The Glass Wall

When you know you can add value but your best ideas can't get through — and what leaders can do about it

There is a figure that always reminds me of the scale of the challenge I’m working with. In the UK, 82% of managers have had no real training to lead people. I’ll write that again…. Eighty-two per cent. We take brilliant clinicians, engineers, scientists, and specialists, people who are brilliant at the thing, promote them for it, and then just assume that leading people is something they'll pick up as they go. The Chartered Management Institute calls them "accidental managers", and reckons poor management costs the UK economy around £84 billion a year. (That’s a lot of money that could have paid for some brilliant training!)

I've been chewing over what that actually costs us. Not in the headlines, but in the day-to-day, in the room, and I keep coming back to one image.

That image came to me on a dog walk, of all places. I'd been talking to someone about the way we split "clinical" from "non-clinical", and how training so often gets written off as unproductive time, and it struck me. I can see where things are going wrong. I can see where I could help. I can see, plain as day, where I'd add value, and I still can't get through to do it. Something's in the way - not a wall exactly, because a wall's solid and you can't see through it. This is the Glass Wall.

That's the thing about a glass wall. You can see the other team perfectly. You can see what they're doing, you can see where you'd help, you can see exactly where you'd add value. And there's still this invisible pane sitting between you, and the message it gives off is: keep in your lane, we don’t need you. Because no one can see it, no one names it. We just learn to work around it.

I've seen it most clearly in healthcare, in that line we draw between "clinical" and "non-clinical". The language on its own builds a ‘them and us’ situation. For example I've watched Speak Up for Safety training handed only to clinical teams, as if no one else could be trusted with a patient's safety, and then I have seen a receptionist, a housekeeper, a manager do the very thing that kept a patient safe. The people we'd filed under "minor contributor" turned out to be equal partners all along. The glass wall just stopped us noticing it.

And here's what I've come to realise: the glass wall works both ways. It isn't only that you can't get through to add your value. It's that you can't see the value other people are adding to you, because from where you're standing, you could do it all yourself. So everyone stays put, each convinced they're the one holding it together.

But this isn't a healthcare problem alone, it’s bigger than that and in fact I’d say it's a human one. Once you've spotted the glass wall, you see it everywhere. It's the engineer who won't step into a "commercial" conversation, because that's not their job. The scientist who thinks marketing is beneath the data. The ops lead and the finance lead who each know exactly how the other could do better, and never once say it across the table.

Sometimes the wall makes people keep in their lane and stay there, siloed. And sometimes, just as damaging, it makes them barge straight across it: everyone reckons they could do marketing, everyone's sure they'd sell better given half a chance, everyone knows how the other department ought to be run. It looks like the opposite problem, but it's the same wall. Either way, nothing gets built.

So what holds the wall up? Not bad people. I believe that very few people come into work to do a bad job (I know that here are some, but they are quite rare.) It's structure and behaviour. Unclear roles, those targets that compete with those of other departments,, and that creeping sense that it isn't safe to reach across. Psychological safety is the mortar, and it either keeps the wall standing or lets it come down. It's also one of the most misunderstood ideas in leadership. When Amy Edmondson first studied it in hospitals, she found the best teams weren't the ones reporting the fewest mistakes. They were the ones reporting the most, because it was safe to. Silence isn't safety. More often than not, silence is just fear that's learned to keep quiet.

This is where I start with every team I work with. Over the years I've come back to the same seven questions from Amy Edmondson, again and again. They look almost too simple, but they tell me more in five minutes than any staff survey. Have a go now. Answer them honestly, not as the person leading the team, but as if you were sitting in it:

1. If you make a mistake on this team, is it held against you?
2. Are you able to bring up problems and tough issues?
3. Do people on the team sometimes reject others for being different?
4. Is it safe to take a risk?
5. Is it difficult to ask other team members for help?
6. Do people on the team deliberately act to undermine your efforts?
7. Are your unique skills and talents valued and used?

Use your instinct and gut answer to each. Then ask the one that really matters: would everyone on the other side of the glass wall answer the way you just did? The gap between your answer and theirs is an indication of where you need to start.

Now, here's where I'll turn my view towards my own profession, because yes, I'm a training consultant, but that doesn’t mean that I think training solves everything – it is only the starting point. People have to then do something with what they have learnt. You can send an accidental manager on the best course in the country, but if they've never been taught to lead, a day in a room won't change how they behave come Monday morning. People have to actively do something with what they've learned. That's where the real work starts.

So what actually brings the wall down? I believe there are three behaviours, which are a great place to start:

Model not-knowing. Psychological safety doesn't begin when a manager says "you can talk to me." It begins when they behave in a way that makes it safe to speak. It's the leader who says "I don't have all the answers, what do you think?" and then actually listens, and does something with it. Bit by bit, the person who used to think "well, isn't that what you're paid for?" starts to think for themselves.

Reach through the wall with curiosity, not takeover. It's the clinician who turns to the receptionist and says, "you see this department every day, what do you notice that I don't?" It's the engineer who asks the customer success team what they're hearing from clients, and actually means it. Reaching across isn't about doing someone else's job better than they can. It's being genuinely curious about the value they add to yours, and then showing them you heard it.

Stop dismissing the invisible work. Listen to the language your organisation uses. Why is training so often logged as "non-productive time", lumped in with absence and holiday, as if the person's downed tools? Is a Speak Up for Safety programme not productive? Is learning to lead not productive? What we count, and what we dismiss, tells everyone exactly where the wall is, and whether it's safe to reach through it.

The glass wall rarely comes down in one dramatic moment, and nor should it; smashing it just leaves everyone standing in broken glass. It comes down the way it went up: slowly, one behaviour at a time. One person decides to reach through, and someone on the other side feels safe enough to reach back.

That's the work I care about most: helping technical experts become the kind of leaders their people will actually speak up to. Because the good ideas are already here.

So. Where's the glass wall in your organisation? And what would it take for you to be the first to reach through it?