The Situation
Marcus stands at the whiteboard in the Tuesday operations meeting, walking his team of four through last quarter’s results. Customer satisfaction is up nine percent. Average resolution time is down by two days. Three of the four targets his vice president set six months ago came in above benchmark.
Teresa, his operations manager, is nodding. Jordan, his newest hire, is glancing at his phone. The energy in the room feels thin.
Twenty minutes later, Marcus is in the monthly leadership review. The vice president moves through each director’s results. When he reaches Marcus, he pauses.
“These resolution times. This is what we’re celebrating?”
He clicks to a comparison slide Marcus has never seen. “Still fifth out of six regions. When are you going to figure out how to run a tight operation?”
The other directors look at their laptops. The vice president moves on without waiting for an answer.
Back at his desk, Marcus finds himself copied on an email thread. Two weeks earlier he had requested a budget reallocation, with a full written rationale. He never received a reply. Now Finance has asked about it, and the vice president’s answer, copied to every director, reads: “Marcus’s team can’t seem to manage the resources they already have. Denied.”
That afternoon, Teresa is polite but distant. “I just want to know,” she says. “Are we doing good work or not? Because in the leadership meeting last month, it seemed like we’re the problem team. And now Jordan is asking me whether he should worry about our reputation.”
In eight months, the vice president has not once acknowledged the rise in satisfaction scores. Feedback arrives only in public, and only as correction.
What Marcus Sees
Marcus’s conclusion is clear, and it is partly right. His authority with his own team is being undercut in real time, not by his failures, but by the visible absence of his supervisor’s regard. If the person above Marcus does not respect him, why would his people stake their credibility on following him?
That insight is worth stating plainly:
Authority is not generated only from below. It is conferred partly from above, and a team reads its leader’s standing from how that leader is treated in rooms they can see into.
But Marcus’s conclusion stops at a person. The vice president is the problem.
Response Intelligence asks a different question. Not who is wrong, but what conditions are producing these responses, including his own.
The Diagnosis
The primary condition is Relationship. There is no working relationship between Marcus and the vice president, only a reporting line. There is no trust that would let either of them raise something difficult and expect to be heard.
The secondary condition is Communication, and it is how the damage reaches Marcus’s team. Feedback reaches Marcus only in public. His budget request gets no reply to him, then a verdict about him goes out to every director. A comparison slide appears for the first time in front of his peers. Almost nothing the vice president thinks about Marcus is ever said to Marcus alone. A poor relationship conducted privately would hurt Marcus. Conducted publicly, it is visible to the people he leads.
A contributing condition is Recognition. The only measure used in the room is rank. A region can improve every quarter and still be fifth out of six, and real improvement produces no acknowledgment at all.
None of these conditions was designed by one difficult person. The monthly review is built as a ranking ritual, and the vice president is likely ranked the same way by whoever sits above him. There is no standing one-on-one, so correction has nowhere to go except the public channel. Copying everyone is the default way decisions are shared. And the standard was never communicated: Marcus hit three of four targets but is being judged on regional rank, which nobody told him was the measure.
Marcus’s Own Part
For eight months Marcus has absorbed all of this in silence. He has not asked for a private conversation, asked which standard he is held to, or addressed with his team what they have been hearing about him and about them.
That silence is not neutral. It is a condition too. Public criticism of Marcus has cost the vice president nothing. It has drawn no question and no response, and that teaches the vice president what is acceptable here. His team is watching two leaders, not one: how the vice president treats Marcus, and how Marcus responds.
This part is the hardest to hear, so it is worth offering carefully. Most people find criticism difficult to take in, especially when they already feel treated unfairly. These are not verdicts. They are possibilities worth considering, honestly and in private:
- Has his silence been read upstairs as indifference, or as agreement?
- Does he know what the vice president is measured on and pressured by, or only what the vice president does to him?
- Did his budget request, sent to someone he had not spoken with alone in months, feel like a demand arriving without context?
- Has eight months of absorbing criticism shown up in his tone, his energy, or how he talks about the vice president?
None of these would make the treatment deserved. Responsibility for conditions grows with power, and the person who designed the public review carries more of it than the person being ranked. But each possibility, if true, is something Marcus can change without anyone’s permission.
Conditions Run in Every Direction
Response Intelligence is usually described from the top down. Leaders design conditions, and people respond to them. But everyone in an organization is responding to conditions and producing them for someone else at the same time, including for the person above them.
A leader designs with authority. Someone designing upward cannot. What they can do is propose conditions that serve the other person as well, in a way that invites partnership rather than demanding change.
