A head of product at a company of about eighty people sends a proposal on a Thursday evening. They have spent two weeks on it. By Friday morning it is back, with the CEO’s changes tracked through every page. A heading reworded. A number moved. A paragraph cut and rewritten in the CEO’s own voice. A short note at the top: “Good start, just tightened a few things.”
Nothing in that message is unkind. The CEO means it. They are quick, they care about quality, and tightening is simply what they do. But the head of product does not read the changes one by one. They read the pattern.
What the edits say
Each correction is small. Together they say something nobody has ever said out loud: your version is a draft of mine. People in a company this size are very good at hearing that kind of message. They do not need a conversation about trust. They only need to see three or four proposals come back this way.
How capable people respond
The first response is adaptation. They begin to write what they expect to be approved, not what they believe is right. The second is to stop finishing things properly, because the real finish happens upstairs anyway. The third is the quietest. They stop volunteering. A decision that used to be theirs now travels up with a question mark attached, because that is faster than being corrected.
From the CEO’s side, this looks like a team that needs more guidance. It confirms the instinct that review is necessary. The cost of the habit is hidden inside the evidence for it.
The ones who leave
Some people never adapt. They are often the strongest, the ones who joined because they wanted to own something. They do not complain. They take a call from a recruiter on an ordinary Tuesday, and the exit conversation is warm and polite, about growth and a new challenge. Nobody in the room says it was the edits, partly because nobody can point to a single one.
The people who stay are not always the ones the company would have chosen to keep. They are the ones who found a way to live with being overridden. That is a different group, and over a few years it becomes the team.
What it costs
The cost never arrives as an incident. It arrives as a team that is competent, careful and waiting. The senior hires who were meant to lift work off the CEO’s desk hand it back instead. The CEO’s calendar stays full, which feels like proof that they are needed.
Nobody decided to build that team. It was assembled one friendly correction at a time.
Myrto Zehnder partners with CEOs and founders of scaling organisations on the structural architecture underneath recurring organisational problems.
The Eagle’s Perspective — myrtozehnder.com
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