Leaders, managers, and employees often reflect very different levels of favorability surrounding important workplace aspects—such as job satisfaction, culture, or respect—ultimately creating separation between the various parties. While everyone tends to see things differently regardless of the situation, these perception gaps go much deeper because they reveal a disconnect across hierarchical structures that can severely impact a company’s bottom line. When organizations fail to create a cohesive group collaboratively working toward established goal achievement, the most valuable resources are not in harmony. As a result, many organizations create barriers that limit or prevent their success and growth.
Individuals develop perceptions and beliefs within a company based on how they experience the workplace. This unconscious act can lead to division across roles, contributing to mixed messaging fueled by differing perceptions. For example, leaders sharing how much they care about the employees may be met with disbelief and frustration from employees who, drawing from their experience, believe differently. In short, the leaders don’t understand the employees. Rather, the leaders tend to project their perceptions onto a situation, often having a much rosier outlook surrounding the employee workplace experience.
Influence of Positional Titles and Historical Roles
When considering historical roles within organizations, it’s vital to recognize that declaring any positional descriptions as universal is a grave error. For example, leadership often is viewed as the ability to influence people toward leader-identified goals that involve change or movement. Managers are considered those who provide order and consistency to carry out a leader’s strategy or vision.
These positional descriptions are useful, but historical adherence to them has made it easy to focus specifically on one at a time without considering its impact or interaction with other roles. Over time, this can lead to parallel but disconnected pathways, resulting in less cohesiveness and negatively influencing workplace outcomes and employee experiences. When viewed this way, it’s easy to see why (and how) gaps develop across and between leaders, managers, and employees. Often, the separation is built into the system itself, accompanied by varying perceptions of communication, trust, transparency, and other factors, and can develop into an “us versus them” mentality. Even a leader’s best intentions can be experienced and perceived much differently by employees due to the degrees of separation across roles.
Separation and its impact across roles
Compounding the issue is a consistent drop-off in positive sentiment surrounding workplace aspects between the leader level and individual contributor, and management is caught somewhere between the two. A recent study of 2,650 employees across 15 countries highlighted significant gaps across these roles. Figure 1 displays the clear negative trend in the percentage of each group who felt the culture to be either excellent or very good in the areas shown. This trend was found across numerous variables, supporting the separation between them.
Leaders who remain distant from the workforce place unnecessary stress and responsibility on the managers located medially between leaders and employees and are tasked with using their talents and skills for successful outcomes. Management then is caught between implementing the organizational mission and strategy and the desires and needs of a workforce—and the two may not always fit well together. This places management in an important and often frustrating position as they operate within organizational structures that can hinder success. With separation driven by position, it is critical for managers to demonstrate a leadership role that includes influencing, inspiring, and motivating while simultaneously trying to achieve someone else’s (the leader’s) vision.
At the same time, employees absorb messaging from company leaders and compare this information to what they experience from management in their day-to-day and week-to-week activities. As employees identify discrepancies and inconsistencies, they can unconsciously develop workplace mini-cultures to create purpose, meaning, and understanding within the environment, such as a small workgroup with unwritten values, beliefs, or behaviors that significantly influence the employee experience. Unfortunately, when these “disconnects” exist and are overlooked by positional titles or historic roles accompanying degrees of separation, leaders and managers often default to maintaining or regressing to historic institutional approaches focused solely on task performance and productivity. The employee’s experience then is reduced to the work itself as the hours and days tick by where the finish line is a deadline, only to start over again with the next one. It’s a downhill slope for a workforce.
The First Step Toward Cohesion
It’s important to note that there’s a difference between closing gaps toward common ground across hierarchies and creating a culture of conformity. Forced conformity to one party’s way of thinking (i.e., forced acceptance of leadership’s viewpoint) is not the solution. Instead, given companies’ formal or informal layers, move past the invisible barriers that separate leaders, managers, and employees and let positional power take a back seat.
That said, the person most responsible for initiating this change and bridging the gaps is the positional leader, who could begin by being more involved through increased interaction and accessibility and directly addressing the separation aspect. The data is clear (Figure 2): Cooperative and team environments are associated with high performance. This helps individuals connect through shared experiences and lets managers focus on managing without absorbing dual roles (including leading). This also means managers aren’t tasked with filtering and conveying the leader’s thoughts, desires, and perceptions to employees, where best-laid plans can become an expensive game of telephone and only occasionally achieve desired outcomes.
A Leader’s Responsibility for Performance Improvement
Organizations desire to be considered best in class, but the best strategies on paper will be difficult to execute if the workforce remains segmented and disconnected. When visions and goals are passed through the organizational hierarchy until the workforce is removed from the “why,” employees lose connections to the purpose and value within an organization, and performance suffers. Leaders are obligated to impact performance by closing these gaps and increasing connectedness and cross-functionality. This begins by being “among” the people. Walk the floors; talk to employees; ask, listen, and share to create mutual connections and find common ground.
High performance is attainable but takes genuine interaction across roles and a horizontal approach to the workplace instead of a vertical one. Until organizations become more proactive and fluid about bridging gaps between traditionally held roles and fluidly melding skill sets and interaction across positional levels, degrees of separation will continue to be a self-created continuous hurdle to overcome internally. Those attentive to identifying and correcting these gaps will be better positioned to compete, establish common ground, and increase organizational performance. Those who don’t will compete against themselves.