Leadership invites frontline employees to bring concerns, including concerns about their managers, straight to senior leaders, and makes the channel and its use known to everyone, managers included.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
The managing partner of an accounting and advisory firm suspected that problems on client engagements were reaching her months late. She announced quarterly lunches with associates, open to anyone, and told the engagement managers in the same email that associates would be invited to raise concerns about how engagements were run, managers included. At the third lunch, an associate described forty hours of weekend work billed without written client approval. The managing partner called the engagement manager the next day, said what she had heard without naming the source, and asked for his account. The client controller had requested the work by phone. Together they wrote a rule requiring written sign-off for weekend work, and two engagement managers asked to sit in on the next lunch.
Why it works
An open door makes raising a concern above one's manager rewarding and safe: the employee gains visibility with leadership, and leadership's endorsement removes the usual cost of going around a boss. The manager's position as the only route upward weakens, so a filtered account carries less value. The announcement alone changes behavior, since managers start explaining their judgment calls before anyone asks. Visible follow-through keeps the channel credible. Inaction kills it, and so do a flood of grievances or managers who retaliate against suspected sources.
The thinking behind it
Michel Foucault In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Michel Foucault argued, using Bentham's prison design, that power which is visible and unverifiable leads people to regulate themselves. An announced open door has this effect on managers even if nobody walks through: they cannot know what will be reported, so they explain their judgment calls in advance. It is also why the channel becomes surveillance unless leaders bring what they hear back to the manager concerned.
George A. Akerlof George Akerlof's The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970) explains the power of whoever holds information the other side cannot check. A layer of managers holds facts about the front line that senior leaders cannot verify, and an open door reduces that gap. The same logic warns leaders to hear the manager's account, since a single report from below is also information they cannot check.
When it fits
Reach for it when you suspect the layer between you and the front line is filtering what you need to know, you have time to listen and act, and you are prepared to hear criticism of managers you appointed. It suits a leader willing to bring what they hear back to the managers concerned.
How to use it well
Announce the channel to everyone at once, managers included, and say what it is for.
- Hold sessions on a fixed schedule, open to all, and keep them short.
- When you hear a concern about a manager, take it to that manager before acting, and hear their account.
- Act visibly on what proves true, and say what you did, so the channel stays credible.
- Protect people who raise concerns from retaliation, and say that you will.
Give managers a share in the program by offering them skip-level sessions of their own.
What it costs and where it backfires
Middle managers can start managing defensively, copying you on routine decisions and avoiding judgment calls, which slows the work. The door can flood with grievances you cannot triage, and without follow-through it loses credibility fast. The line is where the channel becomes intelligence: gathering reports on managers in secret, acting on them without hearing the manager, or using what you hear against dissenters turns the program into surveillance, and people will learn that it is one.
When it is used on you
As a manager, notice a leader acting on details only a frontline report could supply. Ask directly what reached them and answer on the record, keep a short written basis for judgment calls likely to be questioned, tell your team what you are doing and why, and leave the source alone, since hunting for it confirms the worst reading.