I once raised quality control and scale problems to an executive leader. 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 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.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot since. Not because the exec was uniquely bad, but because the reflex was so recognizable. When a leader’s first move in the face of a hard truth is to reach for a reason it doesn’t count, it’s usually a sign they’re more focused on the story they’re telling than on the long-term cost of whatever debt is piling up underneath it. Technical debt, process debt, trust debt. It all compounds the same way, and it all gets more expensive the longer you avoid looking at it.
What it costs
The first thing that happens is the information environment around the leader degrades. People adapt to what gets rewarded. If raising problems gets you labeled a pessimist or a bottleneck, the smart move is to stop raising them, or to soften them until they’re unrecognizable. The leader doesn’t notice this, because from their vantage point everything looks fine. Meetings are productive. The updates are positive. What they’ve actually done is build a filter between themselves and reality, and the filter gets thicker every quarter.
The second thing is that the problems don’t go away. They get absorbed. The ICs and middle managers who can see the issues end up carrying them, patching them, working around them. For a while, that works. The system holds together on the backs of the people closest to the work. But those people also know what’s happening. They know the difference between leadership that engages with hard things and leadership that deflects. And the ones with options eventually use them. What’s left is a team that’s either too checked out to push back, or too inexperienced to know they should.
The third cost is the slowest and the most expensive. When leaders optimize for the story long enough, they lose the ability to tell when the story has stopped being true. The feedback loops that would have caught a problem early are gone. The people who would have flagged it have left or given up. By the time the issues surface in a way the leader can’t deflect, usually through a client leaving, a number missing, or a key person walking out, the problem is no longer the one they could have addressed earlier. It’s much bigger, and the options for fixing it are much more complicated.
To be fair
I want to be fair to the position, because it’s genuinely hard. Everyone wants to believe the decisions they’re making are the right ones. Sitting in the seat where everyone is looking at you for an answer, and then living with that answer after people inevitably push back on it, is not easy work. So you develop a narrative. You build a strategy everyone can rally around. It makes alignment easier. It makes the job livable. I understand the pull of that, and I don’t think most leaders who fall into this pattern are doing it cynically.
The story was the product. Someone else would inherit the rest.
That said, for a long stretch in tech, the incentives rewarded a version of leadership that didn’t have to care much about the long term. If the role was a stepping stone to the next one, and the next one came quickly, you could grow some numbers that looked good on paper and move on before the debt came due. The story was the product. Someone else would inherit the rest.
A different cycle
The economy those incentives were built on isn’t really the one we’re in anymore. Job hopping at the senior level has gotten harder. The competitive landscape has gotten meaner. The runway for carrying a story that the work doesn’t support is shorter than it used to be. Which makes it a reasonable moment to ask whether the leadership habits that worked in the last cycle are the ones worth keeping for this one. Optimizing for long-term growth and sustainability, even when it means hearing things you’d rather not hear, starts to look less like an ethical stance and more like a practical one.
The opposite habit is simple. When someone brings you a hard truth, hear it out, understand what they’re actually concerned about, and address it. Even “that isn’t something we can focus on right now” used with real context is different from deflection, and it doesn’t train people to stop bringing things up. Every time you deflect instead, you make it a little harder for the next real thing to reach you.