Organizations can become remarkably sophisticated at accommodating their leaders. For better or worse. Teams learn their preferences, anticipate reactions, and adjust how information flows around them. Most of the time, this is simply part of working with other people. But sometimes those adjustments begin to accumulate around behaviors that create real friction.
If an executive is volatile, for instance, people learn to present information cautiously. A manager who “forgets” decisions leaves everyone documenting what was agreed. Repeatedly dropped handoffs create their own paper trail as colleagues begin to CYA (cover your ass).
Accommodation
None of these responses is irrational. In many cases, they are what capable people should do. Organizations depend on people adjusting when a process breaks down, balls get dropped, or circumstances change without warning. Workarounds are often what keep the work moving.
The problem is that these workarounds can make dysfunction surprisingly routine. And costly. As the organization continues to function, the behavior at the center of the accommodation remains largely invisible to the leaders with the authority to address it.
Meanwhile, the cost begins accumulating elsewhere. Individually, none of it looks especially consequential. Collectively, it can become an enormous burden. Extra meetings, unnecessary checkpoints, defensive documentation, missed opportunities, and the anxiety people carry into everyday work begin to accumulate. Over time, those accommodations can harden into bureaucracy, distrust, exhaustion, and outright avoidance.
Over time, the people can become so good at accommodating the dysfunction that it becomes difficult to know where the cost originated.
Accounting
Leaders often know when someone is hard to work with. They hear the complaints and see some of the friction. But they also see what that person contributes. “She knows the customer better than anyone.” “He is a gifted researcher.” “She delivers the numbers.” “He has expertise that would be difficult to replace.” Somewhere in the calculation is a familiar concession: yes, this person can be difficult, but they contribute more than they take.
We often reward individuals who bring in higher profits, make better decisions, deliver projects on time, or land a valuable client relationship. But the costs created around an individual appear somewhere else: in another person’s time, another team’s process, or distributed across an entire culture. No single delayed decision, duplicated task, or frustrated employee appears large enough to change the calculation.
In other words, the math has an important asymmetry. Contribution is concentrated and visible, while the costs of accommodation are distributed across several people and even teams.
Which is why the denominator in the ROI calculation may be wrong. And the farther up the organization the dysfunction sits, the more expensive that accommodation can become. A difficult manager may cause a handful of people to change how they work. But a senior executive can cause hundreds of people to alter how they communicate, prepare decisions, and work across functional lines.
At that scale, accommodation stops looking like a personality quirk. It begins to look like an operating cost.
I have seen a version of this with a particular executive team a few months ago. The CHRO seemed to rule with intimidation and fear. When a decision didn’t go her way, she had “selective amnesia”, as her team called it, and decisions had to be rehashed in the next meeting. Her own employees became reluctant to challenge her directly and often sought out another executive nearby whom they trusted for advice.
That second person becomes an informal pressure valve: helping teammates interpret decisions, work through difficult interactions, rebuild trust, and keep work moving across functional lines. But it comes at a cost. From above, the formal leader may still appear productive, while the accommodation is happening somewhere else, in another leader’s time and in the secondary network that has quietly formed around them.
What makes this particularly difficult is that accommodation often works.
Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson saw a version of this while studying hospital nurses.1 They observed 26 nurses across nine hospitals and found that small breakdowns in the work system were remarkably common, roughly one problem for every hour of nursing work they observed. Missing information, unavailable supplies, broken equipment, or someone needed elsewhere could easily interrupt patient care.
The nurses did what capable people tend to do. They found a way through. In 93 percent of the problems observed, nurses solved the immediate issue rather than trying to change whatever had caused it. Patient care continued, which was obviously important. But because the problem had been overcome locally, the larger system often had little opportunity to learn from it. On average, nurses lost 33 minutes of an eight-hour shift coping with these kinds of system failures.
The lesson isn’t that workarounds are bad. Quite often they are evidence of capable judgment, creativity, and commitment. Other research has found that employees create workarounds precisely because formal processes or systems do not fit the reality of the work, and those improvisations can create genuine value.2 These are often referred to as adaptations.
The problem, however, comes when the workaround gets created because of a deficiency and works well enough that no one sees what made it necessary.
Pattern
Temporary accommodations can persist. With repetition, they become routines. Additional research on organizational workarounds has found that unresolved problems can lead workarounds to become institutionalized into regular practice3, sometimes accumulating until the organization eventually has to redesign the underlying system.
By then, what began as an accommodation for one problem can be difficult to distinguish from the way the organization operates over time. At that point, the accommodation is no longer merely distributed. It has become social, passed from one person to another as a part of how people learn to operate inside the organization.
The challenge is seeing the pattern before the accommodation becomes “just the way we do things around here.”
That is harder than it sounds. A manager looking down on an organization sees only part of how a leader affects it. They may see the top-level results, attend important meetings, and hear occasional complaints. But the people beside and below that leader experience something entirely different. They carry the cost of what happens before the meeting, after the meeting, and in the space between to keep things moving.
Any one of those perspectives can be biased. An employee may have had a bad interaction, for instance. Or a rival peer may have a competing agenda. Often a manager simply sees a different side of the person. But when similar experiences begin appearing independently across several relationships, they become harder to dismiss.
That gives us a strong reason to move from individual judgment to collective evidence. Research on multisource feedback has found that perspectives from direct reports, peers, and supervisors contain meaningful information about leadership effectiveness.4 The value is not that any one person gets to declare a leader dysfunctional. It is that the organization can begin looking for a pattern.
And we can get better at asking for that pattern.
Employee surveys and leadership reviews (like 360 assessments) tend to collect opinions on a person. Those are undoubtedly useful, but the underlying evidence is still a set of individual experiences, shaped to some degree by recent interactions, personal history, or competing agendas.
A few of those questions can be designed for an Organizational Network Analysis, offering a much richer way to see that pattern. Rather than relying only individual opinions, it looks across relationships to understand the building blocks of healthy working relationships, such as whom people collectively trust, turn to for advice or information, or repeatedly avoid.
Those relationships matter because they are the infrastructure through which work actually moves. Information, like water, tends to find the path of least resistance. People bring problems to those they trust and avoid those they do not. They seek advice from people whose judgment they value and discount it from those they consider distant. Information flows through relationships that feel useful and safe, and skirts around those that create risk or additional burden.
The practical advantage is that this does not require a new process. The questions can be incorporated into an existing employee survey, engagement survey, or 360 review. What changes is less the burden on employees than the way the organization asks the question, and what it is then able to see in the answers.
We’re familiar with the saying, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ Across enough beholders, however, a pattern emerges.
Intervention
Seeing the pattern, however, does not tell us what to do about it.
Identifying a source of dysfunction can quickly turn into a verdict about the person. Sometimes that judgment may prove warranted. But in many cases, the behavior creating friction is telling us something else. The leader may be struggling with a leadership skill they never developed, for instance, or they may be poorly suited to the work they were rotated into.
Simply showing someone how others experience them produces only modest improvement on its own. Awareness is useful, but it usually needs to be paired with some form of development, support, or change in the environment around the person.
The intervention should be the least invasive one to address exactly what is causing the problem.
For some leaders, that may mean coaching. Our work at 3Fold uses executive coaches almost exclusively as they have shown to help leaders see how their behavior is experienced by others without requiring a colleague or direct report to carry the burden of delivering that message. They can also help the leader experiment with different ways of operating and provide an outside perspective on whether those changes are taking hold.
In other situations, the answer may be additional support. A gifted researcher, engineer, clinician, or operator may find themselves responsible for leading people largely because they were exceptional at the work that came before it. Mentorship, a stronger operating partner, or even a trusted peer can sometimes provide the experience and perspective they may be missing.
Occasionally, we have seen the job itself as the problem. Someone can be valuable to an organization while being poorly matched to the role they occupy. Redesigning responsibilities, narrowing the span of leadership, or moving someone back toward the work where they are strongest can relieve pressure on both the individual and the people around them.
