His name was Richard. Not the same Richard who had presented the outsourcing proposal with the number that had changed the room. A different Richard. A coincidence of names that the CEO noticed and found faintly uncomfortable in the way that minor coincidences are faintly uncomfortable when you are already thinking carefully about how decisions get made and who makes them and what the consequences are of making them badly. This Richard managed a team of nineteen people in a function that sat adjacent to the support operation and that had been, before the transition, one of the parts of the company the CEO had felt most confident about. The metrics were consistently strong. The quarterly reports were consistently positive. Richard himself was consistently excellent in every interaction the CEO had with him, prepared and precise and in possession of exactly the information the CEO was likely to want, delivered in the format the CEO preferred, timed to the moment before the CEO would have asked for it. The CEO had thought of Richard as a strong manager. The CEO had been thinking about many things differently in recent months.

It started with a message from Dom. Dom had become, in the weeks since the conversation in the CEO's office, something that the CEO had not expected and had come to value considerably. Not a formal role. Not an official channel. Something more like the function that Priya had once served in the support area, the person who was paying attention to what was actually happening and who had the instinct and the willingness to surface it to the right person when the right person needed to know. "I do not want to overstep," said Dom. "But there is something happening in Richard's team that I think you should know about." "Tell me," said the CEO. "I have been working with two people from Richard's team on the process integration project," said Dom. "In the meetings when Richard is present they are very quiet. They answer questions when asked. They do not volunteer information. They look at Richard before they answer most questions, not obviously, just a small movement, as if they are checking whether the answer is acceptable before they give it. When Richard is not present they are completely different. More engaged. More open. One of them told me something last week that I think matters." "What did they tell you?" said the CEO. "That the team does not bring problems to Richard because problems get managed rather than solved," said Dom. "When a problem is raised Richard responds in a way that makes the problem disappear from the reporting without the problem being addressed. The team has learned that raising a problem creates more difficulty for them than managing the problem quietly on their own. So they manage quietly. And the reporting stays clean." The CEO sat with this for a long time. "What kind of problems?" said the CEO. "Process gaps mostly," said Dom. "Places where the integration between the provider's operation and the internal team is not working the way the documentation says it should. Workarounds that have been in place for months that everyone in the team knows about and that have not been escalated because the last person who tried to escalate something came out of the conversation with Richard feeling like the problem was their fault rather than the system's." "Thank you Dom," said the CEO. "This is exactly the kind of thing I needed to know." "I want to be clear that I am not certain about any of this," said Dom. "I am telling you what I have observed and what I have been told. It is possible I have misread the situation." "I do not think you have misread it," said the CEO.

The CEO spent two weeks understanding the situation before doing anything about it. Not acting on the first message. Not confronting Richard or launching a formal review or doing any of the things that can be done quickly and that feel like action and that often make the underlying situation worse by alerting the person at the centre of it that they are being watched. The CEO watched. Not obviously. Not in ways that were visible to Richard. In the ordinary way that a CEO can watch things when they choose to pay attention rather than to manage, which is to say by being present in places where things happen and by listening to what is said and not said and by asking questions in conversations that are not about the thing you are trying to understand but that create the conditions in which the thing you are trying to understand becomes visible. The CEO had conversations with four people from Richard's team over the course of those two weeks. Not formal conversations. The kind of conversations that happen when a CEO stops by a desk or joins a small group in a corridor or sits down in the lunch area and talks about the work in the way that people talk about work when they are not being assessed. Three of the four conversations produced nothing remarkable. The people were professional and engaged and spoke about their work in ways that were positive without being performed. The fourth conversation was with a person named Lena who had been with the company for two years and who had, in the way of certain people who have decided to trust you before they have decided to trust you, said something that unlocked everything else. "Can I ask you something?" said Lena. "Yes," said the CEO. "Is there a way to raise something that does not go through Richard?" said Lena. "What would you want to raise?" said the CEO. "Something about the process," said Lena. "About a gap that is causing problems. I have tried to raise it within the team and it has not gone anywhere and I am not sure if the issue is that the gap is not real or if the issue is something else." "The gap is probably real," said the CEO. "How do you know?" said Lena. "Because the fact that you cannot raise it is itself a signal about something," said the CEO. Lena was quiet for a moment. Then she described the gap. It was specific and technical and exactly the kind of thing that should have been in a report three months earlier and was not in any report the CEO had seen. It was also exactly the kind of thing that, left unaddressed, would produce a larger failure at the moment it intersected with the next billing system update or the next product change or the next anything that required the internal and external operations to work together smoothly. "Thank you for telling me," said the CEO. "I want you to know that this conversation is between us and that raising it will not create any difficulty for you." Lena looked at the CEO with an expression that contained a specific kind of hope that has learned to be cautious, the expression of someone who has been told something reassuring before and has found that the reassurance did not always survive contact with the situation it was meant to address. "I mean that specifically," said the CEO. "Not as a general statement. You will not experience any consequence from this conversation." "Alright," said Lena. "I am going to address the gap," said the CEO. "Not through you. Through the process review that is already underway. Your name will not be part of it." "Thank you," said Lena.

