What Management Hears—but Too Often Fails to Understand
אָזְנַיִם לָהֶם, וְלֹא יִשְׁמָעוּ

I speak three languages fluently—Hebrew, French, and English. I can read Spanish reasonably well (though I don’t speak it), and when I overhear a conversation in Arabic, I usually grasp the essence.

Russian, however, is different.

Since the large-scale immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, Russian has been part of the soundscape of daily life—on buses, in offices, in cafés. I have heard it constantly for decades. And yet, I do not understand a single word. Not one. Despite exposure, despite familiarity, it simply does not register.

That realization led me to a broader question—one that is deeply relevant to leadership and organizational life:

What does management hear, again and again, without truly understanding?

French offers a useful distinction here. One can écouter—to listen in a technical sense—without entendre: without grasping meaning, implication, or urgency. Many leaders écoutent. Far fewer truly entendent.

Below is my attempt to articulate the messages that organizations repeatedly send upward—and that management often hears, but does not fully absorb:

1. The timelines are unrealistically aggressive.
   Current schedules are aspirational, not analytical. They reflect hope rather than planning.

2. Releasing this version prematurely risks reputational damage.
   Speed is not always a virtue; credibility, once lost, is difficult to regain.

3. We cannot recruit effectively at these compensation levels.
   Entry-level salaries signal how much we truly value talent.

4. Several key contributors are actively looking elsewhere.
   This is not noise—it is an early warning system. People are, in fact, our greatest asset.

5. Employees from the acquisition completed a year ago are disengaging.
   Integration is not a legal event; it is a long psychological process which often fails.

6. If frontline employees are not convinced, execution will fail.
   Decisions that are not “sold” internally rarely survive contact with reality.

7. Diversity is not a moral luxury—it improves results.
   Heterogeneous teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones when properly led.

8. The lack of cooperation between Units A and B is not structural.
   It is not about roles or charts—it is about trust.

9. Trust, once damaged, is extraordinarily hard to restore.
   If leadership withholds or distorts the truth, skepticism will persist long after the facts change.

10. After a downsizing, top performers begin to leave.
    They assume they are next—and unlike others, they have options.

These messages are not whispered. They are spoken clearly, repeatedly, and in good faith. And yet, too often, they fail to penetrate.

Which brings us back to the ancient insight from Psalms 115:6–7:

They have ears, but cannot hear;
and noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel;
and feet, but cannot walk;
they cannot make a sound.

Leadership is not defined by access to information, dashboards, or briefings. It is defined by the capacity to entendre—to recognize meaning, risk, and human reality before consequences make them undeniable.

Hearing is easy.
Understanding is the work.

Remote and virtual teams are no longer an experiment; they are a structural reality of modern organizations. Distributed work brings clear advantages — access to global talent, continuous operations, proximity to customers — yet it also exposes organizations to persistent and often mis-diagnosed failures.

Across years of consulting with global companies and thousands of professionals, I have found that  breakdowns in remote collaboration are not generally caused by technology, individual capability, or lack goodwill of a personal nature. They are rather rooted in systemic trust failures — failures that organizations rarely name explicitly and even more rarely address directly.

This article outlines the most common trust barriers in remote and virtual teams, illustrates how they manifest in practice, and clarifies what leaders must do differently if they want distributed teams to perform rather than merely function.

The Problem with “Trust”

Trust has become one of the most overused and least operationalized words in organizational life. Leaders routinely call for it, HR programs promote it, and values statements celebrate it — yet when trust fails, no one agrees on what was violated.

The reason is simple: trust does not mean the same thing across cultures, roles, or power structures.

In many German professional environments, trust is procedural: “If you follow the process, I will trust you. However many other cultures work like this: once I trust you, I will follow the process.” Why? Trust in many relationship-oriented cultures is reciprocal and personal. A favor given creates an expectation of a favor returned. When these logics collide — as they often do in global organizations — both sides believe the other has broken trust, while neither believes they are at fault.

