by Serguey Shinder
In the spring of 2021 our directors cancelled a project my team had spent five months on, a rewrite of how our warehouses handle returns, and moved the people onto a customer integration that had been promised for the summer. I had argued against it in the meeting and lost. That afternoon I told my seven engineers, and I told them honestly. This was not my decision, I said. I pushed back hard. I am as disappointed as you are.
It went down well. People were sympathetic. Somebody thanked me for being straight with them. I went home believing I had handled a difficult conversation about as well as it could be handled.
Over the following months I noticed things I did not connect. Two engineers started raising questions about priorities directly with the director. In a one to one, somebody said there was not much point bringing a particular concern to me, since these things were decided elsewhere. When the next change of direction came, the team heard about it from me and asked the director what it meant.
What I had given them was a position and no reasons. Not my decision tells people who is responsible and nothing about why, and people who are left without a why supply their own. Mine had supplied the least charitable one available, that the company did not value what they built. The real reason was reasonably good. The integration carried a penalty clause, and missing the summer would have cost more than the returns work was going to save in two years. I knew that. I had not passed it on, because repeating the argument I had lost felt like conceding it.
And by stepping away from the decision, I had described my own role accurately. I had told seven people that on anything that mattered, I was the person who relayed it. They believed me.
What I do now, when I have to carry a decision I argued against, is prepare the case for it before I say a word. I write down the reasons in the terms of the person who made it, well enough that they would recognise them, and if I cannot do that I go back and ask until I can. I lead with those reasons, then with what happens next and what we still get to shape. If somebody asks whether I agreed, I tell them the truth, briefly, as a fact about the discussion and not as the headline.
It is less comfortable in the room. Nobody thanks you for explaining a decision they dislike. But the questions come back to me, which is where they belong while I am the one leading the team.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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