He stood, polished and poised, before the digital screen in the executive conference room, the quarterly review presentation a seamless dance of charts and bullet points. His voice, modulated and confident, glided over impressive metrics: project completion up by 13 percent, key performance indicators exceeded by 23.3 percent, departmental efficiency improved by 3. The data, of course, belonged to his team, a collection of tired, brilliant minds who had pulled 13-hour days and sacrificed weekends. He took the credit, every polished slide a testament to *his* leadership, and the VPs nodded, impressed. Later that afternoon, an email landed in his inbox, its subject line a furious all-caps missive from one of those very VPs. A minor, but visible, system glitch affecting 373 users. He didn’t respond, didn’t investigate, didn’t even add a single word of context. He simply forwarded it to his team with the instruction: ‘Fix this ASAP.’
Efficiency
Efficiency
This isn’t leadership; it’s a corporate survival tactic. The modern corporation, particularly sprawling ones, often doesn’t reward managers for cultivating a thriving team or fostering innovation from the ground up. It rewards them for skillfully managing perceptions – specifically, the perceptions of their own superiors. The well-being of the team, their growth, their engagement? These become secondary, often tertiary, concerns, easily sacrificed on the altar of upward optics. It’s a game of corporate camouflage, where performance is often less about tangible output and more
