You Don’t Touch Another Man’s Pipes
On speaking truth to power, managing up, and what my uncle's plumbing adventure reminded me about leadership.
A close-up of a modern kitchen sink area featuring brushed brass/gold fixtures, including a tall gooseneck faucet, a smaller pull-down sprayer, a soap dispenser, and a hot water tap, all mounted on a white marble countertop above a deep black undermount sink. White subway tile backsplash is visible in the background, along with a dark-framed window. Green foliage is softly blurred in the foreground left.
The best leadership lessons arrive uninvited.
Last week, at my mother's 70th birthday party, I walked in from the backyard to find my 85-year-old uncle already under my kitchen sink.
Nobody had asked him to do this. Nobody had been informed this was happening. And by the time I walked through the door, he had removed the faucet head, pulled one of the hoses from underneath, and gotten it lodged in the bend of the faucet pipe, rendering the whole thing completely unusable. We didn't have the right tool to fix it. We had a house full of family and a sink full of problems.
The rest of my family, plates piled with food and glasses raised in toast, had either not noticed or quietly decided not to intervene.
I stood there taking it in. And I thought: I have seen this exact scenario play out in a conference room a hundred times before.
First, you need to understand my uncle.
He married into our Italian family at 19, when my eldest aunt was 18 and my mother was barely three years old. He didn't have an easy life. Out of a difficult childhood emerged a man who is, genuinely, one of the biggest-hearted people I have ever known. He loves his family fiercely. He feels a deep sense of responsibility for the people he loves. He wants to help. He wants to contribute. He wants to make things better.
And he is, to put it gently, a handful.
He thinks he knows everything. He thinks he's always right. He thinks that at any given moment, he is instantly capable of anything he decides to undertake. And because he loves you so deeply, he feels entitled to force you to benefit from his brilliance, whether you want to or not.
My family runs on three things: good food, love, and respect. By marrying my eldest aunt, who spent years as the family's second pair of mother's hands, my uncle inherited by association the respect her younger siblings held for her. And so, over the decades, the family learned to live with him. Always one beer too many, one toe over the line, and taking up all the oxygen in the room.
The real cost of staying silent at work
Psychologists call what happened in my kitchen the bystander effect, the well-documented phenomenon where people are less likely to intervene in a situation when others are present. Everyone assumes someone else will handle it. No one does. A 2023 meta-analysis by Norwegian researchers Nielsen and Einarsen found that bystanders suffer their own significant psychological and wellbeing costs from staying silent. Passive bystanders don't just fail the person who needed help; they suffer adverse effects themselves, up to three times greater than those who intervene, including psychological distress and reduced job satisfaction. In the study, witnessing workplace bullying was significantly associated with adverse mental health, job dissatisfaction, and reduced wellbeing in observers.
Silence is not neutral. It is a choice with consequences. Everyone in that kitchen paid a price for looking away.
In organizations, this plays out when a leader says something dismissive or demeaning in a meeting and everyone looks at their laptops. No one speaks. And because no one speaks, the leader receives the message that what they said was acceptable or at the very least, tolerable. The behavior persists while the team's trust disintegrates. While silence may feel like the path of least resistance, slowly over time, it changes the shape of the culture like a stream eroding the landscape surrounding it.
Amy Edmondson's foundational research at Harvard Business School describes this as the absence of psychological safety: the shared belief that a team environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Without it, people won't speak up with concerns or mistakes, assessing the personal cost of honesty as being too high. Edmondson's hospital studies produced a counterintuitive finding: teams with strong leadership reported more errors. Not because they made more mistakes, but because they felt safe admitting them. When Google studied what made its highest-performing teams different, the single strongest predictor wasn't IQ, tenure, or diversity. It was psychological safety. Lack of psychological safety also costs the company, in reduced performance, increased personnel issues, and greater rates of attrition.
My family had no psychological safety where my uncle was concerned. And so, decade after decade, he did what he did, and they allowed it. And on the day of my mother's 70th birthday, he dismantled my kitchen sink.
Confidence is not the same as competence
Here is the other thing about my uncle and that sink: he was absolutely certain he could fix it.
