When you think the plan from above is wrong
Sooner or later, every manager receives an instruction they believe will cost their team. What they do with that disagreement decides whether the people above and below them can still trust them.
A situation most managers will recognise
Consider an illustrative case. An operations manager in a growing professional services firm is told late on a Thursday that a client deliverable has been brought forward to Monday. Her team has just come through a fortnight of long days on another account. She knows what a weekend push will do to them, and she's fairly sure the quality of the work will suffer as well.
Each of her options feels reasonable at the time. She could pass the instruction on exactly as it arrived and let the pressure land where it lands. Going back to the director to make her case is another. The third is what a lot of conscientious managers quietly do: tell the team to do what they can, promise to sort it out, and let the deadline slip without saying anything upstairs.
That third route is the most tempting, because it feels like loyalty. It protects people she cares about and spares her a difficult conversation. It's also the route most likely to damage her.
Right about the plan, wrong about the method
A manager can be entirely right about the substance of a decision and still get the handling of it wrong. Those are two separate judgements, and the quiet workaround fails the second even when it wins the first.
Think about what happens next. The director carries on making promises to the client based on a Monday delivery that's no longer planned. When the gap surfaces, and it usually does, he has to wonder what else has been adjusted without a word. Meanwhile the team has learnt that instructions from above are negotiable, depending on which manager passes them on. She has spent credibility in both directions at once.
Anyone in the middle of an organisation is a bridge between the people who set direction and the people who do the work, and the job is to carry weight both ways. Caring for the team is part of that job. Care that acts on every complaint without telling anyone above, though, has left the manager as the only person who knows what the plan now is.
The opposite mistake
Silent compliance fails too, only more politely.
Plenty of capable managers accept a plan because the person proposing it is senior, without ever weighing it. Seniority and experience deserve respect, yet neither proves that a particular decision is sound, or that the senior person has analysed this situation better than the one standing closest to it. The healthier habit is to judge plans on their merits and, when one looks wrong, to say so. Can we try this instead? Could we look at it again with this in mind?
Senior people are badly served by a room that always agrees with them. Every leadership team needs someone willing to ask the awkward questions, the ones that turn out to be right and the ones that turn out to be wrong, because a plan that can't answer both hasn't been tested. Without that voice, a team can walk confidently into a poor decision simply because nobody inside the echo chamber raised a hand.
Confidence to speak up builds slowly, through use. Each time a manager offers a considered alternative and it helps, she trusts her own judgement a little more, and so does the person she reports to.
Clarity down, information up
In Lead With Ownership, this is the principle of Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command: lead your team with clarity and your seniors with information.
Look at that Thursday instruction through this lens. The director doesn't know what his operations manager knows. He may not have seen the last fortnight's hours, the risk to quality, or the fact that most of the work could be delivered on Monday with the remainder by Wednesday. Taking that information up is her responsibility. It's how a senior person gets the chance to make a better call.
This part is uncomfortable. If a senior makes a poor decision because they lacked information, the first place to look is at what you didn't tell them, and when. Grumbling about the decision afterwards, to the team or to anyone else, changes nothing. A clear conversation with the director on Thursday evening might change a great deal.
Going up the chain has a second half, which is asking why. The director may know something the manager doesn't, perhaps that the client is close to leaving or that Monday is tied to a contract renewal. Understanding the reason often changes how the instruction looks, and it certainly changes how well it can be briefed.
Leading down is the other direction. Once the decision is made, the manager briefs it as her own. Saying "they've told us we have to" hands her authority to someone who isn't in the room and invites the team to treat the plan as optional. If she still disagrees, that conversation carries on upwards, never around. If a plan is unsafe, unlawful or unethical, say so and refuse to carry out the harmful instruction. Explain the concern and seek a safe alternative through the appropriate channel.
Before you act on an instruction you disagree with
A simple sequence helps when the pressure is on:
- Ask for the intent. Find out what the instruction is meant to achieve before you judge how it's meant to be done.
- Take information up, early and in private. Say what you can see from where you stand, the likely consequence, and one workable alternative.
- Support the decision and own the execution. Once the concerns have been heard and the plan is safe, lawful and ethical, commit to making it work. Keep reporting what changes and what the team needs.
- Brief it down as yours. Explain the reason to the team in your own words, and don't hide behind the person above.
If you're the founder at the top of the business, the same principle asks something of you. Make leading up easy. Ask your managers what you're missing before you ask whether they're on board. Thank the person who tells you a plan won't work, especially when they turn out to be right. And if nobody has pushed back on you for months, be slow to conclude that every plan has been sound. It may say more about the room.
A quieter kind of loyalty
The manager who carries honest information up and clear direction down is loyal to her team and to the people above it at the same time. It's slower than a quiet workaround, and less comfortable than silence.
It's also the approach that leaves her trusted from both sides when the next difficult instruction arrives.
