The rhythmic clicking of my retractable pen is the only thing keeping me from screaming while Sarah, the executive assistant with the temperament of a glacial shelf, explains for the 12th time today that the CEO’s door is, technically, open. I am looking at the door. It is made of heavy oak. It is currently shut. But Sarah insists that because of the ‘Open-Door Policy’ announced at the last all-hands meeting, the door is spiritually, if not physically, ajar. ‘He’s just fully committed for the next 22 days,’ she says, her smile not reaching her eyes. ‘But please, send him a detailed email. He loves hearing from the front lines.’ We both know that email will descend into a digital abyss containing 402 other unread missives from people who actually believe the rhetoric.

The Logic of Spices and Hypocrisy

I just spent my Sunday alphabetizing my spice rack. I started with Anise and ended with Za’atar, though I’m still debating whether ‘Red Pepper Flakes’ belongs under R or P. It’s a futile attempt to impose logic on a world that refuses to be sensible. My spices are orderly, accessible, and honest about what they provide. If the jar says Cinnamon, it contains Cinnamon. It doesn’t pretend to be Saffron while hiding behind a locked cabinet. This is more than I can say for modern leadership. The open-door policy isn’t a bridge; it’s a defensive fortification. It is a linguistic trick designed to shift the burden of transparency from the person with power to the person without it. By declaring the door ‘open,’ the leader abdicates the responsibility of actually seeking out the truth. They wait for the brave or the foolish to walk through the fire, and when no one shows up, they congratulate themselves on having a perfectly satisfied workforce.

The Rigidity of Steel vs. Chrome

As a prison education coordinator, I live in a world defined by doors. In the facility where I work, there are 82 steel gates between the entrance and my classroom. We don’t use metaphors for accessibility here because a locked door is a physical fact, not a corporate strategy. I spend my days trying to convince men who have been discarded by society that a book is a key. But even in this rigid environment, I see more genuine communication than I do in the glass-and-chrome towers of the corporate world. In the yard, if someone has a problem, they say it. There is no ‘policy’ to hide behind. Yet, in the office, we’ve replaced honesty with ‘accessibility initiatives.’ It’s a subtle form of hypocrisy that teaches employees that leadership’s words are merely decorative.

The open-door policy is the ‘thoughts and prayers’ of the management world.

When a manager says, ‘My door is always open,’ they are usually saying, ‘I am tired of being responsible for your morale, so I am making it your job to interrupt me.’ It’s a brilliant, if accidental, redirection. If you don’t come to them, any failure in communication is your fault. You didn’t ‘take initiative.’ You didn’t ‘leverage the available channels.’ Meanwhile, the manager sits behind a 52-inch monitor, wearing noise-canceling headphones, projecting a vibe of such intense busy-ness that even the delivery guy is afraid to knock. It creates a gulf between the stated values of the company and the lived reality of the cubicle. This isn’t just a minor annoyance; it’s an erosion of trust that happens in 2-minute increments every single day.

Availability Without Intention

I’ve made mistakes. I remember telling a young inmate that he could talk to me ‘anytime,’ only to realize that I had 32 reports due and a meeting with the warden that afternoon. When he finally approached me with a poem he’d written about his daughter, I checked my watch. I saw the light go out in his eyes before I even spoke. I was being ‘accessible’ in name only. I was the CEO with the oak door. I realized then that an open door without an open mind is just a hole in the wall. You have to be willing to be interrupted. You have to be willing to have your schedule ruined by the messy, unscripted needs of other human beings. If you aren’t willing to let your 102-item to-do list suffer, you aren’t actually available.

This reminds me of why I appreciate the few places left where accessibility isn’t a slogan. There’s a certain kind of integrity in a direct relationship, the kind where the person making the thing is the same person who listens to the person using it. In the high-end world of craftsmanship, there are no assistants or tiered ticketing systems. Think about the bespoke intimacy of

LOTOS EYEWEAR and their ‘One of One’ collection. There, the relationship isn’t mediated by a defensive policy; it is the policy. The craftsman and the client are in a literal dialogue. There is no ‘open door’ because there was never a wall to begin with. The accessibility is baked into the creation of the object itself. It’s a model of genuine collaboration that makes the corporate ‘all-hands’ look like a puppet show.

The Cost of Inconvenience

I’ve watched 22 different ‘culture shifts’ happen in the department over the last decade. Each one starts with a memo. Each one ends with people closing their actual doors to hide from the fallout of the memo. We talk about ‘psychological safety’ as if it’s something you can install like a software update. But safety comes from the absence of fear, and nothing induces fear quite like a leader who says one thing and does another. When you tell your team they can talk to you, and then you punish them with ‘well-actuallys’ or passive-aggressive sighs, you aren’t just being a bad boss. You’re being a liar. You are training your employees to be silent. You are building a culture of 52-person committees where no one actually says what they think because they’ve learned that the ‘open door’ is actually a trap door.

True leadership requires the courage to be inconvenienced.

I once knew a warden who didn’t have an office. He had a desk in the middle of the main corridor. People thought he was crazy. They said it was a security risk. But he told me that he’d rather be at risk of an attack than at risk of being ignorant. He saw every one of the 142 daily interactions that shaped the life of the prison. He didn’t need a policy because he was present. He was the antithesis of the CEO who hides in the penthouse and wonders why the ‘little people’ are so disengaged. Presence is the only antidote to the pernicious myth of the open door. It requires you to step out into the hallway, to get your hands dirty, to alphabetize the spices yourself instead of hiring someone to do it and then complaining that they didn’t use the right font on the labels.

We are obsessed with the optics of availability. We want the credit for being a ‘cool boss’ without the cost of being a present one. We want to be liked, but we don’t want to be bothered. It’s a contradiction that leads to a slow-motion car wreck of resentment. I see it in the eyes of my students when they realize the ‘resource center’ is only open for 2 hours a week during their work shifts. I see it in the face of my friend who was told to ‘bring her whole self to work’ and then got a performance review saying she was ‘too emotional’ when her father died. The open door is a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night, believing we are better than the feudal lords of old. At least the lords didn’t pretend they wanted to hear your complaints about the harvest.

From Doors to Ears: The Price of Honesty

If we want to fix this, we have to stop talking about doors. We have to start talking about ears. We have to acknowledge that communication is a high-cost activity. It costs time. It costs ego. It costs the comfort of being right. I would rather a boss tell me, ‘I am unavailable for the next 12 days because I am overwhelmed,’ than have them tell me their door is open while they’re checking their phone under the table. Honesty, even when it’s cold, is better than a warm lie.

My spice rack is finally finished. It looks beautiful. Every jar is exactly where it should be. And yet, I know that if I want to make something that actually tastes good, I’m going to have to make a mess. I’m going to have to open all the jars, spill some salt, and be willing to change the recipe on the fly. You can’t cook a meal through a closed door, no matter how much you insist it’s open.