Management, ceilings and walls
Tons of bad management practices can be seen every day in companies of all sizes and cultures. Oddly enough, many of them have to do with ceilings and walls.
Take ceilings: women (or minorities), for example, always hit their glass ceiling sooner than white caucasian men, and in 2022 it is still a major management issue (if you can’t see why, you’re a management problem too).
Ceilings are about keeping people where they are, because they are so valuable there, or because no one cares to train them or find new challenges for them. Ironically, this usually happens to your best people first. And if they manage to raise the bar on their own for a while, sooner or later they leave for more thrills and recognition.
Now walls: they are an intrinsic part of management and are here for natural selection: walls help identify people who can break through them. Setbacks, projects that get out of hand, market changes, turnover, customers leaving… think of walls as all the usual obstacles and failures a company has to overcome. But most walls are created from the inside though. Whenever you create a silo, break down a simple process into more complicated ones, every time you create distance instead of proximity or when you compartmentalize responsibilities, you create new walls.
The good news is that walls can be broken down, as long as you admit they exist and have the courage to face them. The problem is that most managers refuse to even acknowledge them and only try to avoid them. And the maze remains, only more complicated.
Finally, let’s not forget most walls are within ourselves: limiting beliefs, cognitive biases, our own education and limited knowledge… These are the toughest ones to break through. Trying to solve new problems with old recipes is a wall most bad manager hit everyday. Lack of curiosity, creativity and boldness are common traits among them. Now is a good time for instance to observe most companies fail in inventing new working models because managers only transpose what used to work IRL in this new remote-first context.
With so many walls and ceilings around them, mediocre managers are like the frog at the bottom of the well: they can’t imagine the vastness of the ocean. Their main job is now, more than ever, to open up and explore possibilities.
