Some managers would rather double down on a bad decision than admit someone else was right.

So, what would you do if pointing out a serious mistake saved your workplace, but got you punished? Would you vow to never get involved in this kind of stuff again? Or would you always speak up?

In the following story, one man finds himself in this situation and doesn’t seem to learn. Here’s what’s going on.

Why can’t management ever just accept they were wrong?

Many years ago, I had a job I honestly thought I’d stay at forever.

One night, one of my bosses announces his great new plan that he came up with on the spot, and implements it immediately. I take him aside and politely point out to him that if we follow his plan, we’ll break our contract, and by the end of the night, we’ll all be unemployed.

Understanding and shock crossed his face, and he went off to cancel his new plan.

One woman stood out.

A week to the day, I was out of there, as even though I’d corrected him privately and saved everyone’s jobs, being privately corrected by a subordinate was too much for him.

At my long-time job, I had to deal with several people over the years who wouldn’t accept anyone beneath their pay grade telling them they were wrong.

Perhaps the most absurd was a woman whose subordinates kept sending work orders that were a mix of things we actually did and things done by another department in the same facility.

Now, he’s got new problems.

I lost track of how many times I wrote her that we had nothing to do with the other department’s work, both because we handled different things and for legal reasons. She would just ignore my responses and expect me to break the law and learn every facet of the other department’s workings to get what she wanted done.

It wasn’t until my boss intervened that she stopped demanding I do the other department’s work.

Yesterday, I got an email from my boss saying she’s had work returned to me, saying I messed part of it up, and outlining all the work I need to do to fix it.

His boss put it to him pretty directly.

I reviewed the work, and found I did everything right.

Similar to the last boss I described, I had someone ask me to do something I couldn’t for legal reasons. So I write up a response to my boss, explaining why I did what I did and citing all the official documentation I followed.

About an hour later, she writes me back, ignoring everything I sent her, and saying I should just do what she says, because “it’s so easy to do.”

A few people quit.

Aside from not acknowledging that I did everything I was supposed to, there’s the matter of how she wants me to “fix” things.

Everything we do at my job can be broken down into two groups. There is something you never do with one of those groups, which is the group my “wrong” work belongs to, and is exactly what my boss has told me to do to “fix” my work.

We had two longtime employees abruptly leave yesterday at very different times of day. I don’t know if they got fired or were tired of this kind of ******** and quit.

Wowzers. That place sounds like a nightmare.

Let’s see how the people over at Reddit feel about it.

This is annoying.

Interesting thing to think.

According to this comment, people want validation.

For this person, it’s about not caving.

He did what he had to, and that’s never easy.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.