The pretence is the unkind part

The friendly-boss fiction feels generous. It holds right up until the moment the power is used, and then it breaks.

You eventually have to give hard feedback, deny a request, restructure a team, or let someone go. If you have spent a year performing friendship, that moment lands as a betrayal, because you taught them to read the relationship as something it was never going to be. If you have been honest from the start, kind, fair, clear that you are their manager and not their friend, the same moment is still hard, but nobody was deceived.

So be friendly and kind, and stay aware in every interaction that the hierarchy is real. That awareness is respect for the other person's intelligence.

Hierarchy is also an information structure

The second half gets discussed far less, and it cost me more over the years. A hierarchy also decides who knows, and information is one of its currencies.

It flows badly in both directions. Downward, it gets filtered. The more levels sit below you, the more disconnected you become from what is happening, because the managers between you and the work are there precisely to handle things, and the things that get escalated up to you are never the whole picture. You end up with a tidy summary of a reality you can no longer see directly.

Upward, it gets withheld, and the most instructive case I lived through was not a political one. A manager sat on news I needed because they thought it would upset me and strain the warm, friendly relationship they wanted to keep. The intention was kind. The effect was that I could not do my job. I was planning and deciding on a picture I knew was incomplete, unable to deliver the right thing because nobody had told me what the right thing now was, and unable to pass it on to my own teams either. I ended up reconstructing the real situation sideways, from peers in other parts of the organisation, because it never reached me through the line it should have. The friendly-boss fiction is one of the things that make the information stop flowing, because the moment someone is managing your feelings to protect a friendship, they are no longer telling you what you need to hear. People spend that currency, deliberately or not, and sometimes they spend it trying to be nice to you. The specific version, the reluctance to pass on bad news because delivering it is unpleasant, is well-studied enough to have a name: the MUM effect [1] .

What to do about it

The practical response is the same for both directions: do not rely on the line. Maintain direct, regular contact with at least a few people at every level below you. Do it without going around your managers or undermining them. The official channel will never carry the full picture, by design. A handful of honest relationships several levels down tells you what the summaries leave out, and a handful of peers across the organisation tells you what your own chain is not passing up.

This has to be done carefully, and openly enough that it does not read as spying. But it is not optional. The alternative is to accept that you are always acting on a filtered, possibly curated version of reality, and to be surprised when it turns out you were.

Summary

Hierarchy exists. There is a real power imbalance between you and the people who report to you, and the people you report to, and pretending it away is what hurts people when the power is finally used. Hierarchy is also an information structure: information gets filtered going down and withheld going up, so build the direct relationships, downward and sideways, that let you see past both. How you act on all this matters more than anything you say about it, which is the next thing I want to write about.

References

1

Rosen, S., & Tesser, A. (1970). On reluctance to communicate undesirable information: the MUM effect. Sociometry, 33(3), 253-263. https://doi.org/10.2307/2786156. The collective, organisational version, employees withholding concerns upward because speaking up feels unwise, is covered by Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000), "Organizational Silence", Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706-725, https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.2000.3707697.