The CEO looked at Richard's reporting from the previous six months. The reporting was excellent. Clear, well-structured, consistently showing strong performance against the metrics that Richard and the CEO had agreed were the relevant ones at the beginning of the year. Every quarter had been positive. Every challenge had been presented as managed or resolved. Every concern had been accompanied by a mitigation that had been implemented and had produced the expected result. The reporting was, in the specific technical sense, accurate. The numbers were right. The descriptions were honest in the sense of not being false. The problem was not in what the reporting said. The problem was in what the reporting did not say, which was everything that Lena had described and everything that Dom had observed and everything that the three process gaps the CEO had now identified through the process review were evidence of. The gap between what the reporting said and what was actually happening was not a gap of dishonesty. It was a gap of selection. Richard had selected, from the available information, the information that presented the team's performance in the most positive light, had organised it clearly and delivered it professionally, and had managed anything that would have complicated that picture out of the reporting before the reporting was produced. This is not lying. It is the specific skill of managing information upward in a way that creates an impression of performance that is better than the reality, without ever saying anything that is strictly untrue. It is a skill that is very common in large organisations and that is very difficult to detect because it requires the observer to notice the absence of things rather than the presence of them, and noticing absences is harder than noticing presences, which is why the people who have this skill are so often promoted before the cost of the skill becomes visible. Richard had been promoted twice in the previous three years.

The CEO called Richard in for a conversation. The conversation was difficult in the specific way that conversations are difficult when one person has more information than the other person knows and the person with more information has decided not to reveal, yet, how much more they have. Richard was prepared. Richard was always prepared. The preparation itself was, the CEO understood now, part of the same skill. Being prepared for every conversation with the CEO meant arriving with the framing already established, with the context already set, with the question already anticipated and the answer already shaped. "I want to talk about the team," said the CEO. "Of course," said Richard. "Performance has been strong in Q3. I was going to include the detail in the quarterly report but I am happy to walk through it now." "I do not want to talk about Q3 performance," said the CEO. "I want to talk about what the team experiences." "I am not sure I follow," said Richard. "I have had conversations with people in your team," said the CEO. "Not as a formal review. Just conversations. I want to share what I heard." Richard's expression did not change. This was itself a kind of information. Most people, when told that their manager has been having conversations with their team, produce some reaction, curiosity or concern or a slight adjustment of posture that reflects the recalibration happening internally. Richard produced nothing. "I heard that people in your team do not bring problems to you because when they do the problem gets managed out of the reporting rather than addressed," said the CEO. "I heard that there is a culture in the team of managing things quietly because raising them creates more difficulty than resolving them internally. I heard that there are process gaps that have been in place for months that have not appeared in any report." "I would be concerned if people felt that way," said Richard. "That is not the environment I try to create." "I know it is not the environment you try to create," said the CEO. "I am telling you it is the environment that has been created." "I would want to understand the specific concerns so I can address them," said Richard. "I am going to share the specific concerns with you," said the CEO. "But first I want to ask you something directly." "Of course," said Richard. "The reporting you produce for me," said the CEO. "Is it complete?" "It is accurate," said Richard. "That is not what I asked," said the CEO. Richard was quiet for a moment. "I present the information that is most relevant to the questions you are asking," said Richard. "And the information that is relevant to questions I am not asking?" said the CEO. "I use my judgment about what requires escalation," said Richard. "And your judgment has consistently been that problems in the team do not require escalation," said the CEO. "My judgment has been that problems in the team can be addressed at the team level without requiring the CEO's involvement," said Richard. "I understand that framing," said the CEO. "I want to offer you a different one. The problems that do not reach me are the problems I cannot help with. The problems I cannot help with are the problems that compound. The problems that compound are the problems that eventually become the failures I read about in Dom's messages and in the process review and in the conversation with Lena that happened because Lena could not find another way to raise something that should have been raised months ago." "I was not aware Lena had spoken to you," said Richard. "I know," said the CEO. There was a pause. "I want to be fair to you in this conversation," said the CEO. "You are very good at certain things. The things you are good at are real and they are valuable. But the way you use them has created a team that has learned not to tell you the truth, which means I have been making decisions about this function based on information that was managed rather than complete. That is a problem I need to address." "I understand," said Richard. "I want to tell you what is going to change," said the CEO.

