The Cream Doesn’t Always Float to the Top

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My mum has been telling me for as long as I can remember that the cream doesn’t always float to the top.

I couldn’t tell you the first time she said it because she has said it so many times that they have all blended into one. I know it predates my working life because I remember entering the corporate world already understanding what she meant, and she still says it to me now. If I call her frustrated about something, there is a reasonable chance that at some point she will remind me, “Remember what I’ve always told you. The cream doesn’t always float to the top.” Sometimes I’m not entirely convinced it has anything to do with whatever I’m complaining about, but after more than four decades I’m unlikely to stop her now.

What she meant was that the world often isn’t a meritocracy, and the world of business certainly isn’t one. Being good at your job matters, but it isn’t the only thing that determines what happens to you. People who understand the politics of an organisation can do better than people who are objectively better at the work. Relationships, visibility and timing matter, as does knowing how decisions actually get made, even if we would prefer to believe that the quality of someone’s work should be enough.

My mum had learned that through her own career as an executive working in environments overwhelmingly dominated by men, so I never had any reason to doubt her. Once I started working, I saw plenty of evidence for myself. One of the earliest examples came when I was working in artist management and EMI was going through a huge restructure. I watched people I thought were exceptional at their jobs suddenly find themselves having to resell themselves for positions they were already doing, while a new group of executives arrived talking about restructuring the business and “creating synergies.”

Some people understood immediately what was happening. They made themselves visible, built relationships with the people making the decisions and told them what they wanted to hear. Others seemed to believe that years of doing their jobs exceptionally well would speak for itself. It didn’t. Some very talented people were made redundant, and a number of them never returned to the music industry at all. I remember finding that incredibly frustrating because it seemed so obvious to me that the business was losing people it should have been trying to keep. But in retrospect, perhaps the more useful lesson was that everybody wasn’t playing the game I thought they were.

And despite knowing from the beginning that this was how the world sometimes worked, I spent years getting angry every time it did.

The part I find interesting now is that I wasn’t discovering anything new. I had been warned about it before my career even began and had accumulated plenty of evidence that my mum was right, yet some part of me continued to operate according to a completely different set of rules. The best person should get the job. Good work should be recognised. Poor behaviour should have consequences. People should do the right thing. And every time reality failed to meet those expectations, I became frustrated by something I already knew the world was perfectly capable of doing.

For the most part I internalised that frustration. I would turn situations over in my head, trying to understand why somebody couldn’t see something that seemed obvious to me or why a decision had been made that I believed was clearly wrong. There were a few occasions when I externalised it, and I can’t think of one where doing so made the situation better, but most of the time I simply carried the feelings around with me. I think I confused some of that frustration with caring, because if I believed strongly in doing good work and treating people properly, wasn’t anger the appropriate response when I saw the opposite being rewarded?

It wasn’t until I got sober and started doing a lot more work on myself that I began to understand how little any of that anger was achieving. Recovery has a phrase for almost everything, often irritatingly so, and I regularly joke about starting a company that makes bumper stickers with recovery cliches on them. However, one I have found particularly useful is that expectations are resentments in waiting. The more I examined some of my own resentments, the more I began to recognise how many of them had started with an expectation about how somebody else should behave.

Recovery didn’t make me stop noticing any of this, and it certainly didn’t make me stop having opinions about it. What began to change was my assumption that recognising something was wrong meant I had to keep wrestling with it. I could see what was happening, understand why I disagreed with it and still accept that my disagreement wasn’t going to alter the reality in front of me. The resentment came when I continued expecting that reality to become something it had already shown me it wasn’t.

Worse, I could often see perfectly well that they were playing a different game.

I think that is where my understanding of my mum’s advice has changed most. When I was younger, “the cream doesn’t always float to the top” sounded like an instruction to understand the game and learn how to play it. These days I think there is a more important distinction. I don’t have to play the game somebody else is playing, but I do need to recognise when a different game is being played.

