There’s an undeniable appeal in seeking broader consensus from your customers, employees, and partners in decisions big and small. When your direction has the legitimacy of a wide backing, it’s invigorating and enabling. Making progress together is more fun and effective than making progress by edict.
But you should temper your temptation to pose questions to which you aren’t really interested in hearing an opposing answer. Seeking legitimacy is a double-edged sword. When it “works”, and the asked reaffirms your preferred choice, it’s great! But it often doesn’t, and they don’t. This is where problems arise.
And it’s true whether you query for opinion or fact. If you ask your customers what’s most important for us to work on next, you better be prepared to build a faster horse. If you tap the data oracle to see whether your redesign worked, you better be prepared to revert if it didn’t.
The problem is that it’s really hard to formulate a question without falling in love with one of the possible answers. In fact, many questions arise from the infatuation with one of those answers, and serve more as post-hoc justifications than genuine inquest of inquiry.
Say you already have a destination mapped out on your mind’s road map, but you want to be seen as being “responsive to customers”. Or you’re already loving the redesign, but you just want to cover your ass in case business was to drop.
We instinctively know that simply picking a direction based on gut alone is hard to rationalize, both to ourselves but especially to others. So we seek to dress up the instinctual pick in more neutral, objective clothes and pass it off as just an innocent pursuit of the “best answer”. But it’s often baloney and the whiff travels.
Better then to simply admit when your gut is going to be in charge and own it: “We’re doing this because I think it’s the right thing to do, and that’s that”. When you say that out loud, it’ll surely feel a tad uncomfortable, but at least it’ll be congruent. Everyone knows when the leader is just seeking reaffirmation of a choice already made anyway, so dressing it up as a question is merely a ballroom dance of charade. We nod, we smile, but we know.
The other advantage of owning up to the discomfort is it will serve as a natural check on the number of gut moves likely to be made. Few people, however bold, are happy freezing at the top of the mountain alone, even if they get an unlimited stack of edict paper to fill out in return. We all want to be loved and accepted, not merely be effective. Well, most of us anyway.
By the same token, some times you really just need someone to pick a path and go with it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Embrace it (judiciously).
The strong leader is neither someone who makes all the choices or none of them, but the one who knows when to do either.
