The disconnect
I’ve spent years watching managers fail at the most basic part of their job: understanding the work they’re managing. Not all of them, I’ve met exceptions but most of the people I’ve dealt with across my career fall into the same pattern. They give orders with confidence, but they have no idea what those orders actually require.
They don’t understand the extent of the effort. They don’t understand the physics of the work. They don’t understand the limitations of the people doing it. They just speak in deadlines and intimidation.
The brick lesson
When I was a kid, my father told me something simple: How can you manage even one worker if you’ve never done the work yourself?
If you ask someone to move a thousand bricks from point A to point B, you can’t just say, “Have it done by 2 p.m.” If you’ve never carried bricks, you don’t know:
- how many bricks a person can carry in one run
- how exhaustion slows them down
- how long each trip takes
- how physical ability changes the pace
- how the work compounds over time
It sounds like a naive example, but it’s not. It’s the foundation of management. If you don’t understand the work, you can’t manage the worker.
Scale makes ignorance worse
Now imagine you have 50 employees doing different tasks, bricks, ceramic plates, driving, lifting (programming, engineering, finance, cybersecurity…), whatever. If you haven’t done any of it yourself, you have no idea what challenges exist in each path. You don’t know what slows them down. You don’t know what else they’re juggling. You don’t know what you’ve already piled on them.
But you still walk into a meeting and say: “I want this done by end of day.” “Return this to me by tomorrow.” “Finish this before you leave.”
It’s not leadership. It’s guessing with authority.
The intimidation model
Most managers rely on one thing: fear. They know people don’t want to get fired. They know people don’t want to look slow or incompetent. So they use intimidation as a management technique.
It works in the short term. People rush. People panic. People deliver something.
But it’s not scalable. You can move bricks this way, you can move a cursor, but you cannot move a company.
The real difference
This is what separates great leadership from the average noise you see everywhere. Some leaders understand the work. They’ve done it. They respect the effort. They know what it takes. Others just issue commands and hope fear will fill the gaps in their knowledge.
One model builds companies. The other burns people!