Until trust is made concrete and observable, it remains too vague to guide behavior in complex, distributed systems.

Three Systemic Trust Barriers in Remote Teams

1. Hidden Agendas and Power Imbalances

The most damaging trust failures in remote teams rarely involve interpersonal conflict. They involve control.

Who sets direction? Which site is strategic and which is tactical? Who gets visibility, budget, and senior leadership attention?

Over time, sites perceived as more powerful accumulate the most attractive work, greater influence, and political protection. Other sites are relegated to execution, maintenance, or “continuous engineering.” Predictably, morale declines, engagement erodes, and downsizing eventually follows.

This dynamic is not accidental. It is the natural outcome of ambiguous governance and poor design.

Leadership implication: Trust does not emerge organically here. It must be engineered through explicit decision rights, explicit allocation of strategic work, and senior leaders who actively prevent quiet marginalization.

2. Limited Transparency Across Sites

Most distributed teams exhibit what I call local loyalty. Information flows freely within a site but becomes selective — or strategic — across locations.

Why? Because information is perceived as power. Transparency is often viewed as weakness in an unspoken competition between sites.

The result is siloed knowledge, duplicated effort, hidden agendas and missed opportunities for leverage.

Leadership implication: Transparency across sites does not happen because tools exist to enable transparency. It happens when leaders explicitly reward openness, model it themselves, and make cross-site cooperation non-negotiable.

3. Tension Between Differing Competencies

Global teams are typically distributed to capitalize on different strengths:

• U.S. sites close to markets and roadmaps
• Israeli sites emphasizing innovation
• Indian sites offering flexibility and scale
• Japanese sites excelling at customer intimacy

These strengths are valuable — but without alignment they become sources of friction.

Customer-driven sites push for immediate customization. Innovation hubs push for architectural integrity. Market-facing leaders push for roadmap discipline. Each believes they are protecting the business. Each distrusts the others’ priorities.

Leadership implication: Trust improves only when leaders explicitly define how these competencies complement — rather than compete with — one another.

How Organizations Compensate for Low Trust

Interestingly, many organizations perform well despite low trust — at least in the short term. They do so by relying on compensatory mechanisms:

1. Escalation: Issues are pushed upward until a senior leader makes a unilateral decision.
2. Feigned trust: Polite agreement, vague commitments, and deliberately ambiguous decisions.
3. Blame: Individuals or functions are punished instead of addressing systemic causes.
4. Brute force: Fear, coercion, and pressure drive delivery.

These mechanisms work — temporarily. They also exhaust leaders, burn talent, and collapse under scale.

What Trust Looks Like in Practice

Through my work with organizations that have built durable trust across distance and culture, trust consistently shows up in 8 observable behaviors, including:

1. We accurately represent one another’s views when the other party is not present.
2. We follow through on the decisions we make together.
3. We assume positive intent unless proven otherwise.
4. We implement what we decide upon
5. Decisions are made on technical/marketing/business considerations to neutralize political positioning
6. We act reliably and honestly towards each other
7. We avoid character assassination.
8. We involve the relevant people in decision-making.

A Leadership Reality Check

Remote and virtual teams do not fail because individuals lack skill or motivation. They fail because organizations place individuals into trust-busting systems and then ask them to behave heroically.

Developing individual capability matters — but only within an environment that does not systematically undermine trust through power ambiguity, opacity, and misaligned incentives.

Leaders who succeed with distributed teams understand this distinction. They stop moralizing trust and start designing for it.

That, more than any tool or training, is what separates remote teams that merely survive from those that perform at scale.

Most of us begin our careers believing that talent, motivation, and hard work will naturally lead to success. And then reality intervenes. Again and again, capable people watch opportunities slip away—not because they lack skill, but because they lack political awareness. Meanwhile, others with sharper political instincts seem to thrive, sometimes despite modest competence.

What’s missing is a systematic initiation into organizational politics.

