Years ago, I wrote up an employee for breaking a policy every single person in that building knew about. She didn’t come to me to discuss it. Instead, she went to her friend, the Director of Operations. Who happened to be my boss. He threw the write-up out and never mentioned it to me. After that, a clear message was sent to my team...our workplace standards are negotiable.

Welcome to the 'Override'

An ‘Override’ is the moment upper leadership reverses a middle manager’s decision.

My boss thought he was doing a favor for a friend. What he actually did was hand that employee a title nobody prints on a badge: ‘The Untouchable Star.’ And she knew it. So she kept breaking the rules, because why wouldn’t she? She had just been shown, in front of everyone, that the rules were something other people had to follow.

Here is the part that costs real money. Think about the manager in your building who stopped bringing problems upstairs. They aren’t checked out. They simply learned what happens when they do. 

When we asked American workers in the National Workplace Trends Study how connected leadership really is to daily reality, nearly half said upper management is disconnected from what the culture is actually like on the ground. That gap does not start with bad executives. It starts the day a manager decides the truth is not worth the trip upstairs.

So what do you do when you are the one caught in the middle? You have three conversations.

1. Be Brave Enough to Have the Conversation With Your Boss

Most leaders never have this one. They vent to a peer, they update their resume, and they quietly decide it isn’t worth the risk.

I walked into my boss’s office and told him directly that his interference was undermining my leadership with my team, and that it was starting to infect the rest of my people.

Notice what I did not say. I didn’t say “you embarrassed me.” I didn’t say “that wasn’t fair.” I named the cost to the business, and I named it to his face.

So what did I ask for? Not a reversal. Not an apology. I asked him to have a conversation with her. That’s a door a boss can walk through without losing face, which is exactly why he walked through it.

2. Know Which Battle You're Actually Fighting

Because here is what my boss said back to me: “She’s a friend so I’ve got her back. That’s just the way it is.”

I lost that battle. The favoritism did not go away. I did not win the principle I wanted to fight for, and I was never going to win it.

What I got was a lever. He agreed to talk to her, and she improved. Leaders burn out in the middle because they hold out for the apology, the reversal, the moment their boss finally admits they were wrong. That moment usually never comes. Meanwhile, the smaller ask, the one that actually changes the poor behavior, was available the whole time. Know the difference between the outcome you want and the smallest action that gets you there.

3. Be Willing to Have the Conversation With the Employee

My boss had just told me she was untouchable. I could have accepted that and spent the next year working around her. Instead, I sat down with her and challenged her to be better.

I told her she gets to decide what she runs her life on. She can wake up every day asking “what can I get away with?” Or she can wake up asking “what can I do to improve?” Those two questions build two completely different careers.

Because everyone in a workplace is doing one of two things. They’re either contributing or contaminating the environment. There is no neutral setting. The person coasting on protection is not standing still. She is leaking something into the room, and every person on that team is quietly deciding whether to match it. She improved. Not because the write-up stuck, but because somebody finally told her she was capable of more than what she was getting away with.

Build What We Call a 'Courageous Communicator'

Leading from the middle requires you to become what I call a Courageous Communicator. It is #10 out of the 12 Bar Raiser™ traits, and it lives in the Impact domain, because this is where your influence either grows or dies.

Nearly 6 in 10 employees say they lose trust in their workplace when leaders fail to lead with integrity, and that distrust walks them straight toward the exit. Every Override that goes unaddressed is a withdrawal from that account. A Destination Workplace® is not a place with no conflict. It’s a place where the standard supersedes the friendship.

This Week's Challenge: The Two-Conversation Week

One conversation up. One conversation down.

Say the hard thing to the person above you, then say the hard thing to the person on your team you have been working around. Same week. Most leaders manage to do one of those in a year. Do both in five days and watch how fast your team’s read on you changes.

SHARE THIS! If you have ever had a decision overridden and watched your authority evaporate in front of your team, you already know what an ‘Override’ costs. Send this to a leader stuck in the middle right now, so they stop absorbing it and start having the three conversations.

WORK WITH BETSY: Want the leaders in your middle developed before they burn out or quit? Betsy delivers her Bar Raisers™ keynote to organizations ready to stop losing good managers to preventable culture problems. Check her availability here.

Need your managers equipped to hold the standard, even upward? Destination Workplace® builds the leadership development programs that turn managers in the middle into Bar Raisers™. See the leadership development programs here.

About Betsy: Betsy Allen-Manning is the wake-up call you didn't know you needed. She's a high-energy leadership keynote speaker and creator of the Bar Raisers™ Movement: a proprietary system redefining how organizations are approaching performance, leadership, and culture. Featured on FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and TEDx, Betsy works with organizations across corporate, franchise, association, nonprofit, and government sectors. She's the lead researcher behind the National Workplace Trends Study, and delivers programs around her Bar Raisers™ and Leadership Mastery frameworks. She is the founder of Destination Workplace®, an award-winning leadership development firm in Dallas, Texas.