Authority, killed

There is a scene that repeats itself every day behind the scenes of Albanian businesses, a moment that looks small but has devastating consequences for a team's morale.

It happens the moment a manager asks an employee to respect the schedule, to close a process to standard or to take responsibility for a repeated mistake. Instead of a professional answer, the employee smiles ironically. They do not bother to argue. They simply turn their back, cross the corridor and go straight to the owner's office.

And what does the owner do? Instead of strengthening the link they put in place themselves to run the work, they do what harms the business more than any financial loss: they side with the one who broke the rule. The manager is left alone in the middle of the floor, stripped of all authority, while the owner's secret, cynical arithmetic runs through their head: I'm keeping him in bread for five hundred and fifty thousand old lek. I gave him a good job, clean shirt, no dust, so let him bow his head and obey.

Let me be blunt about this absurdity. When an owner humiliates their manager to satisfy the whims of the one who doesn't do the work, they have not saved a person; they have killed the system.

Let us look at this mechanism with a cool head.

Why does an employer do this? Because many of them have a twisted idea of power. They do not want a functioning structure, because a structure demands rules that limit even their own momentary will. They want every thread of the business to pass through their finger. By letting the employee go over the manager's head and come to cry their troubles or spread gossip straight in the head office, the owner feeds their ego as supreme judge, as the great father of the house who hands out justice as mercy.

They think they are protecting the weak. In truth, they are rewarding mediocrity.

When the least capable understands that escaping accountability takes no result, only a quiet line to the office upstairs, their working day changes focus. They no longer try to learn the trade, cut mistakes or help colleagues. They become a master of victimhood and intrigue. They know that two words against the manager are enough to win immunity.

And what happens to the manager meanwhile?

They have been given the responsibility without the power. They are asked to guarantee the figures, keep costs under control, meet the targets and get the shift out without faults, but the one tool with which order can be set is taken away: moral and decision-making authority. When the staff see that the leader's word goes straight into the bin as soon as the owner steps in, that manager becomes a laughable figure. They turn into a character who is there only to sign the damage sheets and take the next round of abuse.

And when this manager asks for dignity, they are reminded of the wage. Five hundred and fifty thousand lek. In the owner's eyes, this sum is not payment for the expertise, the stress and the sleepless hours of a person who carries responsibility; it is considered payment for their silence. It is the illusion that by giving someone a title on paper and an office with a desk, you have bought their right to a backbone.

This mindset is suicide for any business.

Real professionals do not stay long in a place where their word loses its value within a minute. They can put up with physical fatigue, they can put up with long sleepless nights, but they cannot accept being turned into voiceless puppets. So those with knowledge and character are the first to leave. And the owner is left with only two kinds of people: servile managers who cannot decide anything on their own, and indifferent employees who work just enough not to be fired.

A true leader understands one basic principle: If you have put someone at the head of a team, either give them your full trust and support to enforce the standard, or sit down and do their job yourself.

You cannot have both a modern organisation and a back door for gossip. You cannot demand discipline on the floor when you break that discipline with your own hand every time someone comes complaining.

Albanian businesses will grow only when they give up this primitive game of intrigue. Until that day comes, owners will keep complaining that they are drowning in work, that no one lets them breathe and that nothing moves without them, never understanding that they built that tiring prison with their own hands, brick by brick, every time they took the manager's honour away to feed incompetence.