What changed was the structure. Not Richard's role, immediately. The CEO had thought carefully about this and had concluded that removing Richard from the role without first changing the conditions that had allowed the pattern to develop would simply move the pattern to whoever came next. The structure changed in three ways. The first was visibility. The CEO instituted skip-level conversations, not as a surveillance mechanism but as a regular practice. Every month the CEO would have a direct conversation with two people from each senior manager's team, chosen at random, about the work and the team and the things that were or were not working. The conversations were not assessments. They were the ordinary practice of staying connected to what was actually happening rather than to the reporting of what was happening. The second was reporting standards. The quarterly report format was changed. The new format required not just the performance that had been achieved but the problems that had been encountered, the ones that had been resolved and the ones that had not, and for the ones that had not, the specific reason why and the specific ask of leadership. The format made the absence of problems a flag rather than a positive signal, which was the correct relationship between absence and information in any organisation that was paying attention. The third was a direct conversation with Richard about what the CEO expected from a manager in terms of information flow. Not a policy. A conversation. About what it meant to manage a team in a way that served the team and the company rather than managing the information about the team in a way that served the manager's position within the company. About the difference between those two things and why the difference mattered and what the CEO would be watching for going forward. Richard listened to all of this and said the right things and committed to the changes. The CEO believed some of it. Not all of it. The CEO had been in enough of these conversations to know that the people who are most skilled at managing information upward are also skilled at managing conversations about managing information upward. The structure was more reliable than the commitment. The skip-level conversations and the reporting format were things that would produce the right information regardless of whether Richard's commitment was genuine, because they created channels through which the information could flow around Richard rather than through him. This was the lesson. Structure over intention. Not because intention does not matter. Because structure works even when intention does not.

The CEO thought about Richard for several days after the conversation. Not with anger. The CEO had moved past the stage of the situation that could have produced anger and had arrived at the stage that produced a different kind of discomfort. The discomfort of recognising a pattern that had been present for a long time and had not been visible because the CEO had not been paying attention to the right things. Richard had not created himself. Richard had been created, or more precisely had been selected for and rewarded by, the specific conditions of an organisation that measured performance through reports and that had not, until recently, built any mechanism for understanding the gap between the reports and the reality. The CEO had created those conditions. Not intentionally. Not through any single decision. Through the accumulated effect of a hundred small decisions about what to pay attention to and what to trust and how to use the time that a CEO has and the attention that a CEO can bring to any given part of the organisation. The CEO had paid attention to the reports. Richard had been excellent at producing reports. The CEO had rewarded Richard. Richard had continued being excellent at producing reports. This was not a story about a bad manager. It was a story about a system that had been designed, without knowing it had been designed, to select for the skill of managing information rather than the skill of managing people. The selection had been consistent and the selection had worked and the result was a manager whose team did not tell the truth to and a CEO who had not known the team was not telling the truth. Until Dom had sent a message. The CEO thought about Dom again. About the forwarded email and the message about Richard's team and the conversation in the office that had ended with Dom saying in principle yes. Dom was not in the organisational chart in any position that gave access to the kind of information Dom had been surfacing. Dom was a provider account coordinator. Dom had no formal relationship with the people in Richard's team. Dom had built an informal one, through the process integration project, and had used the perspective that informal relationship provided to see things that the formal structure had been designed, without meaning to, to conceal. This was exactly the kind of thing the room had provided when the company was small. The proximity. The informal channels. The conversations that happened between people who were working on adjacent problems and who talked about what they were seeing because the distance between seeing and saying was short enough to cross without formal authorisation. The company had grown past the room. But Dom had found a way to be in it anyway. The CEO made a note. The note said: Dom should not be working for the provider.

End of Chapter 14

Writer's Thought:

The note says: Dom should not be working for the provider. I had been thinking the same thing for a while.

Here is What is Broken. The CEO. The Manager Who Performs Upward.

MarvinPro | March 2026

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