War Stories - Defusing an executive kerfuffle

Some situations you encounter as a leader are no-win scenarios. The best thing to do for your organization sometimes is to take the "L" personally.

A sudden flurry of Slack notifications appear on the top right of my screen: three new, separate DMs, surprisingly from the President, CEO, CTO, and CMO. I knew something blew up.

Given the absence of other blaring alarms, I knew the system wasn’t down.

What was?

An unexpected crisis

All four messages were about the exact same thing.

One of my reports, a newly minted engineering manager, had posted a message on his team channel that had suddenly ruffled a lot of executive feathers.