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Chapter 1
What is intelligent disobedience?
In the business context, intelligent disobedience is an act performed with the intent to create a better outcome than would be achieved by following standard rules, practices, or current management direction. Intelligent disobedience means valuing outcomes over compliance with existing guidelines and processes, when circumstances permit.
Under normal circumstances, we, as leaders or employees, should do as we are instructed – following standard procedures and working within the parameters of our job descriptions. However, in some circumstances, those rules and processes do not serve our organization’s interests or may create detrimental outcomes for the managers who’ve provided the guidance. In these instances, the best leaders I’ve worked with turn to acts of intelligent disobedience. They evaluate whether bending (or breaking) a rule or countering a direction given by management would “protect their business,” achieve a more favorable outcome, or avoid a harmful result.
Intelligent disobedience from different viewpoints
Anyone in an organization can engage in intelligent disobedience. In fact, for the best results, many people in an organization should be empowered to consider employing intelligent disobedience.
Empowering people in this way should not be done in a haphazard manner. The stakes of breaking or bending the rules can be high, so care should be taken to define appropriate limits or boundaries before allowing people to perform acts of intelligent disobedience. Without those limits or careful consideration of circumstances, acts of intelligent disobedience could suffer from an acute shortage of “intelligence.”
It would, for example, be inappropriate to commit an act of intelligent disobedience that directly violates the law. Purposefully scheduling an airline pilot to violate their regulated rest periods for the time they fly an aircraft might result in a short-term cost reduction – but the safety risks to passengers and potential penalties imposed by a regulatory body easily offset any benefit. Add the effect of diminished public opinion from the perception of compromised safety and the result could be catastrophic to the business.
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Given the potential for unintended results, an organization needs to take care and provide guidance to properly instill and manage the concept of intelligent disobedience. Every organization has its unique perspectives, which in turn determine which intelligent disobedience techniques are effective. For example, what may be considered intelligent disobedience within one organization may be commonplace at another. Reporting a minor personnel conflict to the HR director may be standard practice in some organizations, while others would expect the first-line management team to handle the issue.
Let’s examine intelligent disobedience in different contexts: the first-line manager, the middle manager, and, finally, senior management.
Intelligent disobedience for first-line managers
In my experience, first-line managers, project managers, and team leaders perform most acts of intelligent disobedience. Typically, they do so when they feel empowered to manage their “piece of the business.” They take the risks associated with bending the rules when they see the potential for a better outcome. Properly empowered individuals engage in intelligent disobedience within limits, where those limits are either assumed or defined over time and experience of working with their managers – the middle managers in the organization. Their intelligent disobedience can be a powerful factor in driving success.
First-line or project managers can enhance that power by intentionally acting to empower their staff. If a first-line manager’s people are confident they can act with intelligent disobedience, similar to the way in which their manager does, performance improvement can be significant. Doing so mindfully is critical, however, because boundary conditions must be universally understood.
Defining the boundaries within which the manager’s staff may act expands the organization’s ability to produce optimal outcomes. Clearly stated boundaries help employees to feel confident that their acts of intelligent disobedience will be received appropriately.
Consider this example of clearly stated boundaries. I once worked with a logistics manager who elegantly directed his team to manage supplies across numerous groups with these intelligent disobedience guidelines:
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1 Do not take action as a means of self-promotion. The overall organization must benefit from your actions.
2 Do not shift supplies to benefit one group at the expense of another.
3 Do not break the laws of our country and state.
4 Do not exceed budget limitations by greater than 5% for any given part number.
5 If you see an opportunity that will increase the effectiveness of the organization that does not follow standard practice, and that action does not violate guidelines 1 through 4, then feel free to act.
Having these guidelines is not enough, however; it is also critical to follow up after your team members have acted with intelligent disobedience. Timely follow-up provides encouragement. Notable acts of intelligent disobedience that are deployed successfully can also be rewarded. In addition, refining guidelines and continuously improving a team’s approach to managing work helps the team to increase their performance. That results in overall improvement to the guidelines and processes used to manage intelligent disobedience, and in continued performance improvement.
When first-line managers actively and repeatedly discuss intelligent disobedience guidelines, their confidence to act grows. Particularly when intelligent disobedience requires a split-second decision, such as answering a challenging client question, a manager who confidently recalls a guideline discussion is much more likely to engage in an appropriate act of intelligent disobedience. Feedback collected from eight years of intelligent disobedience workshops shows that discussing guidelines greatly enhances the frequency and accuracy of how intelligent disobedience is employed. In addition, the results improve, because the management team more frequently supports the intelligent disobedience actions.
Intelligent disobedience at the middle-management level
While discussing parameters and constraints for acts of intelligent disobedience enhances the first-line manager’s effectiveness, middle managers must embrace additional considerations to increase the power of intelligent disobedience in their organizations. From their positions of greater scope and breadth of responsibilities, middle managers who perform their own intelligent disobedient actions can more substantially affect the direction of the business. Middle managers who do this most effectively use the “eyes and ears” of their first-line managers and staff members, who can provide insights that might not be easily visible otherwise. Embracing the concept of intelligent disobedience typically increases the “rule-breaking” ideas that surface in management discussions, increasing possibilities for broader acts of intelligent disobedience. These actions can come with greater risks, however, because the visibility and scrutiny of intelligent disobedience actions taken by middle managers can affect organizational perceptions.
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Middle management case study
Steve,1 a middle manager in the medical instruments industry, was managing a geographically diverse set of support centers. His organization spent significant funds defining enhanced business processes and deploying a new computer system to support those processes. The usual bumps and small errors surfaced after implementation. However, capturing customer concerns for one line of medical devices was taking too long, and customers were reporting interpretation errors when the company tried to correct its devices.
