Yaniv Preiss

Ah, that first heavy snowfall of the winter.

Looking out the window in the morning, everything is covered in a thick, uniform blanket of white. It is dead silent, peaceful, ordered, and beautiful. It covers the cracks in the pavement, the dirt on the street, and the edges of the landscape. It looks perfect.

Some managers have mastered the art of presenting their team to upper management as beautiful snow.

From the outside, from the vantage point of the upper management, these teams look disciplined. They are quiet – there is very little “noise” making its way upwards. They seem heads-down, focused on execution. The dashboards and reports look stable.

The Illusion of the Fresh Powder

This pristine exterior is often the result of absentee management disguised as “high-autonomy leadership.”

It’s the manager who cancels 1:1s four weeks in a row because “we’re all too busy shipping.” It’s the leader who believes feedback is only necessary when something goes terribly wrong or shares it only in the annual performance review. It’s the culture where personal development is seen as a distraction from “real work,” and communication consists almost entirely of deadlines and pressure.

Like that fresh snow, this management style covers up the messy reality of human systems. It buries the anxieties, the lack of direction, and the feeling of being interchangeable cogs. The managerial debt is silently accruing.

For a while, it works, as the snow remains on cold days. The team delivers and the manager gets praised for excellence.

As part of upper management, when you don’t have skip-level 1:1s (meeting your direct report’s directs), you don’t hear about lack of clarity, conflicts or creeping burnout. When you don’t ask the manager tough questions about their 1:1s, feedback, coaching and delegation, you are only exposed to the façade of dashboards and numbers. When you don’t look at metrics beyond delivery, you might be surprised by the operational posture.

Then Comes the Thaw

Inevitably, heat is applied to the system: a critical deadline is missed, the market shifts, a key senior engineer requests to move to another department or hands in their resignation seemingly out of the blue.

The heat of pressure melts the façade.

This is where the metaphor hits the pavement: that beautiful white blanket doesn’t just disappear gracefully. It turns into slush, and as cars and boots trample through it, it mixes with the dirt and becomes black, muddy, slippery ice.

Navigating the Black Ice

The environment that once looked pristine is now a hazard.

It becomes slippery and often invisible – it looks safe until you try to change direction or accelerate and lose grip as trust has eroded.

The hidden dirt is revealed. All the issues that should have been addressed in weekly 1:1s – the interpersonal friction, career aspirations, the imposter syndrome – are now exposed frozen.

It becomes dangerous. This is when your best people slip and fall. They burn out, or they look at the ugly, frozen mess of the culture and decide to simply walk off to a competitor who understands that people need warmth to thrive.

The Cost of the Clean-up

Cleaning up black, muddy ice is exhausting, expensive work. You have to salt it, scatter small stones to prevent slipping, use machinery to remove it, or wait until it melts away. In the meantime, people get injured from slipping. It is much harder to fix an ineffective culture than it is to maintain a healthy one.

The alternative is simple, though not easy. It requires the regular “shoveling” of management.

As a manager of managers, don’t settle for only what you’re hearing from your directs. Challenge “no news is good news” or only good news, as it might be a façade. Don’t be an absentee manager, too – trust and verify.

• Have occasional skip-level 1:1s, let them ask questions, and ask them questions, for example, how many 1:1s they’ve had
• Ask your directs about the feedback they have given, their coaching and delegation
• Check meaningful metrics beyond delivery, such as alerts after working hours, operational posture and risk

Additionally, you can definitely require your directs to have 1:1s with theirs and use all the practices you deem effective. This is for the sake of higher, sustainable performance of your department.