There’s a leadership skill nobody teaches you directly: what to do when you genuinely disagree with your manager’s call and the call still has to be made.
I’ve been on both sides of this enough times that I have a fairly worked-out view of how to handle it. But I also remember the period before I had a worked-out view — before then, I defaulted to one of two bad instincts depending on the situation: either folding too early to avoid friction, or staying dug in past the point where it was useful. Neither serves the work.
A few years ago, I disagreed with a decision being made above me about how to approach a significant piece of technical infrastructure. The details don’t matter for this story, but the shape of the disagreement matters: I thought we were optimizing for the wrong thing, trading long-term operational health for short-term speed in a way that would create problems for my teams downstream. I said this clearly, once, in the right forum. I laid out my reasoning and the specific concerns I had. The person above me heard it, engaged with it genuinely, and reached a different conclusion than I did.
I was overruled. And then I had to execute.
What happened next is the part I want to talk about, because I think this is where most leadership advice stops. It says “disagree and commit” and then moves on, as if the commitment part is easy. It isn’t always.
When I went back to my teams and began implementing a direction I hadn’t chosen, I had a choice about how to present it. I could have been passive about it — technically implemented the decision while making it clear through my tone and language that I’d had reservations. Teams are perceptive; they would have picked that up, and it would have given them permission to be skeptical or half-hearted in their own implementation. That’s leadership malpractice. I didn’t do that.
What I did do was tell my teams, directly: we’re going in this direction, I understand the concerns you might have, here’s the reasoning behind the call, and I’m committed to making it work. I didn’t pretend I’d championed the decision originally. But I also didn’t undermine it with winks and subtext. When my teams asked questions or raised objections — and they did — I engaged with those objections genuinely and explained the trade-offs the decision-makers had weighed. I became a faithful advocate for a decision I hadn’t made.
I chose to be a faithful advocate for the decision partly because the role requires it, partly because I could have been wrong — my objections were reasonable, but that doesn’t mean the decision was incorrect, and I’ve been overruled before in situations where I later understood I’d been missing something important. But also, importantly, because my teams were watching how I handled disagreement with my own leadership. If I wanted them to behave well when I overruled them — which I would eventually do, on other things — I needed to model that behavior myself.
The distinction I’ve come to rely on is between disagreement that’s substantive and disagreement that’s about ego. Substantive disagreement: I have information or a perspective the decision-maker doesn’t have, and sharing it might actually change the outcome. Ego disagreement: I want my view to win because I want to win, or because being overruled feels diminishing. The first category deserves clear, persistent advocacy through the right channels. The second category deserves honest self-examination and then moving on. Once I’ve made that call, one thing that has genuinely helped is being explicit with my manager about the state of my disagreement, both during and after. During: “I want to be clear that I still have concerns about X, but I understand we’re moving forward and I’m fully committed to making it work.” After: “Now that we’ve implemented this, here’s what I’m seeing — I think we’re managing it, but here’s the risk I want to watch.” That keeps the channel open. It signals that I’m engaged, not just compliant. And if the concern turns out to be warranted, there’s a record of having raised it that doesn’t feel like “I told you so” because it was raised constructively rather than retroactively.
Managing up is not about winning arguments. It’s about building a track record as someone whose disagreements are worth taking seriously and whose commitments are worth trusting. Both parts matter. The commitment without the disagreement is just compliance. The disagreement without the commitment is just obstructionism.