End Runs and Undermining Authority: When decisions are made in whispers rather than in the room. Bypassing leadership structures or processes erodes trust and team alignment.
I want to start by sharing a story. Stories have the power to teach us empathy and compassion, which is incredibly important if we are going to take on the Side-Door Strategy as one of the Big Ten Culture Killers of Effective Leadership Teams.
This is a completely fictional story, and any similarities to real people or events are purely coincidental. However, it tends to play out in a similar way across many organizations. By sharing this story, I aim to demonstrate how the Side-Door Strategy works and, more importantly, how it feels to those caught in it.
At a fast-growing educational technology (ed-tech) startup, a senior product strategist named Maya had spent years building a reputation for collaborative leadership. She’d helped launch several successful learning platforms and was known for her ability to bridge engineering, design, and pedagogy.
But things began to shift when the COO, Trent, reassigned Maya’s flagship product to a newly formed innovation lab with no discussion and no transition plan: just a Slack notification and a new reporting structure. The lab’s director, a former venture capitalist with little background in education, kept Maya at a distance and excluded her from key decisions, including the hiring of a new product lead, a junior strategist named Theo.
Theo, who once shadowed Maya on a major rollout, bypassed her entirely and pitched his candidacy for the new role directly to Trent, one that would place him over both Maya’s product and a separate content initiative. Company policy required Theo to consult his current manager first. He didn’t. And no one addressed the breach.
Around the same time, Maya had been collaborating with a high-profile influencer in the ed-tech space, Sienna, on a joint webinar series. When Maya suggested pausing the series to recalibrate the messaging, Sienna lashed out. Instead of engaging Maya directly, she went to Trent, accusing Maya of “stalling innovation for personal reasons.” Maya tried to reconcile to get the project and relationship back on track, but Sienna used the conversation to manipulate the narrative, issuing ultimatums and threatening to pull her audience.
Trent responded by removing Maya from the partnership altogether. He looped in a marketing associate, awarded Sienna’s firm a generous sponsorship deal with no clear deliverables, and failed to advocate for Maya’s role or address the breakdown.
Internally, Maya faced another challenge. One of her direct reports, Jordan, had a pattern of undermining her authority, including ignoring deadlines, rewriting strategy decks without approval, and escalating minor disagreements to the HR department. When Maya tried to address it, Jordan went straight to Trent. Instead of backing Maya, Trent took over. But the issues were not resolved with explicit agreements on how to manage future conflict in alignment with organizational values. A year later, the same pattern was repeated. This time, Maya initiated a formal performance review, but Trent intervened again, effectively neutralizing her leadership.
Eventually, Maya reached a breaking point. The constant bypassing, the erosion of her agency, and the emotional toll of navigating conflict without support left her exhausted. What had once been an exciting role became a daily exercise in damage control. Burnt out and disillusioned, she chose to resign.
In her exit interview, Maya didn’t hold back. She named the patterns: decisions made in whispers, leadership structures routinely bypassed, and a culture that rewarded end-runs over honest dialogue. She spoke not out of bitterness, but out of conviction, hoping her departure might prompt reflection before the organization lost more of what made it whole.
Now, in the way I have chosen to tell this story, I’m sure you might be tempted to think that Maya is the hero and the unwitting victim of others’ abusive behaviors. Indeed, if you were Maya, you would surely feel that way.
But the truth is much more complicated than that. Every character in this story has their own perspective. Indeed, even Maya could have handled some of these issues with more wisdom than she did. Often, people in these kinds of ethical situations try their best to handle them with integrity and wisdom. Yes, some bad actors are out there who aim to destroy what is good and right. However, I believe most people strive to act with the best intentions, consistently with their internal values and ideals.
But that doesn’t mean they always act ethically! Steven M.R. Covey, in his book The Speed of Trust, said, “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.” Suppose we approach organizational issues or conflicts with the view that the other person is somehow lacking in character. We will respond with revulsion, distrust, lack of empathy, and derogatory attitudes. We might think we are the light shining on a hill, morally flawless and beyond reproach. But we all know how it feels to be on the receiving end of others’ smug judgments – misunderstood, dishonored, unjustly treated, and violated.
