Share the reasoning behind difficult decisions
Running a business is hard. There are always decision to be made - and some of them (letting people go, killing off a project, etc) are particularly difficult. When it feels like there’s no really good outcome, not only is making the decision hard - you know that at least some of your team are likely to react badly.
Sharing not only your decision, but your decision making, and the facts and figures constraining it, treats people as mature adults who are able to “handle the truth”.
We know from Douglas McGregor’s work on Theory X and Theory Y that when we see people as trustworthy, they are more likely to act in a way that’s easy to trust. So treat people like mature adults, and they will behave more maturely1. With our most mature eyes, we can look a situation and say “I don’t like this, but I guess it’s the least worst of the options”. So often this actually is the reality for senior decision makers in a crisis: picking between choices when they all seem bad. Lifting the bonnet on that process helps people understand the dilemma you have been facing on behalf of the business.
Dennis Bakke’s Joy at Work is one of the books that has been most influential on my work. When he was CEO at US power company AES he had the slogan: “every person a business person.” I think this is a great concept to lean into in a crisis.2
So if you find yourself having to make a difficult decision, don’t retreat. Be willing to reveal your inner workings.
here is also a technical sense in which sharing your reasoning, not just your answer, invites greater maturity. It opens up the ability for people to relate to you not as your ideas, but as the system that generates your ideas. In Robert Kegan’s model of developmental psychology, we would say this was a more ‘self-authored’ way of relating. Building the capacity for your people to think, feel and act in a self-authored way, helps them work more effectively for your business, but it also strengthens them for the rest of their lives.
Joy at Work is also a great rebuttal to a anyone who says “these touchy feely ideas might work in [name of other industry] but they can never work here” or “that’s great but it could never scale”. AES had 90 plants in 13 countries, employing around 40,000 people -and they made it work.