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A lot of management books kind of emphasize things that are reasonably, I would say, obvious. How do you set a big goal? How do you do, you know, objectives? Like, how do you set up a strategy or these kinds of thing? And the things that you need, like, a mildly good eighth grade education to do. But that’s not where people run into trouble. They really run into trouble on, like, very, very complicated emotional things where the emotion prevents them from doing the thing that they know they need to do. Firing a friend, doing a reorganization that causes somebody who is a very talented employee to lose power and get upset with you, or not give somebody a raise who you really like but isn’t the person on the team that deserves a raise. These things are much more difficult. People often avoid them, leading themselves into real trouble, and that’s when you get into the very hard thing about hard things.
View problems from all angles
When you have a hard decision, you really have to see it through kind of all angles. And this is the thing that I think nobody else can do. So somebody asked for a raise. And so if you’re just talking to that person, you go, oh, well, I like this person. They’re doing a pretty good job. Maybe they deserve a raise. But if you’re really being a leader, you have to look at it through the eyes of the entire organization. What do their peers think? Are they better than all their peers? Why are they getting a raise now and nobody else who may be performing better is asking for it? You have to think through those kinds of aspects and really be disciplined to not just try and make somebody happy in the moment, but do the right thing for the organization in the long term.
Risk being unpopular
When you’re reading a case study about a business, you know everything, because it’s over, and you’re looking backwards through history. And so it’s very easy to make those decisions in retrospect. But when you’re going forward in time, you have less than complete information, often less than ten percent of the data that you would like to have. And then employees or people from the outside, the board, the customers, the public, the press, think that they know the decision. None of them have as much information as you or as much context as you. So it takes courage to do what you don’t know is the right decision. You think it’s the right decision, and then many people think it’s the wrong decision, so they’re not going to like you when you make the decision. That’s the that’s kind of the point at which leaders add value. Because if you just do what people want, you’re not actually adding anything. You know, they could run the company without you.
And I think to develop courage is a tricky thing. I think my favorite quote on this is from, the great boxing trainer, Cus D’Amato. He trained Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. And he said, look, the difference between a hero and a coward isn’t what they feel. They’re both scared. It’s what they do. And I think that, you know, that’s very, very true for leaders. You’re not going to feel confident in making a decision that you think is fifty two percent right and everybody else thinks is wrong, but that’s what you have to do to be good at this job. I think most courage fails because people, want to please the person they’re talking to, get an accolade, you know, today or tomorrow. We see this a lot in politics where people will make an obviously kind of bad decision because people like it in the short term. The main thing is you just have to convince yourself that you want to be liked and respected in the long run, not the short run.