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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
What do you do when the algorithm doesn't have the answer? Countless tools and frameworks claim to make decisions objective and bias-free. But in reality, the defining decisions that leaders face are complex ones with subjective information sources and conflicting courses of action. That's why the toughest choices are left to the leaders, and that's why formulas won't answer them. In Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, leadership expert and CEO of YSC Consulting, Eric Pliner, delivers a set of practical tools for readers to make sense of these complex, subjective decisions quickly and with integrity. It presents a path to understanding your own subjectivity, and how your morals, ethics, and responsibilities affect how leaders make the most important decisions. Difficult Decisions is ideal for executives, managers, and business leaders to examine their own intuition and navigate the most conflicted choices they make. It's a challenging read and an indispensable resource to help readers develop self-reflection, clarify their values, and ultimately make the choice that is most "right" to them.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Note
Epigraph
CHAPTER 1: Difficult Decisions
Making Difficult Decisions
How We Make Decisions Now
Notes
CHAPTER 2: The Moral–Ethical–Role Responsibility Triangle
Morals versus Ethics:
Election
Jean and Paula
Win as Much as You Can
Do the Right Thing
Notes
CHAPTER 3: Morals
Communicating Your Morality and Asking about Morality
Knowing the Sources of Your Morality
A Moral Exercise
Exercise: Morality and Your Leadership Narrative
Notes
CHAPTER 4: Ethics
Characteristics of Ethics
The Ethics of Leading Politically
Waiving Ethics
Ethics and Judgment
An Ethics Exercise
Notes
CHAPTER 5: Role Responsibilities
Who You Are Charged to Serve
A Role Exercise
Notes
CHAPTER 6: Using the Triangle to Make Difficult Decisions
Decision-Making Ecosystem and Its Associated Expectations
The Tissue Test
Notes
CHAPTER 7: I Think I Know What I Think; Now What?
A Decision-Making Process
A View, a Voice, a Vote, or a Veto
Delegating
Facts versus Feelings
Tools and Muscles
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Epigraph
Begin Reading
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2.1 The Moral–Ethical–Role Responsibility Triangle
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5.1 The IEA model: identity / expression / attribution model of socia...
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7.1 Determining decision-making authority by urgency and desired enga...
FIGURE 7.2 Inverting the decision-making process.
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ERIC PLINERCEO OF YSC CONSULTING
DIFFICULT decisions
How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy
Copyright © 2022 by Young Samuel Chambers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Pliner, Eric, author.
Title: Difficult decisions : how leaders make the right call with insight, integrity, and empathy / Eric Pliner.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021062105 (print) | LCCN 2021062106 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119817048 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119817086 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119817062 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Decision making. | Leadership.
Classification: LCC HD30.23 .P554 2022 (print) | LCC HD30.23 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/03—dc23/eng/20220118
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062105
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062106
Cover image: © Getty Images | Miragec
Cover design: Paul McCarthy
For Jonathan
Preface
Writing Wrong
This book is wrong.
I don't mean that it's bad or evil. I mean that it's inevitably incorrect.
There is content within these pages with which you are bound to disagree. Your view isn't necessarily right; but then, neither is mine. Nevertheless, some of what I have to say is undoubtedly just plain wrong.
Much of what is contained herein has been examined in various settings for literal millennia. And still—or perhaps inevitably—not everyone sees it the same way. For instance, one fundamental tenet of this book's core framework—that morals are internally referenced and externally influenced, while ethics are externally referenced and distilled internally—runs in direct contradiction to the starting point of plenty of brilliant thinkers in the field. (A pair of ethicists, one in the UK and one in Australia, use definitions in their shared writing that are almost exactly opposite to mine.)1
Discussions of right and wrong, of good and evil, of fairness and injustice are all deeply personal; they are also contextual and time bound. As a result, some of what I write with certainty today (and much of what I write with uncertainty) is bound to be easily discarded, depending on things like where and when you live, how you are encountering this text, and your reasons for reading it. That is the paradox of insisting that how we make the most difficult decisions must always be contextual.
Add to this the complication of your specific, current leadership context, with responsibility for the well-being, satisfaction, engagement, productivity, happiness, or work/life conditions of an increasingly crowded array of stakeholders, plus the fact that morality and ethics are inherently subjective and ever-evolving, as is our understanding of what it means to lead. All that complexity equals a high degree of likelihood that this book doesn't have clear answers, that it's wrong, or that the apparent answers that seem clear and right today will seem muddy and incorrect far sooner than I or my publisher would like.
