[INTERNAL MEMO]
The leadership mistake that looks like patience
I want to talk about a dream (or delusion LOL) I think most of us had before we ever led anyone (I definitely did).
You hear the stories about a leader making "the hard call." Betting on the product nobody believed in, firing the toxic top performer, making the call that is risky but propels the company forward. And the story always ends the same way: they were right, everyone is like WOW SO IMPRESSIVE, and they become the hero.
So a lot of new leaders sit around thinking "I can't wait until I get to make a call like that."
But what nobody tells you: most hard calls come with zero applause and If anything, criticism.
The hardest decisions I've made as a leader weren't hard because the answer was unclear.
They were hard because I KNEW the answer and I also knew that a group of people I care about would ABSOLUTELY hate it.
As a leader you don't serve one group, you serve three:
The business (it has to be healthy or nobody has a job)
The team (they have to be able to trust you and do their best work)
The clients (they're the reason the whole thing exists)
Almost every genuinely hard call is a trade between them. Raise prices and you serve the business but squeeze and lose clients who can’t afford it. Keep a struggling employee too long and you're "kind" to one person while their teammates lose respect for you. Say yes to every request for more headcount and you drain the profit that keeps everyone employed in a bad quarter.
Easy calls have a winner and no loser. Hard calls serve all three groups ON BALANCE, and someone still eats a cost short-term.
If nobody is unhappy with any decision you've made lately, you're probably not making the hard ones.
And of course I went digging for research on this :P :
HBR followed 2,700+ leaders over ten years. 57% of newly appointed executives said decisions were more complicated and difficult than they expected. The same research found leaders build sophisticated justifications for putting off hard decisions to avoid upsetting people, and the DELAY ends up doing more damage than the fallout they were afraid of.
ghSMART's CEO Genome project analyzed 17,000 executive assessments. Executives described as "decisive" were 12x more likely to be high performers. And of the ones who scored low on decisiveness, 94% got there by deciding too SLOWLY, not too quickly. Read that again. The failure mode is almost never moving too fast on a hard call. It's sitting on one you've already made in your head.
Gallup: only 23% of employees strongly agree they trust their company's leadership. But the ones who DO trust leadership are 4x as likely to be engaged. And what builds that trust isn't making popular calls. It's explaining the WHY behind the unpopular ones.
You actually watched all of this play out here this last quarter.
Evan's change about event-day meals. We were spending over $700K a year on something nobody ever actually decided to create, it just sort of happened accidentally. Cutting it will never win a popularity contest and he knew it, he literally wrote out the objections before anyone could raise them ("why are leaders taking this away from us?").
But run it through the three groups: the business gets the profit discipline we coach our clients to hold themselves to. The team kept what mattered most (meals for people working events, Saturday lunch, snacks and drinks). And clients are served because profit is what pays for the talent and infrastructure they came here for.
Unpopular but OWNED. That is what a hard call done right looks like. No hero moment, or applause, just a leader doing the actual job that most of the time, gets the unfun questions.
One of my best operators ever used to say ‘I’m a shitfunnel, I will take all the shit nobody else wants to do/decide and get it done.’ She was the reason we were able to sell our last business. Similar to Evan, she didn’t care about applause or what was popular, but what was RIGHT.
So here's how to do this with your own team:
1. Run the triangle BEFORE you decide. Write down what the business, the team, and the clients each gain and lose from the call. If your decision only serves whichever group is loudest or neediest right now, it's not a balanced call, it's just the easy one.
2. Decide at the speed of the information, not the speed of your comfort. Once you have what you need to know, waiting doesn't make the call better, it actually makes it worse.(Remember: 94% of indecisive execs failed by being slow, not wrong.)
3. Explain the why like you're the one affected. Name the objections out loud before your team has to raise them. Then own it. "Leadership decided" is hiding. "I decided, and here's why, come ask me" is TRUE LEADERSHIP.
This week: what's the call you've already made in your head that you haven't announced because someone won't like it? Run it through the triangle. If it still holds, make it, explain it, and own it.
Let's get it.
— Leila
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