At the agency I ran, there was a period where the senior team was me, my co-founder and two directors. Below us sat a layer of heads of department, running their teams day to day.
One day I heard one of the department heads refer to us as “the higher ups” when talking about a decision that needed to be made.
I smiled. It felt like a joke I was in on. A bit of gentle mickey-taking about the org chart, the kind of thing every company has. The label stuck and for a while it stayed funny.
Then, gradually, it wasn’t.
The joke that stopped being funny
Over the following months I started noticing resistance to decisions we made as a senior team. Not big controversial calls. Fairly standard ones. Things that, a year or two earlier, would have just happened.
And sometimes it went further than resistance. We’d make a decision, communicate it and then it would land with the wider team in a way we didn’t recognise. The heads of layer would frame it, not always deliberately, as something done to everyone rather than for the business.
It felt like we were becoming the bad guys in a story we didn’t know was being told.
That was the point the divide stopped being a nickname and started being a thing I could feel. “The higher ups” wasn’t a joke about the org chart anymore. It was a description of which side of a wall we were on.
I remember thinking that maybe I was being paranoid and after all, the term wasn’t ever meant maliciously. I still believe that to be true even after years of reflection. But it ended up not being about the term itself, but it being a signal of the wall that was being built between my senior team and the rest of the company.
The advice that isn’t wrong but has side effects
Every founder gets told the same advice by well intentioned advisors – build a senior team so you’re not carrying the agency alone. It’s good advice. I’d give it myself. When it works, it transforms your life. You go from being the only person who worries at 2am to having people around you who genuinely share the load.
But there’s a side effect nobody mentions.
The us-vs-them line that used to sit between you and everyone else doesn’t disappear when you build that team. It moves down a level. Now it sits between the senior team and the rest of the agency and it’s actually harder to see from where you’re standing, because from your side of it, things have never felt better. You’re not lonely anymore. You’ve got a tight senior team who get it.
That tightness is exactly what the rest of the company can see. And what they see is a group.
How the wall gets built (by reasonable people doing reasonable things)
Nobody decides to create an us-vs-them culture. I certainly didn’t – quite the opposite and for a long time, I think we succeeded in avoiding this. But with growth comes the inevitable conversations about structure, senior management teams and middle management.
It builds out of things that are each, individually, completely sensible.
The senior team meets weekly, behind a closed door, because some things are confidential. This is completely reasonable.
You make a decision and communicate it as “done” because you didn’t want to worry people with options that may never happen. Again, reasonable.
The senior team hears news first, because of course they do. Reasonable.
You socialise together more, because you’re in the trenches together and frankly you like each other. You may even do away days together. Reasonable.
Each brick is fine. The wall is the problem. And because it goes up one reasonable brick at a time, there’s no single moment where anyone notices it happening. By the time there’s a nickname for the people on your side of it, it’s been forming for months.
If you’re a senior leader rather than a founder, you’ll likely recognise this from both sides. You probably remember being on the other side of that wall at a previous agency, rolling your eyes at decisions from above. And now you’re a “higher up” somewhere and it’s oddly uncomfortable, because you don’t feel like the person you used to roll your eyes at.
What it looks like once it’s taken hold
A few signals I’d now treat as signals that something is off.
The language shifts
Subtle, but meaningful things such as:
- “They’ve decided.”
- “The higher ups.”
- “Management.”
- “Them”.
When people stop saying “we” about the agency and start describing decisions as arriving from somewhere else, the wall is up.
Feedback dries up
Not complaints, those often continue – of course!.
What disappears is the honest, early, unpolished stuff. People start presenting you with tidy versions of reality, because the wall makes candour feel risky.
Decisions get relitigated below the line
You announce something in good faith and instead of questions coming to you, the real conversation happens afterwards, without you, framed by whoever’s most sceptical. You announce what you think is a great initiative or idea only to be met with silence.
And here’s the uncomfortable one: your heads of layer become the wall’s caretakers. They’re the ones translating your decisions to their teams and if they weren’t brought into those decisions, their translation carries their own doubts. You’ve made them narrators of a story they don’t fully believe.
What I’d do now
I’ll be honest with you: I can’t clearly remember what we actually tried at the time, or how well any of it worked. That period is a bit of a blur, which probably tells you something about how much we were juggling.
But having since watched this pattern from the outside, across agencies I advise, here’s what I’d do if I were back in that seat.
Treat the nickname as data, not banter
My mistake wasn’t laughing along. It was only laughing along. A nickname for the leadership group is the team telling you where they think the wall is. You don’t need to ban it or get precious about it. You need to hear it.
Bring the heads of layer into decisions you’ve made earlier
The instinct is to present finished decisions because it looks decisive and spares people the churn. But in my experience, people rarely resist a decision because of the outcome. They resisted it because they had no hand in it. Showing the heads the problem, the options and the trade-offs before the call is made costs you a bit of tidiness and buys you people who defend the decision instead of narrating it as yours.
And to be clear – I’m not suggesting that every department Head is consulted before every decision is made. I’m saying that you need to pick some decisions to give them a heads up about in advance of communicating it to the wider team.
They may well raise a problem that you hadn’t considered before which is a good thing. But generally, you’re making them feel involved and giving them the opportunity to contribute, even if most of the time, there is very little to contribute.
Watch the sequencing of who hears what
Every time news reaches the senior team weeks before everyone else and everyone can tell, the wall gets a brick. Some gaps are unavoidable but generally, try to avoid long gaps which can lead to ambiguity which then leads to paranoia.
Ask about the wall directly, one level down
Not “is everyone happy” in an all-hands, which gets you nothing. A one-to-one with each head:
- “Where do decisions from us land badly?”
- “What are we not seeing?”
- “How do the team perceive our decision making process?”
Then sit in the silence until they answer honestly. The first honest answer will sting a bit. That’s how you know it’s working.
When distance is legitimate (because some of it is)
I want to be fair here, because the answer to this is not “share everything and flatten the company”. That’s not feasible.
Some separation between a senior team and everyone else is right and necessary. Pay conversations. HR situations. Early acquisition talks. Financial pressure you’re absorbing precisely so the team doesn’t have to. There are things that must stay behind the closed door and pretending otherwise is naive.
The problem is never that distance exists. It’s a distance that nobody has examined. The question isn’t “how do we get rid of the gap between leadership and the team”. It’s “is every part of this gap here on purpose”. At the agency I ran, a lot of it wasn’t. It was just accumulation.
The team sees the wall before you do
The people on the far side of a wall always see it before the people who built it. From inside the senior team, that period felt like the best version of the agency we’d had. Tight leadership, shared load, people I trusted. It took a nickname and then months of friction, for me to notice what it looked like from the other side.
So if there’s a “higher ups” equivalent in your agency, whether you’re the founder or one of the people the nickname points at, don’t wait for the label to stop being funny. By then, the wall’s been up a while.
The nickname is the data. Go and find out what it’s measuring.