I still think it's worth writing, and hopefully you still think it's worth reading. Here's why.
We define leadership strategy as the intentional design of the individual styles, the dynamics and interactions, and the collective cultures that create the conditions for others to deliver desired change. Whether that desired change is increased profit or market share, entry into a new geography, election of a new office holder to state or federal government, development of a new and evocative artistic experience, corralling community resources for greater equity in their distribution, or something else entirely, leaders make it possible (“create the conditions”) for people working together (“others”) to drive results, outcomes, or impact (“deliver desired change”). That's a tall task, and it's one that's best not left to chance (“intentional design”). After all, we have organizational strategies and financial strategies—why wouldn't we have leadership strategies, too?
Intentional design of those leadership strategies requires understanding where we've come from, who and where we are today, how we got here, where we want to go, and how we'd like to get there. That's the part where thinking about how to make the most difficult decisions before we're actually faced with them has the most potential to be useful. Given the sheer number of difficult decisions that leaders have to make every day, the pace required of that decision-making, and the seemingly higher and higher stakes of those decisions, clarifying an approach by design rather than by default leaves us more ready to deal with challenges we've never encountered previously—like a global pandemic or unprecedented economic disruption or irreversible changes to our physical climate or a woefully unreliable supply chain or bans on international travel or the en masse theft of customer data or the disruption of democracy or whatever the next year brings, or the one after that.
Doing so also helps to prepare us to tackle difficult decisions that we haven't considered because we don't know anything about them just yet, which means that we also don't know anything about their answers, which is why the approach in this book is probably wrong or at least ill-suited to some of the tough questions that we're bound to face.
One thing is for sure: I'm not going to tell you what's moral, what's ethical, or what your role is as a leader. I'm not going to tell you what's right or wrong, helpful or harmful, or who your stakeholders are. These are highly subjective questions with context-specific answers. Our aspirations to objectivity in any of these matters are merely pretensions, likely imbued with personal experiences and ways of living in the world that are so core to who we are that we hardly notice them anymore.
With that in mind, I'm not going to try to persuade you about my particular views, nor am I going to go overboard in sharing my expertise. Hopefully, this book will help you to unpack your own expertise and to understand your own views with greater skill and sophistication. Hopefully, you will find a path to more intentional application of what matters to you by figuring out with greater clarity exactly what matters to you. Hopefully, the exercises here will help you to understand the realities that become manifest through your opinions and perspectives and the identities and experiences that inform them.
My desire to focus on understanding your opinions and perspective is in no way intended to suggest that I don't believe in facts—or their importance. After years of working in the behavioral sciences, I suspect that not everything that we classify as science constitutes permanently resolved fact. It only takes a cursory review of the lack of replicability of many classic experiments in psychology with well-accepted findings to illuminate that point. By contrast, faults in our earlier understanding and the healthy evolution of our thinking do not negate the existence of facts. Instead, they reflect the importance of lifelong learning and openness to new information. Our prior collective certainty that the Earth was flat does not make it any less round.
What I am concerned with is how, as leaders, we interpret the world around us based on our current knowledge and what we do with that interpretation. How do we use our understanding of good and bad to enrich the quality of our lives and of life on Earth more generally and to leave the world better than we found it? Several of these words—good, bad, enrich, quality, better—are far from value-agnostic in their definitions. As leaders, we make choices many times each day that impose our interpretation of these words on others. Responsible leadership, therefore, begs our thoughtful consideration of these words and their related concepts, of the sources of our interpretations, and of the impact of our interpretations on others who may or may not share them.
Right or wrong, whatever this approach represents, at least it's by design and not by accident.
Hopefully, you will leave this reading having reflected on where you've come from, who and where you are today, and how you got here. Hopefully, you will have considered where you want to go next, both as an individual and as a leader, and how you'd like to get there. Hopefully, you will design a plan and approach to complex personal and professional challenges with intent, enabling you to make tough choices with insight, integrity, and empathy. And hopefully, you will get to do so well ahead of the next round of pain inherent in making the most difficult leadership decisions: the ones that highlight our conflicts, our contradictions, and our hypocrisies, yes—but also our humanity and our ability to shape the future.
