Outside of family, most relationships at work sit somewhere on a spectrum.
Colleagues, acquaintances, well-wishers, and the occasional genuine friend. The lines between them are sometimes clear. Most of the time, it is not. The majority of us would either find it difficult to notice or call out where a line gets crossed.
How someone actually treats you at work tells you where you sit in their version of that same spectrum. And that dynamic between people, across teams and functions, has a direct bearing on how an organization operates at its core.
These scenarios would be all too familiar to anyone who has spent time in any corporate environment.
Someone makes a decision that directly affects your team. You find out when it is already done. A business deal gets closed involving people you manage, and nobody thought to loop you in. A junior team member’s performance rating gets quietly changed without you being consulted. A person you trusted takes your idea into a room you were not invited to, and it comes back as their own.
None of these moments announce themselves as disrespect. They arrive wearing other labels. Oversight. Miscommunication. Moving fast. The labels make these issues that much harder to call out and address.
The other direction is just as real. Someone brings up your name in a room of opportunity when you weren’t even around. A colleague from another team flags a risk in your plan before you walk into a meeting and saves you from getting ambushed. A person whose work life you made slightly easier six months ago actually takes the time to come and tell you so.
Most people absorb both and move on. The slights get filed under “one-off” or “that is just how they are”. The gestures make us feel good, but they sometimes get met with mild suspicion – What do they want. Why now. Are they even genuine.
The building blocks
There are people whom you would have just had small talk with near the water cooler but they would remember to pull you into important conversations without you asking them, simply because that is who they are.
There are people whose easy-going nature gets mistaken for an open invitation. The jokes land a little too hard. The jibes go a little too far. And the person on the receiving end keeps smiling, because that is who they are, while absorbing blow after blow that nobody else in the room is counting.
There are people who will not step up and correct the record when it favors them, regardless of what basic courtesy demands.
Those traits, springing from the innate nature of a person, are not entirely a product of their work environment. That nature never changes.
This might sound axiomatic but it is the truth.
These behaviors, on both ends, reflect tangibly on several things. That particular relationship. What the organization has quietly decided is normal. What the people inside it have learned they can get away with, or get away without doing.
It plays out in ways that are easy to miss until you are on the receiving end of them.
People and the relationships they build are the first layer, the foundation of an organization’s operating system.
The layer is not organic
The right relationships, curated at the right levels, form the ground on which every pillar needed for a growing organization gets built.
Trust built between a founder and a senior leader helps surface problems early. A genuine, respectful yet aligned relationship between two function heads means cross-functional friction gets resolved in a corridor conversation rather than escalations in a QBR with thirty people and a deck. A manager who takes the pains to be invested in actually knowing the people on the team will notice when someone is acting weirdly or is being quietly sidelined.
The organizational pillars – the ones that determine how decisions get made, how communication flows down and up, how roles and accountability are defined – they are not self-sustaining or self-correcting structures.
They are held up by the quality of relationships underneath them. And the trust that supports those.
When those relationships are thin, or remain transactional, or built on the wrong assumptions, or worse, remain blind to the reality unfolding, the pillars do not just start to lean.
They begin to crumble. One crack at a time.
The spiral
The very nature of organizational pillars that prop up its operating system is that once they begin to crumble, they do not fall in isolation. They start pulling other pillars down with them.
That is where it begins to get expensive.
Communication is the first casualty, though it won’t be dramatic. Updates keep flowing, meetings get held. But the information that actually matters – risks, clean data, actual status, red flags nobody wants to raise – start deteriorating in substance, and even disappear.
When communication breaks down or becomes unreliable, decision rights get muddled. Nobody is sure who actually owns what. So, decisions either get escalated unnecessarily to single points of failure, or they get made unilaterally by whoever has the confidence or the proximity to leadership to act.
And when leaders start getting a filtered version of reality, they are already behind, playing catch up with the timeline for fixes.
The communication breakdown, unclear decision rights and the absence of basic courtesy all coalescing at the same time – those on the receiving end of this mess would see it as plain disrespect. But the disrespect is not always intentional. Sometimes it can be inadvertent. But it is always a byproduct of a broken system.
Repeated breakdowns erode trust. And beyond a threshold, psychological safety drops. People stop raising problems early. They stop disagreeing in the room. They learn to stay quiet and manage upward carefully instead.
The organization loses its early warning system exactly when it needs it most.
Rewarding heroism compounds failures
Recognizing people for their efforts and rewarding them for outcomes is a bedrock of a healthy operating system.
Inconsistent or inappropriate recognition shows structural failures and exposes cognitive bias.
The structure fails when there are no clear criteria for what good work looks like, or worse, the criteria keep getting changed, and there is no transparent, consistent medium and mechanism for acknowledging it.
The bias shows when a few visible wins get attributed to a few visible people, or a few outcomes get showcased as wins even though data beneath is questionable. On top of that, staying visible gets mistaken for performance. The correlation between visibility and contribution is usually never as strong as the organization has decided it is.
The people doing the foundational work, the ones holding things together without drama, learn two things quickly. First, that the system is blind to them. Second, that speaking up about it will make them look like they are complaining. So, they absorb it. Until the system breaks.
The heroes might be real. The heroism can’t become the system.
Course correction
At the organizational level, the intervention must start with a diagnosis before it can become prescriptive. We cannot fix what we cannot see and acknowledge clearly.
The perception gaps between what the CEO believes is happening and what the organization is actually experiencing are often significant, always chronic and they are almost always invisible to the people at the top until something breaks visibly.
At the individual level, the corrections are simpler but require more nerve.
Delay the reaction, not the conversation. The impulse to respond immediately to a slight will almost always make things worse. Let the heat pass. Then have the conversation directly, privately, and without an audience.
Label the specific behavior, not the person. “You changed that rating of my team member without checking with me” is a conversation that can go somewhere. “How dare you disrespect me” is a confrontation that usually goes nowhere.
Set boundaries clearly, and only once. Just state plainly what behaviors are acceptable and what are not acceptable going forward. If the behavior continues, you already know what the pattern is telling you.
Know when the trust bank is empty. Every working relationship runs on some version of trust. The deposits are harder and come in many forms. Disrespect is the easiest withdrawal. Multiple incidents without acknowledgment or correction are not isolated events. They are a signal about the system you are operating in and the people who you are working with. At some point, the rational response is to stop making deposits into an account that only empties.
The hardest part is not experiencing any individual moment. It is staying clear-eyed about what the pattern is telling you, without overreacting to a single incident, or ignoring a repetitive one.
Operating system of people
The behaviors described here are easy to sweep under the rug as interpersonal friction, personality clashes, people being human.
Yes. These are true. But they are also something more.
If people and their work relationships are the foundation, every interaction between people at work becomes a support truss that forms between several pillars of the operating system. Over time, they determine what information actually moves and how easily it moves, which problems surface in time, which decisions get made by the right people at the right time, and which ones do not.
Organizations spend considerable effort defining, constructing and refining all of the pillars of their operating system. Strategy. Process. Culture. Execution.
What they spend far less time on is the ground those pillars are standing on.
That ground is not strengthened in offsites or culture trainings. It is strengthened through the conversations that did not have to happen. The name brought up in a room the person never entered. The honest feedback given when silence would have been easier.
The operating system of an organization has a foundation.
Most never pay close attention to it until something collapses irreversibly.