We teach young managers processes, frameworks, and leadership ideals. What we don’t teach them is how power actually works. As a result, many learn the hard way—by getting burned. That’s a bit like learning about sex exclusively from pornography: distorted, unrealistic, and ultimately harmful. Organizational life, like real life, is messier.

This article is not a how-to manual for manipulation. It’s a guided tour of the organizational zoo—illustrating political behaviors as they are commonly practiced, both admirable and Machiavellian—so managers can at least recognize the species roaming around them.

Goal Setting: The Politics Behind the Numbers

At face value, goal setting seems simple. Managers set reasonable targets, deliver results, get rewarded—or learn from failure. Clean. Rational. Almost comforting.

In reality, goal setting is often a political negotiation disguised as a planning exercise.

In highly political organizations, there are usually two scripts. The official script—the budget cycle, investor presentations, strategic plans—is written for “the street”: analysts, shareholders, and senior executives who need reassurance. The real script emerges later, as deadlines approach and reality intrudes.

Politically astute managers know this. They rarely take goals at face value.

Some under-promise and over-deliver. Others under-promise, then renegotiate once expectations soften. Some quietly agree to ambitious targets to calm the CEO, only to “manage the glide path” later with carefully timed explanations. Being fully realistic upfront, paradoxically, can be the riskiest move of all—it invites pressure before there is room to maneuver.

Managing Your Boss (Without Saying “No”)

Another unspoken discipline in the zoo is managing upward.

One common tactic is unwavering support. Some managers back their boss publicly at all times—right or wrong—earning a reputation for loyalty that can be invaluable in political environments.

There is also the art of selective transparency. Sometimes your boss genuinely does not want to know certain things, especially if the knowledge could implicate them. Yet there are moments when pushing uncomfortable information upward protects you from becoming the eventual scapegoat.

Over-involving your boss can be equally strategic. Flooding them with detail clarifies obstacles without explicitly refusing instructions. Expectations are adjusted—without anyone ever saying “no.”

Disagreement, too, is rarely direct. “Yes, but…” statements, foot-dragging, and tacit coalition-building with more powerful allies are time-honored methods. And when bosses are deeply unpopular, employees may simply execute instructions literally, knowing the outcome will speak louder than dissent ever could.

Ted and the Cost of Being Honest

Consider Ted, a project manager at a company we’ll call 3Q.

3Q promises product upgrades every three quarters and almost never delivers. Yet the company outperforms competitors. The atmosphere is aggressive, employee satisfaction is low, and project managers churn at 20% annually. Still, people are paid well, and firings are rare.

Ted comes from the military. For him, a commitment is sacred. 3Q is his first exposure to civilian project management.

Faced with impossible deadlines, Ted has options. He can resist and be labeled a naysayer. He can accept commitments and pass the blame later. He can hide risks in ambiguity. He can slowly reveal problems when the organization seems “ready.” Or he can overwhelm his boss with detail until alignment is forced.

Ted chooses honesty.

“I’m a straight shooter,” he says. “This project needs five quarters.”

Ted is reassigned to a minor supply-chain project. Six months later, he leaves the company.

In the organizational zoo, truth without timing is rarely rewarded.

Coalitions, Closures, and Quiet Revenge

Now consider a different enclosure.

Paul Wight, Head of R&D, is instructed to downsize by 30% and close one of four global sites. He calls all site leaders to Denver. The tension is immediate.

Chester Man, who runs the Manchester site, believes Paul dislikes time zones, travel, and early-morning calls. Denise Thibadeau, head of the Québec site, fears her location will be targeted due to language issues and Paul’s visible impatience on calls. Both assume bias. Neither trusts Paul.

Despite mutual dislike, Denise and Chester form a tactical alliance. They jointly propose taking responsibility for a profitable legacy product and a new platform—at remarkable speed and low cost. The timeline is knowingly optimistic. The plan is to “fix it later.”

They escalate the proposal directly to Paul’s boss, a European executive, effectively bypassing him.

Meanwhile, Paul asks HR to “build trust.” The result: a cooking class and a motivational webinar about a horse that runs faster while eating less.

