Loyal Opposition; Champion the Cause

You’re driving.  Your boss is in the backseat.  You are approaching a fork in the road.

The boss tells you to turn right at the fork.

You happen to know that turning right will lead to Baltimore-style chaos.  Nasty stuff. A riot is breaking out.

Yet you know that turning left would be turning onto a parade route. More to the point, a parade route for a parade set up for……………… your boss!

Right to riots.  Left to delightful parade.

Whaddya do?

Obviously you tell your boss what you know.  Your boss was predisposed to turning right, but you gently nudge him to approve turning left.

The concepts of Loyal Opposition and Championing the Cause are married here in an effort to show the necessity and wisdom of both.

What is Loyal Opposition?

Loyal opposition represents the willingness AND expectation for all colleagues to express their opinions. There are limits but most limits are aligned with circumstances where the opposition perspective is widely known. Once the opposition is understood, the responsibility to provide that opposition ceases to exist.

What I mean here is that Loyal Opposition is valuable, yet its value erodes if one continues to provide said opposition.  Once you’ve said your piece, shut up.

The adjective of loyal is brutal in its necessity.  Anyone can play the role of opposition.  It’s the loyal element that makes it helpful.

Loyal refers to embracing the team’s purpose.  The team’s goals.  Opposition must exist only in a form and presentation which reflects an emotional and intellectual striving for the common goal.

Small indeed is the superior who resents loyal opposition.  Opposition is easy to resent, but not if it is loyal in its presentation.

Loyal Opposition requires you, as the driver in our analogy, to educate your backseat boss on the circumstances. The likely outcomes of turning right and turning left and your best estimation.

In the event the boss instructs you to turn right at the fork in the road, the nature of Champion the Cause kicks in. Time for Loyal Opposition has ceased. You have been provided the opportunity to share your perspective and your boss has clearly indicated an understanding of your perspective.

Champion the Cause requires you turn right.

I suppose there is one other alternative. You could get out of the car and and relinquish the keys. Quit. Yet generally in the workforce we are not ready to fall on the sword over every disagreement with our boss’s approach or decisions. I suppose in this analogy the better part of wisdom WOULD be to relinquish the keys but in most normal circumstances you do what the boss instructs.

Yet to do what the boss instructs does not fulfill Champion the Cause.  No.  Champion the Cause mandates that you be as vigorous in maximizing the boss’s decision every bit as much as you would if he/she had adopted your approach.

So Champion the Cause suggests an expectation that colleagues and subordinates marry an emotional support to the guidance of organizational leadership.  Champion the Cause means you want the boss’s decision to be the right one.

The Concepts of Loyal Opposition and Champion the Cause work hand-in-hand. One without the other does not work. We all must feel as if we were part of that which we endeavor to accomplish. Loyal opposition and the expectation from upper management of loyal opposition, indeed a welcoming of loyal opposition, is critical to it’s success.

The American workforce typically will find these values rational and to some degree expected at least in the right-to-work states.

It does not exist everywhere.  In some cultures, loyal opposition does not save face.,

I recently became more familiar with the Chinese concepts of hierarchy in business.  I’d been selling to the Chinese for years but now I was in a manner of speaking working for them. What from the outside looked silly, from the inside looked inane They have none of the values to which I am referring.

In the Chinese culture, using my analogy, I just turn right into the riots.  There is no informing the boss he might be taking a big risk.  No, in China and indeed many other parts of the world subordinates must not disagree with the boss.  I’ve seen it in other cultures, certainly in dealing with Middle Eastern clients, in particular Arab royalty.

Unions can introduce some of the same flaws.  Unions portray management as, if not evil, at least uncaring of employees.  Management can be portrayed as working against the best interests of employees, and thus Championing the Cause can be perceived as warming up to management and betraying one’s union brothers.  That mentality of course over time destroys the company.

If it is bad for the hive, it is bad for the bees.

Sure wish union employees could understand that self-evident truth.A colleague who consistently contributes Loyal Opposition and also Champions the Cause is one who can be appreciated by all levels of the organization. Those are two great qualities toward which we can all strive.