Balance: How to Think About Uncomfortable Decisions

A newsletter about the Human Forces that drive the fate of companies: Stories, Connection and Balance.

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That Nagging Feeling: An Uncomfortable Decision

Imagine you have to make a difficult decision. Or rather, you are kind of aware that maybe you have to make a difficult decision. Something is nagging at you. You keep putting it off, half-engaging with it. Perhaps you put it on a todo list where it sits about half way down, never moving off the list, but never getting to the top either. 

It’s an uncomfortable thing to think about - that suspicion that somebody isn’t working out, or might not work out, or that a project needs a reset but doing so is going to mean frayed nerves and difficult conversations.

When you come to a coaching session with it, we’ll get interested, coax it out from where it’s hiding and, when you can see it more clearly, help you face a few facts:

1. yes there is a decision that has to be made here.
2. you don’t want to make it.
3. you’ve been bargaining with it: it can stay hidden if it doesn’t make too much of a racket.  (It's now making a racket)

Your hope has been that things will improve, or … something will happen. You will get to it. Maybe on the weekend, next time you get a moment to think.

I’m generally in favor of hope, but in cases like this, it's not (as the saying goes) a strategy.

Balance: Cold, Structure

Fortunately, this uncomfortable situation is taking place in a company, and a company is an incredibly useful structure. Fundamentally it’s an organization of humans who absorb some resource (in the tech world much of this resource is simply the creativity of its people) at a cost, and generate some other resource with much higher value. That’s it. 

As a set of rules for causing people to collaborate, it’s hard to beat: in the end, there is one goal that everyone in the organization can agree one - to make the company successful - and at a high level, “success” is easily measurable. 

A company allows us to create, belong, connect with each other, struggle, to win and lose. It allows us to do the vital things we are programmed to do in life within a framework of relative safety. We compete with other companies, we don't go to war. We “defeat” them. Nobody gets killed. It’s a clever system. (An aside: externally, companies can do, and have done, terrible things. It's not a perfect system. It's the one we have).

This structure provides us with an incredibly useful tool. Faced with a difficult situation we can ask the question “what is best for the company?”  Given the structure we're operating in, that's always a relevant question.

It is interesting how often we forget to ask. It’s also interesting how the answer is frequently quite clear: yes, I should level person X; no, person Y is not up to it; yes, project Z is a mess and needs a reset.

The question does have to be asked carefully. It doesn’t take much. Simply asking: “if you are being a completely rational manager/leader/executive, just for a moment, ask yourself: what is best for the company”. You ask yourself to disengage from the confused tangle of emotion and thoughts, just for a moment, and see the situation coldly, simply in terms of what the company needs.

Occasionally the answer is unclear. Mostly it isn’t (with some caveats coming up).

Balance and Connection: Warm, People

But that’s not the end of the conversation. If it was that easy, you wouldn’t have bargained with the issue to keep it out of sight.

There’s the other side: “he’s a good guy”, “she’s been with the company for years”, “everybody likes him”, "I've worked with him for a decade", “we can’t do without her”, “morale would tank".

So the conversation flip-flops: it’s best for the company, but…  And this is why the issue stays hidden, because you don’t really know how to reconcile these two views. The cold understanding of the company’s needs vs the anxiety, concern and desire for compassion on the other side.

This is made harder by the relative strengths of our “two minds”: emotion and rationality (this model goes waaaay back). Emotion is a strong force, wired deep into our survival instincts. Human connections, at a deep level, keep us alive. We really don’t want to damage how we link to other people. In this kind of situation - leveling a person, changing responsibility, cancelling a project - it can feel very much that we risk that.

Hence, anxiety. Emotions are designed to move us. Rational arguments are not.

So, being a 21st century rational human in a system that prioritizes rationality, but carrying the emotional forces of a tribal animal, you got back and forth.

The caveats here are the in-between arguments: “morale would tank”, “we can’t do without her” etc. These are often what I would call “faux-rational”, and have to be picked apart carefully. Is it really true that “morale would tank”, or is it (more likely) the case that people would be bummed for a while and recover quickly?  Can you really not do without her?  (Experience tip: when carefully examined this is almost never true). 

This is your emotional side sneakily hi-jacking your thinking (which it does a lot - a topic for many other posts). Be cold. Take a careful look.

Finding the Balance: What Are You Creating/What Do You Leave Behind?

We are constantly leaving traces of ourselves in other people.

Each of us is a complex amalgam of our origins and all the other souls we have connected to: the obvious ones of family and close friends, but the thousands of others - bosses, colleagues, teachers, good samaritans, somebody who flipped you off in traffic, that one fascinating being you glimpsed at college and never saw again - all of them.

The way we treat each other ripples out in time and space. We get to decide what energies we create and what wake we leave behind us.

And so this is the balance: what’s best for the company vs what you wish to create in the world.

Now we’re talking about a decision. A decision you can only make for yourself. 

It could go many ways. You may decide that, yes, what’s best for the company is to let this person go, and the companies policies are draconian (they give little notice, some nasty stock requirement), but that what you wish to leave behind is a sense of clarity, of rule-following, of order.

You may decide that the wake you wish to leave is of obvious strength, of unrelenting winning, of intensity in the service of building something great, and some human damage is a reasonable cost.

(Some of the greatest in our world left curious wakes: Steve Jobs famously was hard and could be hurtful. He also pushed the people to do generationally great work).

You may decide, no, it is impossibly unfair to level this person after they have put their heart and soul into growing the company for five years. So you’ll take a risk that with careful and rapid development, they’ll get there.

However you go about it, you are now deciding consciously between two fundamental imperatives: what is best for the company - this clever mechanism you have decided to be a part of - and what you wish to create and leave behind in the world.

Values: Things You Believe

“Values“ is a good name for the things you wish to create and leave behind. You will leave these with the people you connect with anyway, so the clearer you are about them the better.

I still remember, and remember to model, acts of courage and kindness from my first real job in Silicon Valley, in a cheap, low office building in North San Jose (hi Eddie!). I also channel some of the absolutely uncompromising creativity of the first Silicon Valley entrepreneur I worked for (hi David!). And hundreds of others.

These things ripple through time and have real power. 

If you are in the middle of one of these decisions, it can be very helpful to take a moment and try writing your values down. Without too much thinking, a simple list is a great start. If you have a little more time, this is a good list of exercises. Try a few times, adjust as you notice your actual behavior. Iterate. Build. Keep your notes somewhere you can refer to them.

Tools

The question “what’s best for the company” is a sharp, useful, practical tool. “What do I wish to create and leave behind here?” is equally powerful. Refining your values is a life long practice.

I wish you grace and patience in using these tools, and then, because it is your job, making a decision.

In Person Workshop

I will be leading an in-person workshop on storytelling for Founders, CEOs and execs at Shack15 in San Francisco in Q1. Come and refine your own stories, and hang out, get a drink with a view of the Bay afterwards.

Take a look, and use code EARLY to get 50% off!

I coach founders, CEOs and execs in rapidly scaling startups. Interested? Get in touch.