Executives who don’t know what is happening on the frontline often miss the major quality and culture problems that can severely damage the company in the long run. Frontline employees who don’t know the why behind their directives are less engaged and experience higher turnover. It’s a fascinating concept – the idea that two individuals can have fundamentally different perspectives in achieving the same organizational goals. Undercover Boss has clearly illustrated how big the gap is between the plans made in a boardroom in New York and the actual work employees do every day by showing CEOs and senior executives engaging with their employees at the ground level. Leaders are routinely blown away by the day-to-day operations of their organizations. The result is an inverted Iceberg of Ignorance representing the gap in both directions. The top-down management style favored by most organizations keeps frontline workers in the dark about the challenges faced by the company and the reasoning behind many decisions. While executives are only aware of 4% of the challenges faced by frontline workers, the same can be said in reverse. It illustrates the iceberg in action:IMAGEĪt the same time, the iceberg goes both ways. Similar gaps existed in executive and frontline perception of how departments worked together towards common goals and the overall efficiency of the systems in place. For example, 61% of executives and general management said that their organizations had “efficient, effective processes with minimal waste and bureaucracy.” The rest of the organization? Only 27% agreed with that statement. The Iceberg in 2020Ī 2015 ThinkPoints Transformation Survey found that significant knowledge gaps still exist between senior executives and the rest of the organization.
#Iceberg picture how to#
So what should organizations do to uncover the gaps in knowledge between the frontline and senior executives? Let’s take a closer look at what the Iceberg of Ignorance really looks like and how to address it. As we discussed at length in a recent blog post and corresponding eBook, the existing managerial model is fundamentally broken and hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years or so. While a lot has changed since the 1980s in corporate communications, the fundamentals of management remain largely the same. The Iceberg of Ignorance has been cited for more than 30 years to illustrate the importance of increased communication and traceability in large organizations. When a problem does become visible? There is a lot more beneath the surface. The result? An iceberg that senior executives in an organization can only see the very tip of. It posited that frontline workers were aware of 100% of the floor problems faced by an organization, supervisors were aware of only 74%, middle managers were aware of only 9%, and senior executives were aware of only 4% of the problems. The “iceberg of ignorance” is a concept popularized by a 1989 study by Sidney Yoshida.
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