Why Visibility Across Silos Is Stewardship, Not Insubordination
A 1974 Supreme Court ruling reveals that employee loyalty belongs to the organization, not to a manager who blocks value.
This piece challenges the assumption that bypassing your manager signals disloyalty. Drawing on the 1974 NLRB v. Weingarten ruling, the author argues that employees have a duty to the institution that can legitimately diverge from obligations to a direct supervisor. When managers become value-blockers—hoarding information or suppressing work that strengthens the firm—the ethical calculus shifts. Building visibility with senior leaders across silos is reframed as organizational stewardship, not political transgression.
The default assumption is that going around your boss signals disloyalty. But that framing assumes the manager is the organization. In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v. Weingarten that an employee facing discipline has a right to union representation—even when the direct supervisor would prefer otherwise. The Court did not treat the manager as the sole custodian of the employee's interests. It recognized that the enterprise itself has a stake in fair process, and that stake can diverge from what any single manager wants. The ruling doesn't say "bypass your boss whenever you disagree." It says something narrower and more durable: an employee's obligation to the institution is not identical to their obligation to the person directly above them. When a manager becomes a value-blocker—hoarding information, suppressing work that would strengthen the firm, or protecting their own comfort at the expense of the team's output—the ethical calculus shifts. The loyalty that matters is to the organization's mission, not to one person's gatekeeping. What makes this uncomfortable is that most of us internalize the opposite. We treat "going around" as a political transgression, even when the evidence says the manager is the bottleneck. The Weingarten logic offers a different lens: building visibility with senior leaders across silos is not insubordination—it is a form of stewardship toward the enterprise that employs you. Your manager is one channel for that stewardship, not its sole endpoint. When that channel closes, the duty to surface value doesn't expire. It just finds another route.