Bingo. If I'm a leader and I've felt slighted by someone going around/above/outside of me to vent, complain, etc. - I always urge myself to ask "Well. There's something here that I'm not seeing or understanding. And while it's okay to feel slighted, what's more important is to calmly figure out _why_ this happened."
Often times the only way to figure that out is to sit down with someone, disarmed and listening.
IMO, you never get anywhere when treating a symptom with aggressiveness (talking philosophically here, when I say aggressive I mean with a binary, 'NO THAT'S BAD, LET ME MAKE AN EXAMPLE OUT OF THIS'). Because the further the symptom is removed from the issue, the more blowback an aggressive approach has.