You're going to want to grab a pen and some paper. Some of this might hurt a little bit. At the very least, maybe you'll be more ready for whatever is waiting for you tomorrow. If not, well, don't worry. This book is probably wrong anyway.
Eric Pliner
September 2021
Note
1
Paul Walker and Terry Lovat, “You Say Morals, I Say Ethics—What's the Difference?”
The Conversation
, September 18, 2014.
https://theconversation.com/you-say-morals-i-say-ethics-whats-the-difference-30913
.
Epigraph
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
—The Man in Black in The Princess Bride by William Goldman
CHAPTER 1Difficult Decisions
I had been in the role of chief executive officer of YSC Consulting, a 30-year-old, global leadership strategy firm, for about two years when one of our client teams approached me with a dilemma.
Sixteen months after we felt the first economic effects of COVID-19, our financial performance had returned successfully to its pre-pandemic levels. Still, like many businesses around the world, we remained only a few months removed from worrying whether our boutique consultancy would survive the economic and health crises imposed by the pandemic. The climb back to strong earnings had been arduous and exhausting, and our attention was heightened to every possible opportunity to maintain our recovery and growth.
Everyone was pleased, then, when one of our longstanding partners moved to a new company – this time, a defense contractor and manufacturer – and called on our client team for support. Our contact's new organization needed help shaping their approaches to leadership succession and to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the confluence of which represented one of our firm's sweet spots. The client anticipated a sizable contract, enough to close a gap in forecast performance for the region, and knew that our capabilities were a strong match for the organization's need. Our team went to work immediately, using their knowledge of the client, the industry, and the current moment to craft a custom solution that matched the caller's circumstances precisely – exactly what any great consulting firm would do.
But when Cara, a member of our administrative team, proofread the proposal, she was uneasy. She'd used a superior set of research skills to dig into the gap between the company's carefully curated public image and less savory activities that independent media outlets had reported more recently. Cara was concerned that we were compromising our values in service of the potential opportunity.
We were no strangers to working with complex or controversial industries; our client portfolio included tobacco companies, oil and gas companies with known histories of environmental damage, pharmaceutical manufacturers sued for artificially raising prices of drugs to treat rare disease, low-end retailers accused of exploiting rural communities, financial services organizations that had settled extensive claims resulting from the sale of mortgage-backed securities, and plenty of others. As leadership strategists, our work helps organizations to design their desired leadership styles, interactions and dynamics, and organizational cultures with intent, rather than leaving those critical human elements to default. Incorporating thoughtfully designed values, expectations of sustainability, awareness of community and environmental impact, and deep understanding of the constellation of organizational stakeholders is at the heart of what we do, and so we embrace opportunities to help leaders, teams, and organizations to make changes to their strategies or operations to lead with integrity, pride, and resolve. These particularly challenging scenarios were among those where our work was most impactful and most rewarding. But this one felt different.
Cara's discomfort was on my mind, but I'd heard plenty of discomfort before. We'd made the collective decision to encourage our colleagues to opt out of participating in any project or account with which they felt personally misaligned, and that practice had worked successfully to date, without compromise to the business. She wasn't asking to step away from the project, though; she was asking that the firm make a choice to turn down the opportunity and the partnership entirely.
We had to weigh another element, one that reflected our ethical context. Without a doubt, Cara's thinking was informed by an experience in our professional community that had brought us closer together. In the fall of 2019, we'd licensed the TED platform for use at an internal, all-company meeting. Speaker after speaker blended original research, cutting-edge ideas, and personal experiences to spread ideas about leadership, business, and our firm with passion and power. As one well-loved colleague – a particularly powerful speaker – shared her childhood experience as a refugee from civil war in vivid detail, the room hardly moved. Over the subsequent days, the business worked together to turn our co-workers' rich ideas and personal narratives into decisions about organizational practices and our desired future. Deciding that we wouldn't work with organizations that manufactured and/or sold weapons of war was relatively straightforward; we had few if any clients that met those criteria anyway, and our colleague's message was undeniable.
On a personal level, I didn't take that stance lightly. While I hold a degree in peace and justice studies, my father was a career civil servant for branches of the US military prior to joining a private-sector firm that contracted with those same agencies. We'd had a version of these discussions and debates around our family dinner table for decades, often agreeing to accept that our conversations were unlikely to be closed or resolved in any meaningful way.
