One of the beautiful realities about white-collar work that no one explains to you until you arrive within it is that executives do not care about anything except financial returns, despite claiming to care about everything in all-hands meetings. It is the greatest double standard or two-faced nature of most corporate work: executives will prattle on about caring for your stress, your burnout, your health, our diversity goals, “we’re all a family here,” “we see you struggling,” etc. — and then they run back to meet with similar-minded and similar-looking people and talk about rows and columns on spreadsheets and sales funnels. That’s basically their entire existence, and they justify most of their relevance from it. It’s a shame that Brett, Jr., back at the five-bedroom house, has fallen down an incel rabbit hole online… but daddy has EBITDA to discuss, baby!
Not all executives are like this. Many are.
As a result, executives barely (if ever) know when managers are toxic — because what executives want from managers is simple:
Keep the trains running.
Keep the bullshit away from me.
Kiss my ass and my ring periodically.
When I tell you to jump, you say “How high and in what direction?”
When I am ready to advance you, and only then, can these terms change.
That’s how most work is structured. There are kings, there are middle cogs, and there are peons. You rise up sometimes through aptitude, but often through politics and playing the right games. A lot of dunces get the keys to the executive washroom because they played golf at the right club at the right time, or shoveled shit for 11 years for some guy who barely understands the vertical he’s in. It’s more common than we admit.
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