I was part of a process to increase the productivity of our R&D division, and the part that received the most attention from the R&D folks was creating an escalation process for project teams. The actual, but unstated, objective was to maintain the relevance and power of function managers. Of course, this was an important contributor to the decreased productivity of teams, but no matter, the maintenance of the power structure superseded all other considerations.

What’s crucial to recognize is that this is completely normal, and it reflects the self-protective behaviors that are inherent within organizations. It is simply a manifestation of how our brains work. I wonder how much psychological safety people at Google are feeling these days with its stock price plummeting and management telling people to knuckle down.