The Invisible Barriers Nobody Talks About in Performance Reviews

Inspired by my conversation with Starling, Why Care? Season 7, Episode 62

We talk a lot at work about the barriers people face – bias, representation, glass ceilings. All real and all important to address. But there is a type of barrier that almost never makes it onto a leadership development agenda….

In my conversation with Starling, singer, songwriter, and "pop therapist", she said something that made me think: "We talk about racism, sexism, all the isms and phobias," she said. "But what about adversity when it comes to childhood trauma? You can't see it. It's invisible."

She's right. And the implications for leadership is worth noting.

The performance gap hiding in plain sight

Here is what we know from the behavioural science: the way people show up at work (how confidently they speak in meetings, whether they advocate for themselves, how they respond to feedback, how they make decisions under pressure), is shaped, deeply and persistently, by experiences that happened long before they walked through your office door.

Starling described her own journey, surrounded by addiction, neglect, and violence as a child, she spent years operating from what she calls the "red zone", a state of chronic stress and hypervigilance that neuroscience recognises as ‘fight or flight’. Her prefrontal cortex, the seat of clear thinking and sound judgement, was effectively offline. She won’t be the only one.

What does that look like in a team? It looks like the person who over-explains or apologises constantly. The high-performer who can't take a compliment. The manager who avoids difficult conversations. The brilliant individual contributor who never puts their hand up for the stretch role. These are not character flaws, they are the entirely rational adaptations of people who learned, early in life, that the world was not entirely safe.

The identity tax of being "other"

Beyond individual trauma, Starling's story surfaced something equally relevant for leaders: the psychological cost of navigating environments that were not designed with you in mind.

She was told at 26 that she was too old to be signed as a pop singer. She was told she couldn't sing. She was asked to choose between her marriage and her career. She describes having internalised these messages - genuinely believing, at points, that the setbacks were her fault and that she was the problem. That internal erosion of self-worth is not a sign of weakness. It is a predictable response to constantly needing to self-preserve.

This is the identity tax. The cognitive and emotional load of constantly wondering whether the room is for you, whether you need to modify yourself to be acceptable, whether the rules that apply to others apply to you. It is draining and it impairs performance. Importantly to note, it is largely invisible to the people who don't pay it.

Self-worth is not a soft issue. It is a business one.

One of Starling's most incisive observations is the distinction between why we do what we do. "If you're working out because if you don't have a six-pack you won't be lovable," she says, "then we need to look at the why." The same principle applies to professional behaviour. The employee who is always available, always performing, always proving - are they driven by genuine commitment, or by the deep, unexamined fear that they are not enough?

Leaders who cannot distinguish between those two things will keep burning out their best people without ever understanding why.

The good news is that this is changeable. Starling's work, and indeed the work I do with organisational leaders through Avenir, is grounded in the same insight: when people feel genuinely safe, when they regulate from a place of steadiness rather than fear, the quality of their thinking, their decisions, and their relationships improves measurably. Safety is not a nice to have, it is a performance condition.

What this asks of leaders

The key takeaway here: curiosity rather than judgement. Not "why won't they speak up?" but "what would make it safe for them to do so?" It asks leaders to examine their own invisible assumptions about who gets to be ambitious, who gets to age, who gets to fail and try again. And it asks organisations to take seriously the unseen histories that every person brings with them to work.

As Starling put it, "If you've had a traumatic upbringing, you are going to have a view of the world that you can't get what you want. You can't be who you want to be."

That is not destiny, but it doesn’t shift without intention.

The most effective leaders I work with understand that the path to higher performance runs directly through their people's sense of self, not around it.

Nadia Nagamootoo is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, executive coach, and author of Beyond Discomfort. She is the host of Why Care? Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.