There will also be cases where those efforts fail. A leader may be unwilling or simply unable to change; or they may continue imposing costs on the organization that outweigh what they contribute. At that point, separation may be the responsible decision.
The advantage of seeing the pattern earlier is that it gives an organization more choices. Instead of waiting until frustration has hardened into resignation, bureaucracy, or turnover, leaders can intervene while the problem is still smaller and while the person at the center of it may still have room to change.
Seeing
Organizations will always adapt. They have to. No process anticipates every circumstance, and no leader arrives perfectly suited to every demand placed on them. The ability of people to adjust, compensate, and find another way through is part of what keeps an organization functioning.
But that same adaptability can make it remarkably easy to carry the costs of organizational dysfunction for years.
People compensate. Work gets done. Results continue to arrive. From a distance, the organization may look healthy enough. What is harder to see is everything being absorbed around the edges: the extra conversations, the additional process, the anxiety, the lost time, and eventually the people who decide the accommodation is no longer worth making.
That is why the familiar judgment that someone “contributes more than they cost” deserves a little more scrutiny.
They may.
But before reaching that conclusion, leaders might ask what the rest of the organization has had to build around them in order for that contribution to arrive. Once those accommodations are included, what looked like a personality quirk may turn out to be something much more consequential.
About the Author
Jason L. Zimmerman is the founder of 3Fold Collective, a consulting firm focused on turning strategy into realizable outcomes by identifying what gets in the way of execution and helping organizations align their formal structures with the people and networks through which work actually gets done.
1. Anita L. Tucker and Amy C. Edmondson, “Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System Change,” California Management Review 45, no. 2 (2003): 55–72. Tucker and Edmondson studied how nurses responded to everyday process failures across nine hospitals, finding that highly capable frontline workers often solved immediate problems so effectively that the underlying failures remained hidden from the larger organization. https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2003/02/45-2-why-hospitals-dont-learn-from-failures-organizational-and-psychological-dynamics-that-inhibit-system-change
2. Robert M. Davison, Louie H. M. Wong, Carol X. J. Ou, and Steven Alter, “The Coordination of Workarounds: Insights from Responses to Misfits Between Local Realities and a Mandated Global Enterprise System,” Information & Management 58, no. 8 (2021): 103530. Studying employees in a multinational company, the authors found that workarounds can be rational and valuable responses when formal systems do not fit the reality of the work, and that coordinated workarounds can persist over time. https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.im.2021.103530
3. Bijan Azad and Nelson King, “Institutionalized Computer Workaround Practices in a Mediterranean Country: An Examination of Two Organizations,” European Journal of Information Systems 21, no. 4 (2012): 358–372. Through case studies of two organizations, Azad and King examined how workarounds that might appear temporary can persist and become institutionalized as part of the way work is routinely performed. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1057/ejis.2011.48
4. James W. Smither, Manuel London, and Richard R. Reilly, “Does Performance Improve Following Multisource Feedback? A Theoretical Model, Meta-Analysis, and Review of Empirical Findings,” Personnel Psychology 58, no. 1 (2005): 33–66. The authors found that feedback from peers, direct reports, and supervisors contains meaningful information about leadership effectiveness, while their meta-analysis of 24 longitudinal studies found that feedback by itself generally produces only modest improvement over time. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.514_1.x
Wait, wait, wait... it’s not all negative! This article looked at how cost can accumulate between people, especially when organizations repeatedly accommodate friction without tracing it back to its source. The Hidden Economics of Connection explores the inverse: how value can emerge between people through trust, access, information flow, and relationships that rarely appear on an org chart. Taken together, the two pieces make the same broader point from opposite directions: some of the most consequential economics inside an organization live in the space between people.
The Hidden Economics of Connection
A few months ago, I was sitting in a room listening to a few of Chicago’s better-known private equity firms talk about where the next wave of value creation might come from.
Very well said . . . "The challenge is seeing the pattern before the accommodation".