The outcome? Vancouver is shut down. Manchester and Québec grow by 20%. Paul “moves on to his next assignment.” Denise is promoted into his role.

Politics 1. Process 0.

The Lesson No One Likes

Organizational politics thrive on mistrust, perceived bias, cultural friction, and coalition-building. They don’t disappear during restructuring; they intensify. And they don’t reward fairness—they reward awareness.

The uncomfortable lesson is this: when everyone in the room is a potential victim, consensus is unlikely. As one crude but accurate metaphor puts it, people will never agree on who deserves a second circumcision when they themselves are candidates.

Sometimes, leadership means deciding alone.

Welcome to the zoo.

I would like to present two brief case studies and then offer several conclusions.

Case Study 1: Save-Save

Save-Save is a device that claims to reduce consumers’ electricity bills by up to 40%. Founded by the eccentric entrepreneur Keith P., the company treats many of its employees as interchangeable parts. Turnover—particularly in administrative and customer-service roles—approaches 60% annually. Keith personally makes nearly all major decisions. While his marketing instincts and technical judgment have proven remarkably accurate, his staffing and organizational capabilities are notably weak. Despite this, Save-Save has extraordinary projected revenue for the coming years, and both Keith and his investors have generated substantial financial returns.

Case Study 2: Sally-Re

Sally-Re prepares salary slips for the Ministry of Education’s 15,000 employees. The company has held this contract since 1951, when it was founded by Sally’s grandfather, who was dismissed from the Ministry for a “behavioral impropriety” involving his secretary but was also a major donor to the governing political party (which remains in power). Sally-Re employs approximately 300 people, many of whom are family members or lack basic computer literacy. The company outsources nearly all of its core functions, including data security. Nevertheless, Sally-Re has continued to generate significant financial benefit throughout its history.

These cases illustrate that some organizations thrive because they possess an irresistible product, enjoy extraordinary luck, or have advantageous political connections. Their success persists regardless of internal dysfunction.
Conversely, organizations led by capable managers with sound strategies and solid products can still fail.

For OD practitioners, failing to recognize these underlying dynamics can lead to focusing on the wrong issues, being selected for the wrong reasons, or misunderstanding the organization’s “genetic code.” The risks are considerable and may ultimately harm professional credibility.

As a final note, Sally-Re has recently been instructed by the government to improve service levels by “12%” in the coming year. The Ministry has allocated 300 hours of training for this purpose. Unsurprisingly, Sally-Re’s granddaughter—fresh from completing a BA in Organizational Behaviour at a community college—has already bagged the service-improvement contract, at a very good fee.

But fret not; Keith’s chairman wants to “empower middle management” and is seeking a consultant.

Both barn dancing and the Beatles are not as popular as well; for heaven’s sake, some people don’t even know who Gerry and the Pacemakers were! And who was Chuck Berry? Or Hank Snow? Them was the good old days, sang Roger Miller.

Organizational development was once widely practiced, embraced by both universities who churned out young consultants like pancakes at a breakfast dirty spoon joint; clientele included government agencies, armies, family businesses and high tech. OD became a fad, like sideburns, short skirts, fedora hats and Blackberry phones. That era is dead, מת, caduc.

Nowadays, there is less OD done than in the past. Part of the decline I have explained in another widely read post; in this post I want to focus more on factors endogenic to OD, ie, factors which are not explained away by external constraints facing the profession, but rather come from within.

• OD is both an art and a science. Clients who want a science-based intervention and practitioner generally need the more artistic type intervention and the opposite. But clients buy what they want, not what they need. And too few OD practitioners can offer both types with the same quality of intervention.

• OD is not suitable for all organizations. OD’s impact cannot be quantitatively measured, its impacts are obtuse, and other forms of change such as re-orgs, firing under-performers and coaching are more user appealing, because they have more “apparent” effectiveness. Ie, they look good, they smell good and they impress owners and board members much more than OD. For Christ’s sake, what is OD?

