There is a difference between treating someone as a human and bullshitting your manager though. I’m painfully blunt to the point where the management staff had to spend 3 hours in a crisis meeting discussing whether to fire me an another developer over our opinions given on a department meeting. Which to be fair was the wrong place to throw a couple of managers under the bus for something we’d been telling them for months, but hey. Anyway we didn’t get fired and nothing changed either. I stopped stressing about it after I had spoken my piece though so it worked rather well for me. Less so for the company, but it’s not like the two of us were the only ones management wouldn’t listen to.
So I like it when I can be frank with managers. I think I’m also notoriously hard to manage because one of my character flaws is that I don’t respect authorities. I’m not stupid though. I’ll absolutely bullshit managers in situations where there isn’t really a “win” to be achieved. Obviously this will mainly happen with bad managers, but there will always be great managers who won’t like, understand or have a good connection with you.
I think this is an example of a different issue. It sounds like your managers listened to your feedback often and even let high profile disruptions slide.
In general I think honesty is a good policy and management should be receptive to hearing out problems and possible solutions but that's not the same thing as implementing all feedback.
Maybe you're right or maybe your pet peeve just isn't a priority or can't be done for countless reasons. I'm not saying you did this but something I've seen often is employees confusing being heard with taking the advice.
As professionals I think it's our job to give advice and respect management's decision to take it or not. That's it I also think it's management's job to explain the reasoning.
I mean, this is one example which fits the discussion. Also one that I cherrypicked because I was actually right. I’ve had plenty of managers who were good at listening, however, I think most have been great. I have also worked management a few years myself and taken education in that direction before figuring out it wasn’t for me, so I certainly understand the financial and political parts of management and that you as an employee never have the full picture.
That being said, I have also had managers that I’ve played board games with on our free time who I haven’t actually given my opinion on certain issues with because they weren’t very good at taking that advice. Sometimes I’ve also not done it because I knew managers of my manager wouldn’t take it well if it made I up the chain. I view this more as an issue between me and the organisation I work for. If I’m not invested I’m not going to help it beyond what they pay me to do because it rarely comes back to me in a positive way.
There are many aspect to it. I’ve also had a manager who was a total waste of space as a manager, only caring about the “good story” whether it was true or not to push their own career. Who was also rather cold in regards to management employee duties since they really didn’t like the negative sides of it. Who was then the warmest nicest person in their personal life.
So it’s a very complex situation as you pointed out, but it’s also one where it’s perfectly reasonable to not try to lead upwards if you don’t want the hassle. At least in my opinion.