Titles Create Structure - Behaviour Creates Trust

Why Accessibility Might Be the Most Overlooked Leadership Skill in a Hierarchical World

I was listening to my wife recently. She claims I don’t so this article is in part evidence that sometimes I do. My wife was talking about how she visited a hospital CEO and helped them with the tea round. This was a regular Friday afternoon activity. Days later I read a post by Christopher Dodd who was sharing his thoughts on changes to recruit training within the Royal Navy where officers and ratings will share the same basic training before branching off. This got me reflecting on hierarchy.

Hierarchy exists for good reason, it creates order, accountability, and clarity. But when hierarchy becomes a barrier between people and leadership, it quietly erodes the very things it was built to protect. This article explores why structure and accessibility aren't opposites. They're partners, and why the most powerful thing a leader at any level can do is simply be reachable.

We Need the Pyramid - Let's Be Honest About That

There's a fashionable tendency in modern leadership circles to talk about hierarchy as though it's something we've outgrown. A relic. A sign of old thinking.

It isn't.

Hierarchy exists because complexity demands structure. When an organisation grows beyond a handful of people, someone has to own the decisions. Someone has to be accountable when things go wrong, and recognised when things go right. Roles need to be clear. Responsibilities need homes.

Simon Sinek puts it simply: people need to know where they stand. Clarity is not a constraint on people — it's a gift to them. And hierarchy, done well, provides exactly that.

Think about how the military operates under pressure, or how a hospital runs during a crisis. Nobody stops to vote on who makes the call. The structure already holds that answer. That structure saves time, prevents confusion, and critically saves lives.

Hierarchy isn't the problem. What we do inside it is.

How Hierarchy Gets Work Done

A well functioning hierarchy is really a system of trust and responsibility flowing in two directions.

Downward: vision, direction, clarity, and support. Upward: information, honesty, accountability, and feedback.

When both directions are working, hierarchy becomes a powerful engine. James Clear, in Atomic Habits, talks about systems being what determine outcomes, not goals alone. Hierarchy is a system, and like any system, its quality depends on whether the parts are connected.

The problem isn't the structure. The problem is when the layers of the structure stop communicating.

A manager who never hears from the front line makes decisions in a vacuum. An executive who is insulated from day to day reality builds strategy on assumption. A junior employee who can't surface an idea or a concern because of who they are on the org chart is a wasted resource and a disengaged human being.

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, describes the importance of seeking first to understand. Hierarchy, paradoxically, can make leaders the worst listeners in the room not from arrogance, but from distance. The more layers there are between a leader and the work, the less they naturally hear.

That distance is where hierarchy quietly begins to fail.

The Pyramid of Responsibility — Turned Upside Down

Here's a reframe worth sitting with.

If hierarchy is a pyramid of authority, the person at the top holds the most power. That's the traditional picture and it's not entirely wrong.

But if hierarchy is a pyramid of responsibility and accountability, something shifts. The person at the top isn't above everyone else. They're responsible for everyone else. The pyramid doesn't crush down. It holds up.

In that model, the CEO isn't insulated from the office junior. They're accountable to the office junior for the culture that person works in, for the clarity of their role, for the safety they feel to speak up.

Robert Greenleaf called this servant leadership. The leader exists not to be served, but to serve. Not to be protected by the structure, but to protect the people within it.

And here's where accessibility becomes not just a nice quality but a leadership obligation.

The Case for a Flat Line of Accessibility

Structural hierarchy and human accessibility are not the same thing. You can maintain clear reporting lines, distinct responsibilities, and firm accountability and still be genuinely reachable as a person.

The CEO being accessible to the office junior isn't about bypassing management or undermining the structure. It's about something far more powerful: signal.

When a senior leader is visible, present, and approachable, when they remember names, ask questions, and genuinely listen it sends a message that echoes far beyond the conversation itself. It says: you matter here. Your experience of this organisation matters to me.

That signal builds trust, and trust, as Sinek reminds us, is not built in the big moments. It's built in the small ones, the consistent, repeated evidence that a leader cares about people, not just performance.

Consider what is lost when that signal is absent. The junior employee who notices a process flaw but assumes it's not their place to say anything. The team member who sees a culture problem forming but has no path to raise it. The new starter who doesn't feel seen and quietly starts looking elsewhere.

Now consider what is gained when it's present. Ideas surface earlier. Problems are surfaced before they become crises. People stay. People grow. People bring their whole selves to work rather than the cautious, protected version they reserve for environments where they don't feel safe.

Accessibility doesn't flatten the structure. It animates it.

What Accessible Leadership Actually Looks Like

This isn't about open door policies that exist on paper and nowhere else. Accessibility is a behaviour, not a policy.

It looks like the senior leader who walks the floor regularly, not to inspect, but to connect. It's the executive who remembers what someone mentioned three weeks ago and asks how it turned out. It's the manager who, when someone junior offers a different perspective in a meeting, leans in rather than dismissing it.

It's showing up to the spaces where people are, rather than waiting for people to find the courage to come to you.

The hospital CEO who pours tea on a Friday afternoon isn't undermining their authority. They're reinforcing something far more important, that the structure they sit at the top of exists to serve the people within it, not the other way around.The Royal Navy's decision to put officers and ratings through the same basic training before they diverge isn't an erasure of hierarchy, it's (hopefully) a foundation supporting it. Shared experience builds mutual respect. Mutual respect makes the structure work. Whether it's a tea trolley or a training ground, the message is the same: titles are given, but trust is earned, and it's earned in the small, consistent, human moments that no org chart has ever been able to capture. 

Identity is shaped by the accumulation of consistent behaviours. The leader who wants to be known as accessible has to act accessibly, repeatedly, until it is simply who they are.

The Hierarchy Won't Define You. How You Show Up Inside It Will

A hierarchy gives you authority. What you do with it, how you use your position to serve, to listen, to connect is what defines your leadership.

The most powerful structures aren't the ones that insulate leaders from their people. They're the ones that give leaders the stability to be genuinely present with them.

“It’s what you do. Not what you’re called.”