If decisions are being driven by politics rather than merit, recognising that doesn’t require me to become more political. If somebody else behaves in a way that conflicts with my values, I don’t have to compromise mine to compete with them. My morals and ethics don’t change according to the behaviour of the people around me, but if I pretend that I can’t see what is happening, that doesn’t make me principled, it makes me naive.

And, perhaps more importantly, it makes resentment almost inevitable. If I can see that somebody is playing by a different set of rules but continue to expect them to behave according to mine, I am setting myself up to be disappointed. There is something slightly ludicrous about repeatedly resenting an outcome that I could already see coming.

That doesn’t mean accepting everything that happens around me. There have been times throughout my career when I have seen behaviour inside organisations that fundamentally conflicted with my values, including abuses of power and behaviour towards other people that I couldn’t reconcile with the kind of organisation I wanted to help build. Sometimes I could influence what happened and sometimes I couldn’t. On more than one occasion, when I realised that I couldn’t change the situation and wasn’t willing to participate in it, I left.

For me, that is where acceptance becomes an active behaviour rather than a passive one. Another recovery phrase I have come to live by is that acceptance is the answer to all my problems; although I don’t interpret acceptance as meaning that something is okay. For me, acceptance means acknowledging what is actually happening before deciding what I am going to do about it. I can challenge something, try to change it, refuse to participate in it or walk away entirely, but none of those choices is particularly useful if I am still arguing with the fact that it is happening in the first place.

This has probably been the biggest change in how I respond when I think something is wrong. I still get frustrated, and there are still times when I look at a decision and feel fairly certain about where it is going to lead. Sometimes I turn out to be right, but I’ve learned that being proved right rarely provides the satisfaction we imagine it will. If someone has been put into a job they can’t do, a project has failed or people have been hurt along the way, the fact that I saw it coming doesn’t make any of those things better. Vindication is a fairly hollow prize when the outcome you actually wanted was for things to work.

Waiting to be proved right keeps me attached to the very situation I need to let go of. It turns somebody else’s decision into something I continue carrying, sometimes long after the people who actually made it have moved on. These days I try to separate what actually happened from what I think should have happened, understand where my frustration is coming from and then ask whether there is anything useful within my power to change. Sometimes that means speaking up or acting, sometimes deciding whether I am willing to remain part of the situation, and sometimes recognising that, while I may have an opinion about it, it actually has nothing to do with me.

That last one has taken me a surprisingly long time to learn.

Someone else’s promotion doesn’t change my ability. Somebody receiving recognition that I don’t believe they earned doesn’t diminish the quality of my work. A decision I disagree with doesn’t require me to carry that disagreement indefinitely, and recognising that somebody else is playing a different game doesn’t mean I have to join them. I can understand the reality around me while continuing to behave according to the values I have chosen for myself.

I spent years directing an enormous amount of emotional energy towards things I couldn’t control, partly because I thought that was what caring looked like. Letting it go somehow felt too close to saying that I didn’t care what happened.

I see that differently now. Accepting the limits of my influence doesn’t make me indifferent to the outcome. In fact, I think I’m much more useful when I can distinguish between what belongs to me and what doesn’t, because my energy goes towards the things I might actually be able to change rather than the things I simply wish were different.

I don’t think caring requires me to carry everything anymore.

My mum was right. The cream doesn’t always float to the top, and after decades of her telling me that, I have more than enough evidence to know she probably isn’t going to be proved wrong anytime soon. I still believe businesses should reward the best people. I still believe ability should matter more than politics and that people should be accountable for how they behave. Acceptance hasn’t lowered any of those standards.

It has simply taught me where to apply them.

I can hold myself accountable for the work I do, the decisions I make, the people I support, the things I challenge and the environments I choose to participate in. I can recognise the game being played around me without pretending it isn’t happening, and without changing the rules by which I choose to live.

The cream doesn’t always float to the top. I wish it did, but I no longer need it to.

And perhaps that was what my mum was trying to teach me all along.

Eric x