The flickering fluorescent light above hummed, casting a sickly yellow over the conference table, magnifying the dust motes dancing in the stale air. My stomach clenched a familiar knot as David’s voice, sharp and incredulous, sliced through the two days remaining before the client deadline. “Font size 11? Really? Are we trying to hide something?” He gestured vaguely at the projected report, a report he hadn’t seen in its evolutionary stages, having missed every single one of the 11 weekly project check-ins. It was a classic David maneuver, a performance I’d witnessed at least 41 times this year alone.

The Seagull Manager

“The Seagull Manager,” a phrase that conjures a visceral image: swoops in, makes a lot of noise, craps all over everything, then leaves. We laugh about it, don’t we? Share the anecdotes, grimace in solidarity over lukewarm coffee. But beneath the dark humor lies a deeper, more insidious truth. This isn’t just about David being a difficult person. This isn’t merely a personality quirk to be endured. This is a profound, systemic outcome, a symptom of how we’ve designed our organizational structures and, critically, how we promote and train the people we deem ‘leaders’.

We lionize individual achievement, pushing our top performers, our most brilliant technical minds, into management roles. We laud the programmer who wrote the most elegant code, the salesperson who closed the largest deal, the strategist who delivered the clearest plan. We celebrate their personal victories, then, without a single day of management training, without a blueprint for fostering collaboration or building trust, we hand them a team of 11 individuals and say, “Go forth and lead.” Is it any wonder then that they revert to the only behaviors they’ve been rewarded for: individual heroics, last-minute saves, and demanding visible, direct control?

A Painful, Eye-Opening Mistake

I remember a time, about a year and a month ago, when I was very much a David myself. It was an internal project, nothing high-stakes, but I was new to a supervisory role. I was swamped, honestly, juggling 11 different priorities, and I let my junior team run with a crucial presentation. I checked in, sporadically, just enough to feel I’d “managed.” Then, the day before they were set to present, I sat down, opened the deck, and my stomach dropped. The color scheme was… garish. The data visualization, while technically correct, looked like it belonged on a kindergarten wall. My immediate, gut reaction was, “Who let this happen?” I panicked, overrode their choices, and stayed up until 1:01 AM making it presentable. My team, I learned later, felt utterly undermined. They’d worked tirelessly, believed in their choices, and I, in one swift, uncommunicated swoop, had invalidated it all. I criticized, then I did anyway, completely missing the chance to teach, to guide, to empower. It was a painful, eye-opening mistake, a moment that colors how I view every David I encounter now.

The Ecosystem of Fear and Mistrust

This isn’t to absolve the Davids of the world entirely. There’s a level of self-awareness and accountability we all owe our colleagues. But the ecosystem they operate in often encourages this behavior. When organizations operate from a place of fear – fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of the unknown – they often create a vacuum of trust. Employees are handed responsibility, a heavy burden to carry, but are simultaneously denied the authority, the autonomy, or the genuine trust required to truly own their work. The manager, often feeling the same pressure from above, believes their value lies in correcting, in finding fault, in proving their oversight, rather than fostering an environment where mistakes are learning opportunities, and autonomy leads to innovation.

Think about Jasper P.K., the playground safety inspector. Jasper’s world revolves around anticipating catastrophe. He sees a child climbing too high on the jungle gym, a loose bolt on the swing set, a patch of gravel too thin beneath the monkey bars. His job is critical: ensuring physical safety. But imagine Jasper, after approving the entire playground design, suddenly swooping in during playtime to declare that the shade of yellow on the slide is not “optimal for psychological stimulation,” or that the spacing between the ladder rungs, while perfectly safe, isn’t “aesthetically harmonious.” He’d be universally despised, and rightly so. His intervention, while perhaps well-intentioned, entirely misses the point of the playground: to foster play, discovery, and a little bit of glorious, messy chaos, all within established safety parameters. Our projects are not so different. We need clear safety rails – deadlines, budgets, core objectives – but within those, we need space for play, for experimentation, for a team to build something without constant, non-constructive interruption.

The Corrosive Cycle of Disengagement

It’s a cycle that perpetuates disengagement. Why invest fully, why take calculated risks, why bring your most innovative ideas to the table, if you know they might be dismissed, or worse, re-engineered without your input, at the 11th hour? The unspoken message is clear: your contribution is conditional, your expertise provisional, your agency nonexistent. It’s a subtle corrosive that eats away at morale, productivity, and ultimately, the ability of a business to innovate and adapt.

When I’m looking at solutions for seamless collaboration, especially in complex project environments, I often think about how crucial it is to have systems that foster transparency and consistent, constructive engagement. Platforms like ems89.co are built precisely to provide that reliable foundation, ensuring every voice matters and contributions are visible throughout the process, preventing those last-minute, trust-eroding interventions.

That feeling of being watched, of having your work under a microscope only when convenient for the observer, is draining.

It reminds me of standing at my window this morning, watching someone brazenly pull into the parking spot I’d been patiently waiting 11 minutes for. They just… took it. No acknowledgment, no apology, just an entitled confidence that the rules didn’t apply. It’s a small thing, inconsequential in the grand scheme, but it speaks to a larger disrespect, a disregard for the shared space, the unspoken agreements. And that, in essence, is what the seagull manager does. They disregard the collective effort, the established process, the emotional investment of the team, for a moment of perceived individual authority.

Fixing the System, Not Just the Birds

The real challenge isn’t to ‘fix’ the Davids of the world. It’s to fix the systems that create them. It’s to invest in true leadership development, to redefine what success looks like in a management role beyond just individual output. It’s about fostering a culture where trust isn’t a buzzword but an operational principle, where responsibility comes with genuine authority, and where feedback is a continuous dialogue, not a sudden, disruptive squawk from above. Until we address this systemic fear of letting go, the skies will remain crowded with our feathered friends, swooping in and out, leaving behind nothing but a mess and a deep sense of frustration.