• There are many OD professionals out there, with far more providers than clients. Very few OD professionals are on top of their game, rather there are many one trick ponies such as trainers, team builders, AI freaks, or high priests of some new religious fad sweeping the profession such as rebranding strategies for individual employees. There are also many incompetent people who have done a lot of damage by peddling damaged goods such as one -size-fits-all nonsense; see next item.

• Clients that do well with OD are very unique, the exception rather than the rule: they are truly dedicated to long term sustainable albeit intangible improvement; they value effectiveness much more than the current pop star, apparent effectiveness and gloss. Commercialized OD, meaning pre-packaged so-called axiomatic nonsense, is pure gloss- as well as pure nonsense. Organizations are very complex webs of human interaction, often extremely difficult to decipher.

• There are too few examples of OD projects that are hugely successful enough to serve as a positive reference point, to encourage potential clients to jump into the pool. I have been in the profession for over 45 years, and while I have an excellent track record and very satisfied clients on all continents except South America, my happy client list cannot be compared to that of a dental surgeon or plastic surgeon. Few clients are willing to share intimate details about how OD made a real difference. I had a very satisfied client (who retired) who said, “I never understood what you did until you stopped doing it (because of a downturn in his market).

The organization is facing declining sales and profitability, and senior management has mandated significant cost reductions. Paul Wight, Head of R&D based in Denver, leads several development sites located in Brunswick (New Jersey), Vancouver (BC), Québec City, and Manchester (UK). He has been instructed to downsize his organization by 30% and close one of the sites. To discuss this plan, Paul calls all site managers to Denver.

The most controversial decision is determining which location will be closed. The head of the Manchester site, Chester Man, deeply mistrusts Paul’s judgment. Chester believes Paul dislikes the time zone challenges, the early and late hours of conference calls, and the travel burdens of flying to Manchester quarterly—in coach class. Chester suspects Paul has a hidden agenda to shut down Manchester.

Similarly, Denise Thibadeau, who leads the Québec site, assumes that her location is at risk. She believes the Québec site will be closed because of communication challenges—specifically hard to understand accents—as well as additional costs tied to compliance with Canadian language laws. Although development costs are subsidized by provincial tax concessions, Paul often shows impatience on calls when he cannot immediately understand what is being said. Denise interprets this as further evidence of bias.

In recent weeks, Denise and Chester, despite their personal animosity, have started discussing how to counter Paul’s perceived plan. They form a tactical alliance, agreeing to jointly take responsibility for maintaining a profitable legacy product and developing a new platform at exceptional speed and minimal cost. They knowingly misrepresent the timeline, assuming they can “clean it up later.” Their strategy is to leverage their sites’ low employee turnover; they escalate their proposal directly to Paul’s boss — a European — hoping to neutralize Paul’s influence.

Meanwhile, Paul asks his HR manager, Gloria Ramsbottom, to create an activity to build trust for the Denver meeting. She prepares a cooking class, followed by a webinar of a horse that runs increasingly fast while eating less.

Ultimately, Paul shuts down the Vancouver site. Denise and Chester grow their sites by 20%. Within months, Paul “moves on to his next assignment,” and Denise is selected to replace him starting in March.

Summary

This case illustrates the political dynamics and infighting within a geographically dispersed organization facing downsizing. Paul, the R&D head, must close one site and reduce staff by 30%. Site leaders in Manchester and Québec—fearing targeted closure based on assumed biases—form an unlikely alliance to protect their locations. They manipulate strategic commitments and leverage internal politics to override Paul’s authority. Despite attempts to build trust, the meeting fails to resolve underlying tensions. In the end, the Vancouver site is closed, the coalition succeeds, and Denise replaces Paul. The case highlights the challenges of mistrust, perceived favoritism, cultural differences, and coalition-building during organizational restructuring.

PS Lesson learned: People will never reach agreement who is the unlucky one to get a second circumcisions if they themselves are candidates for this procedure. Don’t use teams when you need to decide on your own.