Corporate Mania

Everyone is an important person in their own world.

Send someone a message and it is seen, but unanswered. Ask a question and you may receive a reply, but somehow never the complete information. Follow up, and suddenly you begin to feel as if you are asking for an audience with someone far more important than yourself.

There is one thing I have observed particularly in the corporate world: everyone wants to look busy.

Not necessarily because everyone actually is busy, but because busyness itself seems to have become a symbol of importance.

The slower the reply, the more meetings on the calendar, the more rushed the walk through the corridor, the greater the impression that the person must be important.

And when I try to understand these people, I often see something deeper—a self-image so large that even an ocean of appreciation and gratitude may not be enough to fill it.

But are these people evil?

No.

That would be too simple.

Most of them were probably not like this in the beginning.

They were juniors once. They waited for replies. They followed up with seniors. They felt ignored. They wondered why someone could not simply answer a message properly. They probably promised themselves that when they became senior themselves, they would behave differently.

And then, slowly, something changed.

Perhaps they simply learned from those who came before them.

Corporate culture has its own inheritance. People observe their seniors, absorb their habits, and eventually reproduce them. A junior sees senior colleagues constantly appearing unavailable and unconsciously learns that unavailability is what authority looks like. A delayed response begins to resemble importance. A packed calendar becomes a badge of relevance. Being difficult to reach becomes evidence that one's time is valuable.

Eventually, a strange transformation happens.

A person no longer merely has work.

He must also look busy.

He no longer merely holds responsibility.

He must constantly demonstrate that he is important.

And perhaps this is where ego quietly enters the room.

The irony is that this importance often exists mainly inside one's own professional universe. Inside that world, titles, meetings, emails, escalations, CC lists, dashboards, and deadlines can create the feeling that everything depends on us.

But step outside that small universe and the illusion becomes obvious.

The world continues.

The sun rises.

Traffic moves.

Families eat dinner.

Children play.

Millions of people live perfectly meaningful lives without knowing our designation, our department, or how many meetings we attended that afternoon.

The person who appears extraordinarily important inside one office may be completely irrelevant to the person sitting beside him on a bus.

And there is something strangely liberating about that realization.

The problem, then, is not being busy.

People genuinely have responsibilities. Some roles are demanding. Some days leave little room even to think.

The problem begins when busyness becomes identity and importance becomes performance.

When replying respectfully begins to feel beneath us.

When giving complete information feels like too much effort.

When accessibility is mistaken for weakness and distance for authority.

Perhaps corporate culture does not intentionally create such people. Perhaps it merely rewards certain behaviors until they become habits, and those habits eventually become personalities.

The senior teaches the junior without saying a word.

The junior becomes senior.

And the cycle continues.

Maybe one day I too will reach that stage.

Maybe I will have more responsibilities, more meetings, more people waiting for my response.

And perhaps that will be the real test—not whether I become important, but whether I begin to perform importance.

Because being important and believing oneself to be important are very different things.

One is responsibility.

The other is ego.

And perhaps the healthiest thing we can remember in the corporate world is this:

We may be important in our roles.

We may be important to our teams.

We may even be indispensable for a particular task.

But we are never as important as our ego occasionally convinces us we are.

In the end, titles disappear, emails stop arriving, someone else occupies the chair, and the organization continues.

Maybe professionalism should therefore not be measured by how unavailable we can appear, but by how useful, respectful, and human we remain while carrying responsibility.