There are things you learn to tolerate after thirty-four years in the corporate world. Pressure is one of them—pressure from targets, deadlines, clients, and from people several organizational boxes above you who have suddenly discovered that a number on a report is not moving in the preferred direction. These are occupational hazards. You learn to live with them.
What I have never quite learned to accept is disrespect disguised as urgency.
It is an old management style that has somehow survived every corporate transformation program ever invented. Companies modernize, structures change, and departments are reorganized, divided, merged, and occasionally renamed into something nobody can remember without checking the organizational chart. We talk about collaboration, empowerment, and creating better workplaces. And yet, every now and then, the old management playbook makes a comeback.
It often begins with some variation of: “During my time…” This is followed by a recollection of how things were done before, how people worked harder, and how the speaker personally crossed several corporate oceans apparently without the assistance of a boat. There is nothing wrong with remembering the good old days. The trouble begins when they become the yardstick by which everyone in the present is measured.
Experience is valuable. But experience should make us better at understanding people, not merely better at reminding them that we have experience.
There will always be problems at work. Responsibilities change, processes evolve, teams adjust, and people make mistakes. Someone misses something; someone else believes it should have been obvious. In other words: corporate life.
But somewhere between identifying a problem and solving it, urgency can enter the room and respect quietly slip out. Voices change, expressions harden, and questions begin sounding less like questions. Suddenly, someone must be blamed.
That is when management becomes theater. Sometimes the search for someone to blame becomes so consuming that the elephant in the room gets to sit comfortably through the entire discussion. The actual problem? Still there. Still waiting to be solved.
Pressure has a peculiar way of revealing how people understand authority. Some become more focused, some become more collaborative, and others become louder. Perhaps the assumption is that decibels improve efficiency. They do not. Neither does a harder stare, a sharper tone, or another reminder of how much better things supposedly worked “during my time.”
This is not an argument against accountability. Accountability matters. People should be corrected, performance should be questioned, and mistakes should be called out. But accountability and humiliation are not synonyms. Neither are urgency and aggression. You can question someone’s work without questioning the person’s worth.
Experience does not make anyone infallible. I have made mistakes, been corrected, changed my mind, and occasionally swallowed my pride. But experience has also taught me something else: position and worth are not the same thing. A title may determine who signs the memo, calls the meeting, or occupies the larger box on the organizational chart. It does not determine who deserves respect.
My younger self might have responded differently. She was fearless and sufficiently jaded to say exactly what was on her mind. Age has taught her restraint; experience has taught her to choose her battles. But restraint should never be mistaken for acceptance. Silence is not necessarily surrender. Sometimes it is simply the last courtesy an experienced professional is extending to the room.
Disrespect rarely arrives as one grand, unmistakable act. More often, it accumulates. A dismissive remark here. A condescending tone there. A public dressing-down passed off as urgency. Small things—until one day, there is one final straw. The camel, having survived targets, deadlines, and reorganizations, finally develops an opinion. Not necessarily a loud one; by then, the camel has also learned restraint.
For all the sophisticated language corporations have invented around leadership, perhaps we have made something simple unnecessarily complicated:
You can be urgent without being insulting.
You can be demanding without being demeaning.
You can correct without belittling.
You can lead without constantly reminding everyone that you are the leader.
I still believe professionalism requires restraint, experience should come with humility, and respect should travel in both directions on an organizational chart. Perhaps that makes me old-fashioned. So be it.
If respect has become an outdated management principle, that is one corporate transformation I am perfectly happy to resist. Because it was never really about protocol. It was about respect.
