The board meets quarterly. Four times a year, a group of people who don’t work at the company decide what happens to the people who do.
They get a deck. Curated. Optimistic. The deck does not include: the parking lot arguments, the people who cried in the bathroom, the project that failed because leadership changed direction three times, or the fact that the best engineer quit last month.
The board sees the company the way leadership wants the company to be seen. They make decisions based on that version. The decisions affect the actual version. The gap between the two is where people get hurt.