A System Built on Silence: Part Two - The Manager Who Did Not Claim Them

This second installment continues the conceptual narrative introduced in Part One. As with the first entry, this is not a personal account nor a depiction of any specific workplace. It is a literary examination of recognizable organizational dynamics found across many environments where promises of support coexist with inconsistent follow-through.

Part Two expands the lens on how terminology, tone, and performative care can obscure deeper structural issues. Interpretation rests with the reader, not with any implied real-world reference.

In many organizations, this pattern appears in different forms.

The Manager Who Did Not Claim Them

There are kinds of harm that arrive through aggression, and kinds that arrive through absence. This manager belonged to the second category. They did not yell or slam doors. They did something quieter that cut deeper. They held power without claiming responsibility, and that refusal shaped the employee’s days more than any directive ever could.

The first manager left as quickly as they came, with a cold “I didn’t know you were hired”. The second manager entered the employee’s orbit after accounts were shuffled. They had visible authority. They appeared in key meetings, spoke with confidence about client histories, and made decisions that affected budgets, scope, and staffing. What they did not do was the most basic act of leadership: step forward and say, clearly, “I am your manager. Here is how we will work together.”

Everyone around them behaved as if this fact were already established. The employee was the only one who did not have confirmation. They eventually asked directly, because no one else would.

The answer came without curiosity and without any attempt to repair the gap.

“I didn’t interview you.”

Four words, flat and closed. No follow up. No “let’s fix that.” No “tell me what you need.” Just distance. Underneath, the meaning was simple. You are here, but you are not mine. Your presence is incidental. Your success is not my concern.

With that line, the possibility of mentorship ended before it began. There would be no one whose explicit job was to understand the employee’s background, advocate for their workload, or ask whether the demands being placed on them were sustainable or humane. Whatever happened next would happen without a safety net.

The avoidance did not stop there. The manager did not schedule regular one to ones. They did not outline expectations for the quarter. They did not say, “Here is how I see your role on these accounts. Here is what you own. Here is what I will protect.” There was no shared plan, no agreed criteria for success, no basic container for the work.

Instead, their presence showed up in fragments.

A message in chat minutes after a meeting, critiquing something the employee had done without having been told how it should work. Dozens of comments in shared documents that second guessed a decision made under incomplete direction. Silence when the employee asked for guidance. Volume when they tried to move forward without it.

In the absence of leadership, the employee did what they had already learned to do in this system. They tried to reverse engineer expectations from scraps. They took every stray comment and treated it as data, even when it contradicted what had been said the day before.

“Be more visible.”
“Do not take up so much space.”
“Own the client relationship.”
“Let me handle that directly.”

Each line arrived alone, without context or follow through. None of it added up to a coherent management philosophy. The employee kept trying to decode a pattern that did not exist. There was no system. There was only chaos and reaction.

Feedback followed the same shape. It rarely referenced clear standards. It did not build on prior conversations. It landed as a series of scattered critiques delivered as if the underlying expectations had already been set. The manager commented on outputs as if a shared baseline existed, when in reality it had never been articulated out loud.

Feedback without clarity is not guidance. It is destabilization.

The public corrections were the most corrosive.

Instead of using one to one conversations for sensitive feedback, the manager used group chats and shared channels. They wrote in all caps. They tagged the employee’s name alongside peers and leaders, calling out supposed missteps as if they were urgent operational risks rather than normal iterations of complex work. Every message landed like an announcement: this person is suspect.

The employee felt their body react before their mind could. Their stomach dropped when notifications appeared. Their chest tightened as they opened chat threads, bracing for the next all caps directive or critique broadcast to an audience they had not consented to.

They tried to set a boundary. Calmly and directly, they asked the manager to stop using all caps for reprimands and to bring sensitive feedback into private channels. They explained that the public callouts felt shaming rather than supportive. The manager acknowledged the request and changed nothing. The behavior continued in the same form.

That choice carried its own message. The employee’s boundaries were not seen as valid. They were seen as an inconvenience.

Over time, the employee adapted around the harm. They became cautious in shared spaces. They spoke less in group chats. They limited their contributions in meetings to what felt safest. They reread every message before sending it, sanding down any language that might trigger another performance of “directness” at their expense. Their voice narrowed. Their certainty drained.

Meanwhile, the manager continued to hover at the edges of the work. Present enough to critique. Absent when it came to building structure.

When the employee proposed recurring check ins, they were deprioritized. When the employee drafted alignment documents, they went largely unacknowledged. When they suggested simple systems to reduce confusion, the manager reframed those suggestions as overthinking, as if the desire for clarity reflected a personal deficiency rather than a structural need.

Avoidance became a method of control. As long as nothing was clearly defined, nothing could be clearly held. Expectations stayed fluid. Accountability stayed diffuse. The manager preserved their flexibility by exporting instability downward.

The erosion deepened when the ethical shape of the workload finally came into focus.

Their calendar was saturated with client meetings, internal syncs, and production reviews. Deadlines overlapped.

The pace felt unsustainable, but inside the culture of “high growth,” unsustainable felt normalized. They saw the same names working delivery across multiple accounts. They kept wondering if what they were experiencing was a temporary overload or the actual operating model.

One afternoon, they asked a colleague on the delivery team directly.

“Are you being staffed more than full time across these accounts, or is this a temporary overlap?”

The colleague did not hesitate.

“Everyone is double batting here.”

They said it casually, as if they were describing a preferred project management tool. A simple fact. A feature, not a flaw. Sometimes, they added, it was triple batting. It was how they made the numbers work.

The words landed clean and heavy. The employee understood the math immediately. Contracts that implied full time focus for each client. A single human body quietly stretched across them all. A billing model that treated one nervous system as several.

The employee felt a stillness settle in their chest. They asked the question they could not swallow.

“Do the clients know we are double batting and triple batting people on their accounts?”

The answer was immediate.

“No.”

They asked whether senior leadership was aware.

“Yes.”

Then the employee approached the manager about the practice, with a simple question: “Is this sustainable?”

They did not answer the question. They shifted the frame instead.

They talked about the realities of growth, the need to “do what it takes,” and the assumption that senior employees could handle the pressure if they were truly ready for the role. The subtext was clear. The system did not need clarity. It needed obedience.

From that point forward, the employee’s work carried a different weight. They were no longer just holding the burden of disorganization. They were holding knowledge that the structure of the work itself was misrepresented, and that their own overextension was not an accident but a mechanism.

They tried, briefly, to raise the issue as an ethical concern. The responses followed a familiar pattern. Deflection. Reframing. Comments that sounded supportive on the surface and landed as dismissal underneath.

“You are overthinking this.”
“We all go through it.”
“This is just how it is at this stage of the company.”

Nothing about billing changed.

Nothing about the manager’s behavior changed.

The employee stopped asking for structure. Not because they no longer needed it, but because each attempt to create it was treated as evidence that they were the problem. They redirected their energy from questioning the conditions to trying to survive them. They told themselves that if they were just a little tougher, a little more organized, a little more resilient, it would hurt less.

Self doubt grew in that space. Not because the employee lacked skill or discipline, but because the system did everything in its power to convince them that harm was a test of character instead of a design choice.

By this point, the ground beneath them had already shifted. The manager’s refusal to claim them, the absence of structure, the public corrections, the normalization of double and triple batting, all of it had combined into a steady erosion. The harm had not yet revealed its full shape, but it had started carving into them.

This is the moment before the moral injury arrives.
This is the point where the body already knows something is wrong, but the mind is still trying to explain it away.

This is the final moment before they speak truth and are told to be quiet.

Read the complete six part autopsy here.