Practical Leadership Series — Chapter 2: The difficult conversation most leaders avoid
Would you stay quiet, or stand up for your team?
Here’s a question worth sitting with.
Someone more senior than you questions the work one of your team members delivered. They’re not happy with it. And you don’t agree with them.
What do you do? Do you stay quiet, take the feedback, and pass it down to your team member? Or do you stand up for them?
It sounds easy to answer when you read it here. In the moment, it’s one of the harder things you’ll do as a leader — because the person you’d be pushing back on is more senior than you, and staying quiet is so much easier.
Let me tell you about the day I had to choose.
One busy afternoon, I got a call from a senior stakeholder. She was unhappy about one of my team members. The work was late, she said, and it wasn’t good enough.
I listened. I didn’t defend him, and I didn’t promise to sort him out. I just listened. I wasn’t going to take the complaint at face value, but I wasn’t going to dismiss it either. Somewhere in the middle was the truth, and it was my job to find it.
What I did next is the part worth sharing — because it’s the difference between a leader who passes complaints down the line, and one their team would walk through fire for.
Don’t let one complaint become one verdict
The first thing I did was refuse to treat her complaint as one thing.
“Late and not good enough” sounds like a single judgement. It’s actually two, and they have nothing to do with each other. Under pressure from a senior voice, it’s easy to blur them together — and then you either defend the whole thing or accept the whole thing. Both are wrong, because the truth is rarely all on one side.
So I separated them. Was it late? And separately — was it bad? Two questions, checked on their own.
