"Don’t make all the wrong moves"

When a bug hits production and leadership wants answers, the pressure on a manager is real.

You’re caught between urgency from above and tension below.
You need to keep the team safe, but not so safe that nothing gets learned.
You need to represent leadership, but not so literally that you lose trust.

In the heat of it, here are five moves that are easy to reach for, and easy to regret:

🧨 Pass the pressure directly down

Feeling the heat from above, you could offload it without processing:

“Leadership wants to know how you let this happen.”
🔁 Effect: Turns a learning opportunity into a blame game. The developer shuts down.

🙈 Avoid the conversation entirely

You could dodge the awkwardness by not addressing it:

“It’s not worth the conflict, the fix is in, let's just move on.”
🔁 Effect: No reflection. No improvement. Mistakes keep slipping through.

😤 Over-identify with leadership

You could align completely with the frustration from above:

“This kind of thing can’t happen, what were you thinking?”
🔁 Effect: The team feels under siege. Trust erodes. People go quiet.

🧽 Overprotect the team

You could shield the developer entirely, refusing to explore accountability:

“It’s fine, don’t worry. These things happen.”
🔁 Effect: Short-term comfort. Long-term repetition. Stakeholder trust fades.

🗂️ Turn it into a checklist, not a conversation

You might default to process instead of people:

“Let’s just add a test case and move on.”
🔁 Effect: Looks productive, but skips the human insight — what someone might have noticed or questioned.

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In the moment, all of these options went through my mind. They’re fast. They meet someone’s need, a stakeholder’s urgency, a developer’s discomfort, my own anxiety.

But they come at a cost: they damage trust.

In moments like this, your job is to soak up the pressure from above and brace for the uncomfortable conversation, not to avoid it, and not to pass it on.

That’s how you create the headroom to give each person what they need, while keeping the relationships intact on all sides.

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle

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