Читать книгу Amplifiers - Tom Finegan - Страница 15

Early in my tenure as CEO of our firm, I was agonizing over another seemingly big decision that I needed to make that I knew was not going to be popular with everyone. I say seemingly because in hindsight I can't recall most of the decisions I agonized over. But I would stew over them desperately wanting complete approval from the hundreds of consultants who worked for us. After sufficient discussion and review of our options, the time would come when we made the decision, and I would communicate the decision to the broader company. Feedback would come back to us and even in situations where I felt the decision was entirely negative yet necessary, I would get emails or texts from people letting me know they appreciated the decision and were fully supportive of the direction. The more this occurred the more I realized that in most big controversial decisions, people fall into the “20-60-20 rule”. Twenty percent of the people think the decision is genius, 20 percent of the people think the decision is a disaster and wonder how we ever got to the position we're in, and 60 percent of the people trust that it's probably best and move on. This realization lets us sit back and weigh the decisions we're making and filter them through the 20-60-20 rule so that we could ask ourselves, “Will this decision or direction skew the distribution?” As a leader it's impossible, and in fact not wise, to never piss people off. As is frequently referenced by Colin Powell, sometimes it's necessary to piss people off. Once I no longer felt the need to have everyone's approval for every decision we made, it liberated me to make decisions much more effectively.