[3pt14159]

In the '80s when my dad was a C-level at a major Canadian telcom the first thing he did was move the knowledge workers to the edge of the building where the private offices were and moved his setup to the middle of the floor. His reasoning was that he'd constantly need to talk to different people anyway and the people with more technical roles would benefit from the silence. It kinda blew peoples minds at the time, though I can't say I know how well it really worked in practice.

[space_ghost]

About 15 years ago my boss got promoted from VP of Engineering to CEO. It was a weird move for him, and one of the ways he handled it was to move out of his private office and onto a desk right in the middle of the R&D lab floor. He did his CEO work right in the midst of smelly chemical experiments and random hardware prototyping work. It must have worked for him, because he's been tremendously successful in the years since.

[bluGill]

On that line, open door policies are worthless.

The people who believe in it are extroverts. They are never in the office, they are walking around looking for people to talk to. The only time they are in their office is when they are have a conversation that truly does need to be private.

The introverts in the mean time need time away from people to recharge. They don't want you interrupting if it isn't an emergency.

[belval]

Nothing like the CEO telling everyone that we have an "open door culture" and to feel free to come to him when they have concerns for the well-being of the business.

The above only works if no-one does it.

[bluGill]

The CEO actually wants a FEW people to do that though. He wants feedback, the bigger isn't isn't the number of people is too much (though that could be a problem), the bigger issue it is that the few who do come to him skew his thinking to their biases instead of the real thing.

Thus open door for the CEO needs to be replaced with something that gets more general feedback. I'm not sure what that might be though.

[JohnFen]

Not just more general feedback, but honest feedback.

Whether acknowledged or not, there is a power discrepancy between executives (especially C-suite execs) and everyone else. That discrepancy means that executives can't expect to get the real picture by relying on workers to tell them.

[allenrb]

It sounds like your dad had some sense to him!

Personally, I’m capable of deep focus but also easily distracted. In some sense it almost physically hurts to be pulled out of that focus. When it happens too often, I’m “scared” to try and get back in.

Putting me in an open floor (as has happened repeatedly in the last decade) is certainly not the key to maximizing my impact.

[muttled]

It's like if you tried to bend over and pick something up and right before you picked it up, someone kicked it away a little. And then you tried again, so they kick it again. Over and over. Eventually you stop reaching for it.

[chris37879]

In my experience, upper management like that tends to listen to those people that know what they're talking about. They understand that they hired these people to be experts, why would you ignore their opinion when that's literally what you're paying them for.