After the debate, everyone needs to disagree and commit - management principle #3
“Disagree and commit” is an oldie but a goodie – it makes #3 on my personal list of 9 Management Principles. Made popular by everybody’s favorite buff CEO, Jeff Bezos, he does a pretty fine job of explaining it in his book – Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson – so I’m excerpting a bit of it here:??
What can also really speed up decision making, in addition to asking whether a decision involves a one-way or two-way door, is teaching the principle of disagreeing and committing. So you’ve got passionate missionaries, which you need to have. Everybody cares, and if you’re not careful, the decision process can basically become a war of attrition. Whoever has the most stamina will win; eventually the other party, with the opposite opinion, will just capitulate: “Okay, I’m exhausted. We’ll do it your way.”
That is the worst decision-making process in the world. It leaves everybody demoralized, and you also get a kind of random result. A much better approach is for the more senior person to escalate to even more senior leaders. Controversial decisions need to be escalated quickly. You can’t let two junior people argue for a year and exhaust themselves. You have to teach those junior people.
When your team is really at loggerheads, escalate—and escalate fast. And then you, as the more senior person, hear the various points of view, and you say, “Look, none of us knows what the right decision is here, but I want you to gamble with me. I want you to disagree and commit. We’re going to do it this way. But I really want you to disagree and commit.”
And here’s the important part: Sometimes this disagreement happens between the more senior person and a subordinate. The subordinate really wants to do it one way, and the senior person really thinks it should be done a different way. And it’s often the case that the more senior person should disagree and commit. I disagree and commit all the time. I’ll debate something for an hour or a day or a week. And I’ll say, “You know what? I really disagree with this, but you have more ground truth than I do. We’re going to do it your way. And I promise I will never tell you I told you so.”
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It’s actually very calming really because it’s acknowledging the reality that the senior person has a lot of judgment. That judgment is super valuable, and that’s why sometimes you should overrule subordinates even when they have better ground truth. But that’s your judgment. And sometimes you’re, like, “I know this person, or I’ve worked with them for years. They have great judgment. They really disagree with me, and they have way better ground truth. I’m going to disagree and commit.”
The piece that I would add to this is that, in my view, this is much easier said than done! A key reflection I’ve had is that as the CEO, you really need to build this concept into the fabric/culture of decision-making at your organization and keep your eyes and ears open for behavior that runs counter to it. Otherwise, you’re likely to see folks continuously pretend to go along with a decision in conversations with you or in other public company settings, but really continuing to drive their own agenda forward behind the scenes.
Catch up here if you missed earlier posts in this series: