When I have sought to defend my team against executive interference, I’ve created a dangerous divide between their work and the business’s goals (we’ll talk about this more in Chapter 5). When I have sought to defend my decisions against probing questions, I have missed out on critical information that would have made those decisions better. And when I have sought to defend myself against the feeling—real or imagined—that I am underrecognized or underappreciated by my colleagues, it has made me appreciably worse at my actual job.
