When You’re Stuck Between a Rock and a C-Suite

There's almost nothing harder than being a leader sitting squarely between the top executives and the humans who actually do the work every day.

From this vantage point, you see the business goals and pressures clearly. But you also see everything downstream. You hear the quiet fears, and you empathise with the frustrations that never make it into a board deck. You see where executive leadership are stuck in their blind spots about what people need. You know that it’s not because executives don’t care, but because larger pressures are screaming at them day and night with a megaphone.

And here’s the thing: you know what would help. You recommend training, better modeling and performance frameworks, or more thoughtful infrastructure. And the executives nod, genuinely agreeing…but the conversation ends there. Because while making a company better for the people sounds important, it never seems urgent.

The revenue risk is that what makes work better for people also makes the company more valuable. A high percentage of leaders miss this powerful truth.

So the gap stays a gap. And, the people leader, HR executive, or COO with a human-centered lens, stays stuck. It’s one of the most emotionally taxing professional scenarios. But luckily, it’s solvable, just probably not in the way you think.

People Problems Don’t Get Solved Until They Turn Into Numbers

Here’s the quieter truth behind most organisational suffering: people don’t struggle because leaders are cruel or incompetent (usually). They struggle because leaders are unwilling or unable to invest in creating the conditions that make superb work possible.

It's incredibly true that people often like to complain, but most of the time when employees ask for changes to working hours, training, systems, or hybrid norms, they are not asking for indulgence, they are pointing to risky friction in the system. And yet those requests often stall, not because leaders disagree, but because improving the flow of work is perpetually outranked by urgent client demands, or the next strategic hurdle.

So the system stays sub-optimised. Not broken enough to demand action, but inefficient enough to tax the contributions of everyone inside it.

I use a simple framework to help human-centered leaders break this deadlock:

Counting + Comparison = Motivation

When this framework is in place, optimising the way people work goes from sounding like a cultural preference to more of an operational discipline that will provide leaders with real, tangible results.

Step 1: Counting Makes Friction Visible

The first move is to stop talking about “people issues” in abstract terms and start counting the cost of friction. Not hypothetically, not emotionally, but numerically.

What is the attrition rate in teams with older systems vs. current ones? What does rework cost when technology platforms don’t talk to each other? How much management time is spent resolving preventable confusion?

When organisations fail to optimise systems and improve everyday frustrations like inflexible hours, illogical processes, or bad systems, then their people compensate for these issues with effort. And effort is expensive. Once friction is counted in dollars, the narrative changes. Executives may disagree on philosophy, but they rarely disagree with math.

Step 2: Comparison Activates Attention

Counting informs leaders, and when you combine it with comparison, that’s where real motivation happens. Most senior leaders are competitive by nature. Not in a petty way but in a performance-oriented one. They want to know how they are doing relative to peers. So the next step is to benchmark.

Which teams work faster with fewer meetings? Which locations retain talent longer after implementing flexibility in scheduling? Which leaders operate with fewer escalations and cleaner handoffs?

When the data shows that certain environments produce better outcomes, not because people work harder, but because work is designed better, something important happens: Optimisation becomes aspirational.

Now the conversation shifts from “Do we really need to change this?” to “Why are they getting better results than we are?” That question puts fuel in the tank.

Making Systems of Work a Strategic Priority

None of this is about shaming leaders or diagnosing character flaws. Most executives were promoted for execution, not for designing environments. They were rewarded for pushing through friction, not eliminating it. So they default to endurance instead of optimisation.

But when leaders learn to see work as something that can be designed, not just endured, organisations change dramatically. Energy returns, waste drops, and people stop compensating for broken systems.

And the leaders caught between the C-suite and the workforce finally stop feeling like translators of unmet needs and start acting as architects of better outcomes.

If you are advocating inside your organisation for clearer systems, smarter flexibility, or more humane pacing, then your instinct is right. But instinct alone rarely wins budget or attention.

When you quantify friction and compare outcomes, you give leaders a new lens. And when leaders finally invest in making work smoother, people stop burning out trying to overcome systems that were never designed to help them succeed. In that way, everyone wins.

Trying to lead change while embedded in the very system that resists it?

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