[teddyh]

> do it in a careful way.

Sure, that sounds more reasonable. Your initial description could easily be interpreted as “If you go over the head of your immediate manager for any reason whatsoever, you are a liability to the company and deserve to be fired immediately”, which is mostly how I read it. Certainly, an employee must be careful when engaging the company in non-orthodox paths, just as you say, but employers must also be careful in how they communicate the possible options available to an employee; if what employers say comes across like my quote above, an employee can feel trapped and easily become disgruntled in a situation when upper management would actually want to be informed of said situation.

The onus is on upper management to make sure that employees feel safe enough to actually inform upper management of something management would like to be informed about, which includes counteracting middle management, since the incentive of middle management is to try and make sure that employees never ever go over the head of middle managment for any reason at all.

[lostcolony]

Very first thing I said - "When done in bad faith".

Sounds like you were perhaps arguing against a strawman? I never said don't ever go to upper management, nor that there is never a reason to go to upper management. Just that if someone goes to upper management the way this guy did, the right response is to let them go, that they are a liability to the team, the manager, and the company at that point. Honestly to themselves, too, but that's not on the manager to fix.

[teddyh]

I responded to what I read into what you wrote. Since you did not seem to mean exactly that, then it’s all good. I certainly did not intentionally misinterpret what you wrote in order to attack it.