So you are a senior leader now? Manager of managers, an important person high in the hierarchy. Surely the view is quite spectacular up there, right? But let me tell you something. You have a serious problem. And it’s not only you. All senior leaders in all organisations.

You are most likely out of touch.

You are sitting on top of an Ivory Tower, too far from the frontline, too far from the actual work being done. The information you receive is already predigested, aggregated and filtered by your subordinates and therefore skewed. It’s missing details, and some problems are hidden from you. If you don’t have the best and most up-to-date information about your employees and customers, you’re unlikely to make the best decisions. Or worse, you may not know something is brewing below before it’s too late to act.

Fortunately, there is a way to combat leaders’ isolation. To escape the Ivory Tower. The first step is to accept it exists.

The Ivory Tower

Every organisation needs a hierarchy to self-organise and simplify communication. Such simplification is necessary, as otherwise you would be overloaded with data flowing from all directions. You are not able to process every single detail that is happening in your teams, and that’s ok. You should trust your teams; they will handle most of the cases on their own. That’s what autonomy and empowerment are about.

But it has drawbacks. The same process that protects you from being overloaded with information hides some data from you. It’s not intentional; no one is plotting against you (well, maybe someone is, but that’s a topic for a different article), it’s part of how humans think and work. It is an inherent part of hierarchical organisations and human nature.

Respect your elders

Most societies and cultures have a built-in respect for authority and seniority. Be it people higher in the hierarchy, older, more experienced or all at once. So it’s natural for employees to occasionally hold back opinions and feelings that they fear might contradict or irritate the boss. Or they feel you are too busy to deal with such “trivial issues”. Or, a very common problem, they are afraid that you will shoot a messenger bringing bad news and speaking about the problems in their teams will put them in a bad light. It’s simply much easier to cover up the issue and hope for the best.

In very hierarchical cultures, such behaviours can lead to disastrous consequences, like a plane crash where a junior crew member was hesitant to speak up to avoid offending his superior, who was making an obvious mistake.

Extended communication lines

Do you remember the telephone game that you played as a kid? Where one child whispers a message to another one, and the next one and so on. Every such step changes something in the message so that the final version is hilariously different from the original one.

And it’s all fun until you are an adult and are managing an important project. The telephone game is a game for kids, but it taught us an important lesson about management. Every layer of communication distorts a message. Every layer adds, removes or changes the information a bit. The further you are from the frontline, the more layers are between you and your people, and the more distorted information you receive.

It works both ways

To add even more weight to the topic, not only is the communication you receive affected by your position in the hierarchy. The information you send to your subordinates has to go through the same extended communication lines.

Which means that they receive a distorted message. Your vision, your strategic goals, plans, and the reasoning behind them are probably not reaching them the way you would like to. And if they don’t understand your vision, they get frustrated and anxious seeing changes and new goals they don’t fully comprehend.

A very common complaint about “our leadership does not know what they are doing” is a direct effect of this kind of communication issue. Leadership (usually) knows quite well what they are doing, but they fail to deliver this message to their teams.

Break the bubble

Fortunately, not all hope is lost. There is a way to break the leadership bubble and escape the Ivory Tower. You will just have to get your hands dirty.