This is a well-established cognitive phenomenon. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified what would become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the systematic tendency of people with limited knowledge in a domain to overestimate their own ability. But the more important finding is the why. As they put it, those with limited knowledge "suffer a dual burden: not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."
He didn't just not know how to fix my sink. He couldn't know that he didn't know. And there was no one in that kitchen willing to reflect that reality back to him.
One of the most dangerous failures in leadership is mistaking confidence for capability, insisting on doing the wrong thing with absolute certainty. Leaders who make unilateral decisions in domains where they have no expertise do so because the absence of feedback has never given them reason to doubt themselves. This is a metacognitive failure enabled by an environment of complacency and accommodation. If you're wondering where your own blind spots live, this post on the leadership learning curve is a good place to start.
"Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs."
—George Chapman
What does accommodation of this behavior cost over time? Research on sycophancy in organizational contexts finds that leaders exposed to consistent flattery and unchallenged authority exhibit heightened susceptibility to confirmation bias, rewarding behavior that conforms to their leadership and dismissing dissenting voices.
Sycophancy (ˈsi-kə-fən-sē) noun: obsequious flattery; the character or behavior of a sycophant.
Sycophancy, one study noted, "acts as fuel for hubris, warping the decision-making process at the top." The people around my uncle hadn't intended to fuel his hubris. They were managing their own comfort. But the effect was the same.
When we accommodate people who behave badly, we are not being kind. We are depriving them of the feedback they need to grow. We are protecting ourselves at their expense. We are not including them in the repair aspect of living in community. And we are making everything harder for the person who eventually has to step in to mediate or manage the conflict.
I have never been one to silently observe bad behavior.
My earliest memory of intervening with my uncle is of being a tween, watching him tease my mother in the way he always did, and telling him to leave her alone. An eleven-year-old huffing and folding her arms is easy enough to laugh off. He laughed. He left her alone. That was enough for me.
When I bought my first house, a group of family came over to help me unpack and set up. My uncle was trying to install my dryer and growing increasingly frustrated. My aunts quietly asked me to redirect him before the situation escalated. So I sent him outside with my cousin to assemble the barbecue.
Thirty minutes later, he was back inside. Two inches from my face, voice raised, telling me that nothing I'd purchased had the correct parts.
I did not back down.
I approached my uncle the way I'd learned to approach escalated human interaction over years of managing the graveyard shift in a large customer service call center. I took a breath. I made my voice slow, measured, and calm. And I told him clearly: I needed him to take a step back, take a breath, and give himself a moment.
My family was stunned. No one had ever responded to him that way.
He backed down. He went outside. He assembled that barbecue.
What I did in that moment turns out to be grounded in neuroscience. Research on vocal de-escalation finds that modulating your voice to remain calm and even-toned doesn't just signal control to the other person. It physiologically helps them access their own regulation. A calm, measured voice activates the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex in the listener, the region responsible for modulating the amygdala's threat response. When someone is dysregulated, you don't match their energy. You model the nervous system state you need them to find.
I hadn't yet learned the science behind that practice at thirty-three, but I knew it instinctively.
And I practice it now as a primary method of conflict resolution, more fully and more deliberately, having spent years in corporate leadership developing the skill.
Getting back to the sink.
The situation at my mother's birthday party was more complex than the barbecue incident. For one thing, the damage was already done. But at least in this case, this was my home, and my partner's, and there were two of us to navigate it together. After we finally convinced him we would take care of it and got my uncle out from under the sink, he stood there shrugging, baffled that the problem had exceeded his abilities, apologizing to my partner for having broken our faucet. He was humbled and embarrassed, finally having realized his misstep, in a room full of family who were beside themselves.
No one else could have handled this. I knew that. Any relative who tried to intervene would have gotten the full force of his defensiveness. There was a right person and a right reasoning for this moment, and it was us.
We tag-teamed it. I turned to my aunt, who was mortified and helpless, comforting her and letting her know that we were all in this together and we would figure it out.
My partner looked at my uncle squarely and said, with no meanness and no drama: You just don't touch another man's pipes.