Nevertheless, the firm had held this decision with real pride and shared it publicly, fully considering the possibility that we might countenance a version of this exact dilemma in the future: the opportunity to deliver meaningful work to people who wanted it, needed it, asked for it, and were prepared to pay for it, but with whom we could not align our values. We'd opted to employ what some call an “abundance mindset,”1 the belief that ample opportunity in the marketplace would allow us to readily find work that we wanted to deliver, in line with our values and cultural priorities. Essentially, we were confident that we'd never need to take on work that hurt in the ways that we'd identified.
What we hadn't accounted for, though, was an unanticipated and drastic shift in context that created a conflict between our morality and our role responsibilities as leaders and service providers. The world had changed since we'd determined that we could turn away prospective revenue. Neither our survival as a firm nor our ability to fully employ our people – many of whom relied on us for health care for themselves and their families – were guaranteed. Perhaps they never had been, but years of strong performance had left these existential questions well out of sight. But after a year where nearly every organization in our industry had laid off employees, reduced compensation, restricted hiring, closed offices, defaulted on financial obligations, or taken other measures to save cost in exchange for protecting their organizations and the majority of their people, turning down a large contract with guaranteed revenue – thereby potentially putting some of our people, their livelihood, and their families at risk – seemed irresponsible, if not downright unethical.
Simultaneously, the client organizations and their leaders who sought support from us, some of whom we were meeting for the first time, were also in new waters. Every organization we encountered was grappling with often unprecedented leadership dilemmas about right and wrong, good and bad, survival and destruction, wellness and illness, diversity and similarity, speed and deliberateness, short-term and long-term needs, even life and death. And few of them had the luxury of time to seek a wide range of perspectives; they wanted perspective, support, coaching, and thought partnership from trusted advisors, which we are, and they needed these supports urgently.
We were clear about the belief that our work delivers meaningful impact and helps leaders and organizations to shape a desirable future; we'd found a way to balance it with the belief that we did not want to cause further harm to our community members or to the world, and we backed that up by not supporting the manufacture and sale of weapons of war. We held the unshakable belief that accepting an organization as our client makes us responsible to be of service to them; our role is to provide them with experiences and support to ensure intentional design of the leadership styles, interpersonal dynamics, and cultures that enable successful achievement of strategy. Although we hadn't thought of it quite so dramatically in the hardy years prior to COVID, we also held the fervent belief that our ability to sustain our firm, to meet our financial obligations, and to employ our people without compromise to their livelihood, their families, and their health care, was good for them, good for the world, and good for business. Now that these criticalities were no longer guaranteed in the ways that we had naively assumed, it was incumbent upon us as leaders to consider the conflict anew.
At first glance, this apparent dilemma sounds like a textbook display of an oft-levied accusation against private-sector organizations and leaders: The moment that financial performance is challenged, values go out the window. But scratching the surface only slightly reveals that this paradigm is not, in fact, present in the most stereotypical way – and almost never is.
The real conflict is between competing dimensions of personal morality, ethical context, and the role responsibilities of the leader – all of which exist in service of good.
So, is it right to turn away revenue that might protect employment, compensation, and benefits during a period of macroeconomic uncertainty and high unemployment? What if completing activities to earn that revenue runs counter to the psychological contract explicitly agreed with the moral view of the organization’s employees? On the other hand, what if engaging in these activities furthers the organization's ethical position – about helping leaders of all kinds to make good judgments and to use their drive and influencing skill to shape the future?
In her book How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Selling Your [Brilliant] Self in Any Situation, author Frances Cole Jones asks herself and her readers, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be friends?”2 It's a straightforward question that begs deeper exploration: What matters most? Intellectual integrity or real relationships? Holding on to our ideas or holding on to other people?
The answer, of course, is both. People and principles are inextricably linked, and it is nonetheless often impossible to make everyday decisions that attend to both with equal passion.
Over and again, leaders are called upon to make complex decisions quickly in ways that fulfill the responsibilities of our roles, that are in line with the ethical expectations of our sociocultural context, and that match our personal morality. The most difficult decisions cannot be made objectively, no matter how many analytics we complete. But understanding the sources of our views, examining rather than blindly accepting our feelings and obligations across stakeholder audiences, and knowing the pressures and incentives of the contexts in which we operate can enable us to make tough calls successfully.
That doesn't mean that there won't be trade-offs and that everyone will be happy with our choices.