This has a common name: managing up, or managing your supervisor. It is often mistaken for flattery or politics. It is neither. It is a skill that can be learned, practiced and improved: understanding what your supervisor is measured on, anticipating what they will need, choosing how and when information reaches them, and making it easy for them to support you. Leaders spend years learning to manage the people who report to them. Very few are taught to manage the person they report to, even though that one relationship shapes more of their working life than almost any other.
There is also a reason for Marcus to lean in rather than pull back. Partnerships that are truly ending tend to go quiet. People stop being invited to the table and are dropped from emails. Marcus is experiencing the opposite: he is included too much, in the wrong way. However badly it is delivered, that is the behavior of someone still paying attention. The relationship is damaged, but it is still live, and a live relationship can be rebuilt.
What Marcus Can Do Next
1. Ask for the private channel that does not exist.
“I’d like to set up a standing thirty minutes with you every other week. Right now most of what I hear about my region comes in the monthly review, and I’d rather hear it from you first so I can act on it sooner.”
It is hard to refuse, and it accuses no one.
2. Use it to say the hard thing, plainly.
This is the step Marcus has avoided for eight months, and the one most likely to change anything. The vice president may not know what his approach is costing. It is not a complaint about tone. It is information about impact.
“When my results are criticized in the leadership review, or a decision about my team goes out copied to the other directors, my team hears about it. Last week my operations manager asked me whether we are doing good work or not.
I can take hard feedback, and I want it. But when it comes in public, it costs me authority with the people I need to lead, and that makes it harder to deliver what you are asking for.
I’m asking that criticism of my region come to me first, privately. Is that something you’re willing to do?”
Then he stops talking and listens. Whatever the answer, Marcus will know where he stands.
3. Ask for specifics instead of taking offense.
Not taking offense is not suppressing the feeling. It is refusing to let the offense become the response. When criticism arrives as a verdict, Marcus answers with a question:
“I want to get this right. What would a tight operation look like to you? Which measure matters most, and by when? And am I being measured on the four targets we set in March, or on regional rank?”
A verdict can only be absorbed. A specific question turns it into an Expectation the vice president has to define, and Marcus becomes its co-author.
4. Brief upward before he is asked.
A short note a few days before each review: what moved, what it took, the context behind the rank, what comes next. The vice president walks in already informed, and it is harder to deliver a verdict about results someone has already explained to you. This is managing up at its most useful: having what your supervisor needs before they ask.
5. Answer the question his team is actually asking.
Marcus has already shared the numbers with his team. That was never the gap. Teresa heard the results on Tuesday and still asked, “Are we doing good work or not?” Numbers on a whiteboard cannot compete with what the team has seen and heard from the vice president. What they need is Marcus naming what they have witnessed, and telling them where he stands.
“You’ve heard how our region has been described in leadership meetings, and I know that’s hard to square with our results. So let me be clear about where I stand. This is good work, and I’m going to keep saying so. How we rank against other regions is a separate conversation, and I’m having it.”
He cannot control how the vice president describes the team. He can make sure it is not the only description they hear. He can also ask, privately, for the budget decision to be revisited, so that if it is still a no, it is a no given to him rather than about him.
6. Give trust a real chance, and decide in advance what happens if it does not come.
Trust can be rebuilt, but it is earned through repeated evidence, not one conversation. The one-on-one, the direct request and the monthly note, kept up for a full quarter: that is the effort. Marcus should watch for evidence, not apology. Does criticism start reaching him privately first? Does the vice president ask a question in the review instead of delivering a verdict?
The real test is whether his effort is reciprocated or absorbed. In a healthy relationship, managing up earns something back: context, cover, credit. In an unhealthy one, the same effort becomes labor that earns nothing. He should also know the quieter signs that a partnership has been severed: no longer asked to the table, removed from emails, engagement thinned to the minimum. Public criticism means the vice president is still invested. Exclusion means he has stopped.
If nothing moves after a genuine effort, going over the vice president’s head is rarely the answer at this level. A senior leader’s own supervisor usually knows how they operate, and a director who escalates about how he is treated tends to become the problem in the story. The exception is harassment, discrimination or retaliation, which belongs with HR without delay.
Otherwise, the more honest path is to plan an exit, deliberately and without drama, and to protect his team on the way out: document their results, speak well of their work where it counts, and set them up to succeed with whoever comes next.
Either way, the effort is not wasted. Leaning in either rebuilds this relationship or builds the skill he will need for the next one.