That line my partner delivered is, whether he knew it or not, a masterclass in what researchers call face-saving: the strategies we use to preserve someone's social dignity while still delivering a clear message. It was direct. It was grounded in a norm my uncle could accept. It didn't humiliate him in front of an audience. It gave him a graceful exit. And it introduced humor, leaving him room to maintain his dignity rather than requiring him to defend it.
Research on difficult conversations in organizational settings finds that people need roughly a 4:1 ratio of positive to challenging interactions to receive feedback without feeling threatened. This isn't about softening hard truths. It's about understanding that the delivery is part of the message. If the delivery triggers defensiveness, the truth gets lost. Face-saving is not weakness. It is strategy in service of the outcome you actually want.
How to Speak Truth to Power (and Why Most People Don't)
Here's the thing, friends. The behaviors I've described in my uncle are not exotic. You have seen them. You may work for someone like him right now.
The leader who makes decisions alone, without consultation or collaboration, and presents them as fait accompli. The one who insists they're right despite having no expertise in the domain. The one who takes up all the oxygen in the room and leaves everyone else managing their own discomfort. The one whose colleagues have spent years quietly accommodating and conceding because the cost of confrontation seems too high.
Research on upward influence tactics (how people effectively manage those above them in a hierarchy) finds that the most effective approaches are not the loudest or the most direct. They are rational, relational, and strategic. Foundational work by Kipnis, Schmidt, and colleagues identified eight distinct influence tactics used in organizations. The most effective by far were inspirational appeals and consultation, building connection and credibility before raising the difficult thing. Hard tactics (pressure, confrontation, blocking) consistently fail.
What this means practically: you don't speak truth to power by walking in and announcing someone's failure. You build the relationship that can hold the truth. You establish the credibility that makes you worth listening to. This takes timing and the ability to deliver the message in a way that leaves dignity intact. But you have to say the hard thing.
This is not a comfortable skill. It requires you to tolerate the tension of knowing something that needs to be said, and holding it long enough to say it well.
But consider the alternative.
Consider what it costs to stay silent. What it costs the organization. What it costs you. What it costs, ultimately, the very person whose behavior you're declining to address.
Leadership is a relationship. So is following.
I want to leave you with the thing I believe most deeply about all of this.
Leadership is not a transaction, title, or reporting structure. It is a relationship, and perhaps even a partnership, between the one who leads and the one who follows. And following is not a passive verb.
Following is an act of trust.
When we entrust someone with a portion of our lives, our career, our financial wellbeing, our creative vision, our growth, we are trusting that they will offer honest guidance. And if any part of their leadership touches our deeper values and beliefs, we often develop a regard for them that goes beyond professional interest. We want them to be good. We want the relationship to be real.
That is exactly why honest feedback is a sign of trust, not a betrayal of it. (If you're navigating the line between feedback and criticism, this post goes deeper.)
It takes real regard for someone to say: this isn't working, and I'm saying so because I believe you can do better, and because our relationship is strong enough to hold this conversation.
And if your leader is not someone you trust enough to have that conversation with, I want to gently ask you: who, exactly, are you following? And why?
Because following an authority figure who cannot receive honest reflection is a slow erosion of your own integrity and judgment. You do not owe anyone your silence at the expense of your own authenticity, growth, your team's wellbeing, or the mission you're both supposed to serve.
My uncle broke my sink. He also helped me learn, across forty-plus years of celebrations and holidays and moments at kitchen counters, that the most loving thing you can do for someone is not to accommodate or dismiss their difficult behavior. It's to hold them, clearly and with dignity, to a higher standard.
Even at a birthday party. Even, however gently, when they're 85.
Reflect on this…
Who is the "uncle" in your professional life? What behavior have you been absorbing that you haven't yet named? What has it cost you, and what has it cost your team?
What would it cost you to speak up? And what is your silence currently costing? (These are often two very different ledgers. Compare them honestly.)
Think of a time you managed up effectively. What made it work? What did you do with the discomfort of not knowing how it would land?
Where are you following out of habit rather than trust? What would it mean to follow differently, or to stop following altogether?
