You Have To Be All In, Until You’re Not
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that as the organization scales, you have to be all-in, until you’re not. What the heck does that mean?
It means that, other than confiding your indecision to a very small number of trusted advisors on a given issue, indecision is poison to the people around you and to the organization in general. So even if you’re thinking of doing something new or different or making a tough call on something, you generally need to project confidence until you’ve made the call.
One example of this is around a decision to fire someone on the team, especially a senior executive. Public indecision about this reminds me of years ago when George Steinbrenner owned the Yankees. Every time he contemplated firing a manager, which was often, he was very public about it. It turned the manager into a lame duck, ignored by players and mocked by the press. No good for the manager or for the players, unhelpful for the team as a whole. It’s the same in business. Again, other than a small group of trusted advisors, your people have to have your full backing until the moment you decide to remove them.
Another example of this is a shift in strategy. Strategy drives execution – meaning the course you chart translates into the goals and activities of all the other people in your organization. Mobilizing the troops is hard enough in the first place, and it requires a tremendous amount of leadership expressing commitment. If you’re contemplating a shift in strategy, which of course happens a lot in dynamic businesses, and you share your thinking and qualms broadly, you risk paralyzing the organization or redirecting activities and goals without intending to or without even knowing it.
Some people might look at this concept and cry “foul – what about Transparency?” I don’t buy that. As I wrote recently in The Difference Between Culture and Values, “When you are 10 people in a room, Transparency means you as CEO may feel compelled to share that you’re thinking about pivoting the product, collect everyone’s point of view on the subject, and make a decision together. When you are 100 people, you probably wouldn’t want to share that thinking with ALL until it’s more baked, you have more of a concrete direction in mind, and you’ve stress tested it with a smaller group, or you risk sending people off in a bunch of different directions without intending to do so. When you are 1,000 employees and public, you might not make that announcement to ALL until it’s orchestrated with your earnings call, but there may be hundreds of employees who know by then. A commitment to Transparency doesn’t mean always sharing everything in your head with everyone the minute it appears as a protean thought. At 10 people, you can tell everyone why you had to fire Pat – they probably all know, anyway. At 100 people, that’s unkind to Pat. At 1,000, it invites a lawsuit.”