Being in a highly regulated medical instruments industry, the company’s corporate culture embraced processes and checklists, which were changed only after careful deliberation. Steve was a strong advocate of improved and unified processes, and repeatedly professed his belief in following new processes for an extended period before making changes. By not making changes too early, teams would not be tempted to revert to their old habits and processes.
Yet the high frequency of customer issues being reported from multiple geographies was a concern. Steve needed his team to perform well and to ensure that they addressed issues with the medical devices they supported.
Steve was faced with a difficult decision. Should he raise questions about the new support process, risk being perceived as a hypocrite, and potentially risk a cascade of nonoptimal process changes across the organization? Or should he ask his teams to continue to use the problematic processes, running the risk that the organization’s performance would suffer?
Despite his concerns about downstream issues, Steve made a decision quickly: he had to put his customers first. A couple of his teams suggested an alternative process. The teams didn’t collaborate, but the process change they proposed was strikingly similar. He brought members of those teams together and drafted a revised process that did not require an immediate change to their new system. Before deploying the change, he consulted with his management peers and shared his business problem, the analysis they undertook to improve the business process, his rationale for contradicting himself, and the direction he promoted for the organization. He conveyed this information using these simple steps.
1 Steve’s team discovered a customer issue, rather than an issue of process comfort or familiarity for his staff, which changed his thinking about altering the new processes.
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2 They worked hard to ensure that they were executing the process correctly before proposing a change.
3 Representatives of multiple teams who were having the same difficulty were instructed to collaborate to develop the change.
4 The new process design and evaluation sessions were recorded and made available on the company intranet, so that anyone could see how they analyzed the issue and solution.
5 Steve scheduled morning coffee breaks for teams within and outside of his organization because they might be aggravated by his “change of direction for self-centered reasons.” He had a bakery make a cake in the shape of a crow – and he was filmed at the coffee breaks “eating crow” for changing his position so drastically.
In this example, Steve engaged in a significant act of intelligent disobedience by reversing his position and not enforcing the duration of time normally given to executing and validating processes in his organization. Steve made a bold move by admitting his need to change direction, publicizing the change, and taking steps in a time frame counter to that which would normally have been deemed acceptable. He maintained his integrity within the company and enhanced the effectiveness of this intelligent disobedience by turning his action into an organizational learning moment. He leveraged his role as a middle manager and the broad exposure it provided to set an example for those willing to follow. In addition, the “eating crow” gesture was a lighthearted way of getting people’s attention and showing them that he was human, could make mistakes, and could admit them to the benefit of his organization.
Senior managers’ perspective: directing middle managers
Ira Chaleff, author of The Courageous Follower: Standing up to and for Our Leaders,2 has said that acts of intelligent disobedience can be the CEO’s best friend. Similar to the interactions between lower levels of management, senior managers need to discuss acceptable boundaries and constraints to ensure that they embrace intelligent disobedience in a way deemed acceptable by the CEO and in line with the strategic vision and priorities of the business.
Senior leaders should consider an additional perspective of intelligent disobedience, over and above providing boundaries to the middle managers they lead. Understanding the goals, personality, strengths, and weaknesses of their middle managers is critical to appropriately managing the concept of intelligent disobedience. Some managers will have a difficult time altering culture, while building and maintaining culture may form the lifeblood of the success of others. Some managers may have spent major portions of their career evolving products and services from existing offerings, or have worked in an entrepreneurial space in the past and be quite comfortable with new, innovative development. Each middle manager may have a different comfort level and willingness to engage in intelligent disobedience, and each may want to use different types of intelligent disobedience.
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Wise senior leaders might choose not to encourage their entrepreneur-style middle managers to pursue changes to processes in a government-regulated business area, because those entrepreneurs may go too far or feel overly constrained to be successful. On the other hand, a process-minded middle manager may get bogged down in detail and lose the big picture when developing a new business concept where there are no rules.
Managing intelligent disobedience depends on understanding personalities and strengths. Therefore, to maximize the effectiveness of intelligent disobedience, senior managers must tune the constraints and boundaries for intelligent disobedience to suit each individual.
Effective intelligent disobedience involves balancing risks
Intelligent disobedience is not for the meek.
The very nature of intelligent disobedience involves engaging in actions that are not commonplace. Bending or breaking commonly held rules or norms, varying from supervisors’ directions, discussing topics that are considered taboo, and so on, involve a degree of risk. You need to evaluate that risk compared to the potential benefits for your business, team, and the outcomes you are expected to deliver. Opportunities may be rich, but may be accompanied by ramifications of altered perceptions and concerns of those uncomfortable with straying from the status quo. Understanding and weighing the risks of intelligent disobedience is a crucial activity – and neglecting to do so may easily remove the “intelligence” from your attempt to engage in performance improvement.
This book frequently examines risks and how to evaluate them. This section reviews the most common risks you’ll need to analyze when considering acts of intelligent disobedience.
Personal risks versus professional risks
Most people work to maintain their standard of living. Ideally, working is also an enjoyable experience. Whether or not that is the case, being pushed to change jobs or being perceived negatively in your current role can be extraordinarily uncomfortable. The most pressing (and sometimes desperate) question people ask, when discussing acts of intelligent disobedience, is: “What is the risk of being fired if I disobey my manager’s direction?”
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In some cases, the risk of being fired may exist – and, in some cases, being fired may be appropriate! However, when examining this risk in...
