Leading Your Team Through Poor Upper Management

Thriving Despite the Storm: Leading Your Team Through Poor Upper Management

Working under ineffective or toxic upper management is one of the most challenging situations any team leader can face. You’re caught in the middle—trying to shield your team from dysfunction above while maintaining morale, productivity, and a sense of purpose below. While you can’t control what happens in the C-suite, you can create a pocket of positivity and resilience that helps your team not just survive, but actually thrive.

Acknowledge the Reality Without Dwelling on It

The first step is honest acknowledgment. Your team likely already senses when upper management is making poor decisions, creating unnecessary obstacles, or fostering a negative culture. Pretending everything is fine undermines your credibility and leaves team members feeling isolated with their concerns.

However, there’s a crucial balance to strike. Acknowledge challenges without turning team meetings into complaint sessions about leadership. A simple statement like “I know some of the recent changes from above have been frustrating, and I want to focus on what we can control to move forward effectively” validates their experience while redirecting energy toward solutions.

Create Your Own Microculture

Think of your team as a ship within a ship. While you can’t steer the larger vessel, you have significant control over the environment within your own hull. Establish clear team values, communication norms, and ways of working that reflect what good leadership looks like, regardless of what’s modeled above you.

This might mean implementing regular one-on-ones when upper management doesn’t prioritize them, celebrating wins that go unrecognized at higher levels, or maintaining transparent communication about decisions that affect your team. You’re essentially creating a buffer zone that filters out dysfunction while amplifying positive practices.

Focus Relentlessly on What You Control

Poor upper management often creates a sense of helplessness. Combat this by consistently redirecting your team’s attention to areas where they have agency and influence. This includes their individual skill development, team processes, client relationships, project quality, and how they support each other.

Make a practice of asking “What can we control here?” when facing frustrating situations imposed from above. This question shifts the team from victim mindset to problem-solving mode, which is both more productive and more psychologically healthy.

Become a Strategic Information Filter

Part of your role becomes serving as an information buffer. This doesn’t mean lying or hiding important information, but rather presenting necessary information in a way that helps your team focus on their work rather than getting caught up in organizational drama.

When communicating changes or directives from above, frame them in terms of how they affect your team’s work and what actions need to be taken, rather than editorializing about the wisdom of the decisions. Save your own frustrations for conversations with peers or mentors outside the organization.

Invest Heavily in Your Team’s Growth

One of the most powerful ways to maintain morale despite poor upper management is to ensure your team members are continuously developing skills that will serve them well regardless of organizational circumstances. This demonstrates that you care about their long-term success, not just current productivity.

Create learning opportunities, provide stretch assignments, offer constructive feedback, and help team members build portfolios of accomplishments they can take pride in. When people feel they’re growing and building valuable capabilities, they’re more resilient in the face of organizational dysfunction.

Build Strong Lateral Relationships

Don’t underestimate the power of peer relationships across the organization. Often, other middle managers are dealing with similar challenges from poor upper management. Building alliances with other team leaders can provide mutual support, information sharing, and sometimes the collective influence to push back on particularly problematic directives.

These relationships also create alternative career paths and opportunities for your team members, which reduces the feeling of being trapped in a dysfunctional system.

Maintain Perspective and Hope

Regular remind your team (and yourself) that organizational leadership changes over time. Companies evolve, bad leaders eventually face consequences, and new opportunities emerge. While you’re dealing with current challenges, you’re also building skills, relationships, and experience that will serve everyone well in the future.

Share stories of how teams and individuals have successfully navigated difficult periods and emerged stronger. This isn’t toxic positivity—it’s realistic optimism based on the fact that most career challenges are temporary, even when they feel permanent.

Know When to Escalate or Exit

Finally, maintain clear boundaries about what you will and won’t accept. There are situations where poor upper management crosses lines into truly toxic or unethical behavior that no amount of positive team culture can counterbalance. Have a clear sense of your own limits and help team members recognize theirs as well.

Sometimes the most positive thing you can do for your team is to model that good people don’t have to tolerate truly destructive environments indefinitely.

The Long View

Leading through poor upper management is exhausting and often thankless work. But remember that your team will remember how you handled these challenges long after the current leadership is gone. By focusing on what you can control—team culture, individual development, and maintaining dignity under pressure—you’re not just surviving difficult circumstances. You’re building the leadership skills and team loyalty that will serve you throughout your career.

The goal isn’t to fix upper management or to pretend dysfunction doesn’t exist. It’s to create an environment where good work happens, people feel valued, and everyone emerges from this period stronger and more resilient than when they entered it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​