landmark meta-analysis of 114 workplace studies involving more than 21,000 employees found a significant positive relationship between self-efficacy and work performance, while more recent research drawing on 172 independent workplace studies has shown that employees with stronger self-efficacy are also more likely to demonstrate behaviours such as helping colleagues, speaking up and contributing beyond their formal role.

A manager who assumes someone is unready may never test their assumption. A promotion process that rewards confidence over capability may repeatedly overlook quieter talent. Recruitment practices that place too much weight on academic attainment may exclude people whose later experience offers much stronger evidence of their ability to learn and adapt.

Standards still matter, and poor performance should be addressed, but it is disproportionate and dangerous for any leader to turn a particular performance, at a particular moment, into a lasting judgement of potential.

Instead, they should examine what someone has demonstrated since the original assessment was made. Have they learned, adapted and recovered? Do they take responsibility? Can they apply experience to unfamiliar problems? Are they now more capable than the evidence behind the original judgement suggests?

Such human-centred leadership recognises that people change. In the real world, we can see that with the right encouragement confidence grows, judgement develops and experience can reveal strengths that formal assessments miss.

Leadership’s role is to recognise, develop and create opportunities for that growth, not reject people out of hand. And this is more than baseless crusading. There is growing evidence that this leadership approach benefits organisations as well as individuals. Gallup’s latest meta-analysis – spanning 183,806 business units across 53 industries and 90 countries worldwide – has found that organisations with highly engaged employees consistently outperform their peers across measures including profitability, productivity, customer loyalty and retention.

Exam results can shape the opportunities available to a young person, but they should never become a lifelong verdict on capability. The real test runs across a lifetime. 

The leaders who identify talent most effectively are those who are prepared to look beyond grades, reconsider their own assumptions and recognise potential where it actually sits – in the individual, not the scoresheet.

Hamed Amiri is a speaker and technology leader whose work explores leadership, resilience and identity in a rapidly changing world. A senior leader in technology and transformation at PwC, he combines corporate experience with lived perspective, informed by his journey from Afghanistan to the UK.

READ MORE: ‘What organisations lose when employees feel they cannot speak freely‘. Long before people enter the workplace, they learn to adapt themselves to the expectations of others. Hamed Amiri argues that when employees feel compelled to play it safe and mask aspects of themselves, organisations often lose the very insight, challenge and honesty they need in order to grow.

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