In East Asia, particularly in Korea, there is a term called 'ganeon' (諫言, remonstration). It refers to speaking up when a superior's approach is wrong, in order to correct it.

But does a East Asian Confucian perspective always require it? Not necessarily.

From the Confucian viewpoint, an organization is not simply an arena for individual logical debates. Everyone has their own role and position, and when those roles collapse, the order of the community collapses.

'A superior must decide like a superior. A subordinate must remonstrate and support like a subordinate.'

What the OP's post did was not just make the boss look wrong. It declared that the boss 'could not function as a boss.' That's why the colleagues felt fear. It wasn't 'technically correct.' It was 'that person can publicly destroy the team's hierarchy.'

In Confucian terms, this is called 'remonstration without propriety.'

Good remonstration usually involves speaking privately first, respecting the other person's social face, and presenting options while preserving the form that the superior is the decision-maker. Those options should include risks and alternatives, so that it leads toward the direction you want.

In other words, you start by acknowledging that the boss's point is valid, then frame your disagreement as a risk you are worried about, but you're concerned about certain risks. If you say it that way, team members will later remember that you warned them, and the boss can't avoid responsibility either.

Of course, the boss also needs to have the right 'virtue' for that position. They need to listen to why subordinates object, and have the ability to make technical judgments. Storming out of a meeting saying 'I don't need this shit' is not boss-like behavior, so in an East Asian perspective, both sides are at fault. But many would see the subordinate who shattered the other's face as more at fault.

And of course, human relationships don't always have a right answer. I don't always follow this myself either—I fight with clients every day.

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coldtea 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>'A superior must decide like a superior. A subordinate must remonstrate and support like a subordinate.' Everyone has their own role and position, and when those roles collapse, the order of the community collapses.

Sometimes it's the plane that collapses:

“The Korean culture has two features—respect for seniority and age, and quite an authoritarian style,” said Thomas Kochan, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You put those two together, and you may get more one-way communication—and not a lot of it upward,” Kochan said. The Asiana pilots on Flight 214 apparently did not discuss their predicament, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing cockpit voice recordings. As a general point of reference about the Korean language, you speak to superiors and elders in an honorific form that requires more words and can be more oblique. Less, “Yo! You want water?”; and more, “It’s a warm day for a nice refreshment, no?” This may sound trivial. But put this in the context of a cockpit, where seconds and decision-making are crucial and you get an idea of how communication and culture matter."

"Nearing the end of the 1990s, Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline around the globe. Cockpit miscommunication has been a persistent factor in these accidents. For example, the Korean Air Flight 801 crash was attributed to the pilot’s decision to land despite the junior officer’s disagreement, evidence of high power distance — a culture that denotes a heavily hierarchical society. Gladwell argues that this innate behavior of deep reverence towards elders and superiors highly contributes to cockpit miscommunication, especially on planes designed to be flown by two equals. Unsurprisingly, it has been found that the safest airlines are often from countries whose cultures do not value strict hierarchies."

https://www.cnbc.com/2013/07/09/korean-culture-may-offer-clu...

https://leonogas.medium.com/thinking-beyond-cultural-legacy-...

	▲	jdw64 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's actually a valid point. In East Asian societies, there's a fundamental difficulty in directly challenging a superior. So it would be fair to say that in such cases, the organization's self-correcting mechanism fails to function. In reality, if you take extreme assumptions about most situations, counterexamples are bound to appear. But the cases we usually talk about tend to be about 'boundary issues'. things that happen near a certain line. Your example is actually a typical pathology of East Asian culture. The ideal is what I described, but when it doesn't work ideally, it leads to uncritical acceptance of a superior's orders If you take extreme examples for any situation, there are many difficult points. Conversely, we can't say that extreme cases never occur. So it's more accurate to say that I'm speaking based on cases that fall within the general distribution. You brought up a counterexample to my point, but that's actually a problem that frequently materializes in East Asian societies. I have no intention of denying that. But what I'm describing is the ideal theory. As always, finding the balance is the difficult part.

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antonvs 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Part of the problem with all this is the unquestioned validity of the idea of a "superior".

There are things that managers are good at and things that their staff are good at. For technical roles, a manager doesn't need to be superior to their staff when it comes to technical decisions - in fact if they are, it implies a problem.

Once you start viewing work as a collaborative exercise, a lot of these problems disappear.

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datakan 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A manager is the subordinate. Their entire role is to provide for the employees the things and support needed to get their jobs done. Corporations arent the military, there are no "superior's" except in the minds of the mentally and emotionally fragile who think they were put there to rule over others.

Steve Jobs famously said, "I don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. I hire them to tell me what to do". He didn't always live up to that but his point was valid.

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DrScientist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are two things here - Steve might well hire smart people to tell him what to do - but in the end Steve made the choices and drove them through.

Management is all about choices with limited information - there is rarely one clear and obvious route forward, but a strategy of following all routes simultaneously will lead to failure as there needs to be focus.

So somebody has to make that choice and then drive that focus through the organisation.

This can be very difficult when the choice isn't clear and obvious - as lots of smart people will have different views.

That's the art of management - you need to make the right choices most of the time. and when you've made the wrong one correct quickly, but you also need to be able to get the organisation to rally behind that choice, even if not everyone agrees.

	▲	elihu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The way I look at it is that a manager can make decisions with wider scope, but the people under them exert greater control in day-to-day tasks over some narrower scope. In software development, for example, a manager might set goals for some project, but it's individual developers who are actually writing the code that usually have the most leeway to decide for themselves how best to solve some particular problem. (So long as it's within the bounds of what peer reviewers will accept.) I think org charts would better fit how I think of the organizations they represent if they were drawn upside-down, like a tree.

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silentmafia 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

yet the salaries impose hierarchies..

	▲	datakan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Salary is supposed to imply risk. The higher the responsibility the higher the risk the higher the reward. That’s another topic on its own.