Bigger Than the Competition

I once had a conversation with an executive leader where I pointed out quality control and scale problems we were facing. Real problems. The kind that affect clients and compound over time if you don't deal with them. The response was something along the lines of, "We are way bigger than [our largest competitor] and doing significantly more revenue."

That was the whole answer. Not "here's how we're going to address it." Not "walk me through the specifics." Just a size comparison, delivered like it settled the matter. As if being larger than someone else meant the problems weren't real.

That moment stuck with me because I realized the exec wasn't evaluating what I'd said. They were deflecting it. The size comparison was a reflex, which told me more about what that person was optimizing for than anything they could have said directly. If your response to "we have quality and scale problems" is "we're bigger than the other guy," you're not thinking about the work. You're thinking about the story. The story you tell the board, the investors, whoever needs to believe things are going well long enough for the next milestone to hit.

What makes it worse is what happens next. Executives like that don't just dismiss the problem once and move on. They build a circle that agrees with them. They find people who will confirm that everything is fine, who will reframe real issues as minor concerns, who will sand down the edges of bad news until it's unrecognizable by the time it reaches the top. That's just what happens when the person in charge signals that they don't want to hear it. People adapt. The ones who keep raising problems become inconvenient. The ones who soften the message or stay quiet get rewarded. And over time, leadership isn't just ignoring the problems. They've built an environment where the problems can't surface at all.

That's where the real damage happens. The issues I raised didn't go away because someone compared our size and revenue to a competitor's. They were still there. But the people with the authority and the budget to change direction had constructed a version of reality where none of that needed to change. So nothing changed. And the people who actually cared, the ones with ownership over the work, ended up absorbing the problems themselves. Meanwhile the exec moved on to the next talking point about growth.

I've seen this more than once. The specifics change but the pattern doesn't. The motivation at the top isn't to deliver great work for the clients paying for it. It's to hit the numbers that matter for the exit or the next role. Nobody talks about whether the clients are actually getting value, or whether the people on the ground are burning out.

And the people who pay for it are the ones who can't leave the room. The ICs doing the work. The clients who signed up because the sales motion was good even if the delivery wasn't. They're operating inside a system where the incentives at the top have nothing to do with the quality of what's going out the door, and they can feel it even if they can't always name it.

I'm at a point in my career where I know what I want, and it's not complicated. I want to work with leaders who hear "we have a problem" and respond by trying to understand it. Not leaders who reach for a reason why it doesn't count.

I don't have a clean answer for this one. My best guess is the market corrects at some point. The story can only outrun the work for so long.