How different our perspective on others would be if we saw them as the divine image-bearers they truly are! We wouldn’t try to subjugate or shame them. We wouldn’t dismiss that as unimportant or foolish. And we definitely wouldn’t silence them. They bring something of great honor and worth to the table. We harm ourselves when we fail to see that. We isolate ourselves from the chance to learn and grow while also dehumanizing and diminishing the other.
End-runs (bypassing established processes or authority to achieve a goal), I believe, are indicators of toxic attitudes towards others. We assume the worst about them and thus “kick them to the curb” to reach our goals. However, in doing so, we diminish that person’s ability to bear the image of God. And that is a serious offense! It violates the cosmic order created by God. When our internal stories, ideals, and ambitions become so essential to us that we begin to see people as obstacles to achieving them, then we become idolaters.
Specifically, the image-bearing quality that end-runs damage is agency. Agency is a person’s ability to manage their relationships, resources, and navigate their contexts in a way that allows them to create new cultural goods. A simple organizational or team principle that should underpin leadership ethics is that, collectively, we aim to develop, protect, and support the agency of our people. Understandably, when the agency of our people is affirmed and protected, we have a much greater capacity to lead and work ethically. We must acknowledge our ethical blind spots that hinder our ability to perform this vital work. Then, we must create proactive accountability structures at the individual, organizational, and societal levels that aim to support the agency of our people.
The philosophy of ethics differentiates between behavioral ethics and bounded ethics. Behavioral ethics aims to understand how people actually behave when faced with ethical dilemmas. Bounded ethics, on the other hand, concentrates on the psychological processes that cause even well-intentioned individuals to act unethically. In other words, behavioral ethics examines actions, while bounded ethics considers intentions.
Our bounded ethics create blind spots where our good intentions hide the effects our behaviors have on others’ agency. I believe our bounded ethics drive the direction of behavioral ethics. If we have ethical blind spots, it becomes increasingly hard to act ethically. As leaders, our bounded ethics will limit our ability to empower others’ agency in our decision-making.
We definitely need to train people on the ethical behaviors we expect on our team and establish accountability structures that support them. However, I believe leadership in community, which is a form of adaptive leadership, must go deeper than that. We need to thoroughly explore where we might have blind spots regarding how our personal, organizational, and even cultural or societal ethics, perhaps unintentionally, hinder the agency of others.
A set of leadership examen questions can help your team explore and assess your team’s ethics. The main issue these questions address is how to remove or lessen the bounded ethics that reduce the agency of our people.
- Where have I assumed good intent in myself but judged others by their actions? How might this double standard have affected trust or team alignment?
- Have I ever bypassed someone’s authority or role to expedite a decision? What internal story justified that choice, and what impact did it have on their agency?
- When conflict arises, do I tend to intervene or empower others to work through it? What fears or assumptions drive my approach, and how might they reflect bounded ethics?
- What accountability structures exist to protect the agency of team members, especially those in vulnerable or transitional roles? Are these structures proactive or reactive?
- Have I ever unintentionally rewarded someone who made an end-run around leadership? What message did that send to the rest of the team about process and trust?
- In what ways might my leadership philosophy be unclear or inconsistently applied? How does that ambiguity create ethical blind spots or erode team confidence?
- Do I treat dissent or disagreement as a threat to unity or as a signal for deeper discernment? What does my response reveal about my view of others’ image-bearing agency?
- Where might my internal values or ambitions unintentionally position others as obstacles? How can I reframe those moments to honor their contribution rather than diminish it?
- Have I created space for team members to name when they feel disempowered or bypassed? What practices could make that feedback safer, welcome, and actionable?
- What does it look like in our specific context to champion the agency of others as a core ethical commitment? How can we embed that into our decision-making, conflict resolution, and organizational culture?
