Answer to: My superiors want me to pretend in front of my subordinates that I support a company policy I disagree with. How do I handle this instruction?

There does exist a risky option, that if you have a leader that frequently pivots to new things, or people cycle in and out of that position every few years, then this may be viable: Ignore, Delay & Bypass I witnessed something similar to this situation where an executive was pushing a bad decision, and the people several levels below who would be implementing it were keeling over laughing at how absurd it was. So with their immediate leader's support they ignored it. When higher ups asked them for status on their integration of it, they seemed to always have very high priority tasks from customers coming up that were delaying their availability to implement the changes, or they could not risk making any changes while they were in the middle of a critical deployment. It was impressive watching said lead's ability to come up with excuses to kick the responsibility down the road by a month or two. Eventually the executive moved on to the next initiative and thus no one was pushing or checking on that bad decision. Other groups in the organization quickly reverted back, mean while their group continued on as nothing had happened. One key aspect of this strategy is delaying. Even if you eventually have to come in line with a decision, you can take lessons from other groups and mitigate some of the negatives. Also if other groups go through the painful transition first and leadership can see the fallout of the decision they may relent before your group is forced. Then the last aspect is bypassing. A former coworker once had a requirement pushed upon them that thou shall use a specific framework. Problem was said framework was never intended for said product. So they used it for small portion while using a different framework that actually did the job. I will note this did carry a huge additional drawback: The leadership thought their decision worked and did not learn from their mistake and thus were likely in the future to do the same thing again.