Ultimately, I signed the contract, and we took the organization in question into our portfolio as a client. You might stop reading now, convinced that my team and I sold out, that we made an immoral choice to prioritize profit over people, to place our shareholders' interests above our ostensible values. I've considered that possibility plenty of times – both before making the call and since. But the simple action of scribbling my name on a tablet screen belied the hours of self-reflection, team discussion, open debate, process consideration, research, and values clarification that went into making this difficult decision. Confronted with an array of options and a seemingly endless mix of opinions, I am confident that we made the right choice for our firm and our people. We didn't avoid the apparent conflict between our roles as leaders, our personal codes of morality, and the ethical context in which we operate, even (especially) where those dimensions were misaligned. We indulged the challenge, clarified how we would choose, explored the factors driving us toward and away from each potential outcome, and made a difficult decision with insight, empathy, and integrity.
Making Difficult Decisions
How many decisions do you make each day?
What's the toughest decision you've had to make?
Why was it so hard?
How did you ultimately make the call?
Did you get it right?
How do you know?
Our most difficult choices rarely challenge us because we lack information. They're not solved by aggregating data or reviewing spreadsheets or even by using artificial intelligence.
Our most difficult decisions challenge us because they dig at some raw aspect of our humanity: what we believe in our hearts about right and wrong; our hopes and fears about how others will respond to us; and our desire to be good people and to leave legacies that reflect who we believe ourselves to be. They challenge us because they require us to confront conflicts between what we think and what we do, between our view of ourselves as inherently good and choices that mean that not everyone will experience us as good. They require us to recognize that there are few absolutes and lots of nuances. And they require us to recognize that, as the heroes of our own life narratives, we are sometimes the villains in others' life narratives.
By its very nature, leadership – that is, creating the conditions for change in service of generating shared value and meaning – is inherently interpersonal. It requires bringing people together to envision and enable a future that is somehow different from today. Leaders prompt personal and communal growth and development; generate emotional soothing and comfort; inspire new perspectives and ways of being; engender individual, collective, and community wellness, health, and wealth; and help us to know and understand who we are and why we are here.
And because leadership is interpersonal, how we lead today affects real people's real lives right now – and may have consequences for years and even generations to come.
There is a lot for leaders to learn about the sources of and context for our choices, and there is a lot that all of us can learn from other leaders to inform how we make the most difficult decisions of our lives.
Leadership is about tough choices, and making tough choices shows leadership.
We must ask ourselves, then, what kind of leadership we want to show. What kind of leaders – and people – do we want to be? And how does thoughtful, considered conscientiousness and communication about these choices make us better at what we do – and who we are?
It doesn't matter if you think these decisions are right or if anyone agrees – the whole point is that lots of people don't and won't agree. That's what makes these decisions difficult. They are subjective, and subjective decision-making is not helped by pretending to objectivity. We can't do it. We're human, we're fallible. Our lives, identities, and experiences shape the way we see the world. There's no such thing as human objectivity. So then, we want to look to science. Science, after all, can be objective. There are hard facts in the world of science. We follow the impulse to want to rely on something seemingly scientific, seemingly objective. And so we look to things like machine learning and artificial intelligence, hoping that they can somehow tell us what to do about the hard stuff, either forgetting that these technologies are themselves still created and programmed by humans (with all of our biases and fallibilities) and ignoring the fact that they still can't tell us what to do about the really hard stuff – the subjective stuff. An algorithm can give us answers – perhaps even the best answers that do the least harm – but it cannot tell us how a group of humans, each with different backgrounds and identities and experiences, will feel about those answers. And that means that perhaps it hasn't given us answers at all.
There is ample and increasing evidence that the best decisions are made by so-called centaurs3 – part human, part machine – building on the superior analytical capability (and, perhaps more importantly, speed) of technologies and the essential empathy and experience-based intuition of humans.
But they still can't tell us how to feel or what to do when we think something is just plain wrong. That requires us to rely on our judgment – the blend of spotting and recognizing issues (anticipating and responding to the practical environment decisively and realistically); the rigor of our cognition (processing and making sense of complexity, insight, and nuance in a balanced way); and framing (seeing broader themes and perspectives, distilling clarity from ambiguity). Our ability to make those judgments skillfully is informed by what's going on inside of us, what's going on around us, and what we understand is expected of us.
So rather than looking for ways to make decisions more objectively, every one of us who has a difficult choice to make should instead focus on how to build and sharpen the ability to make subjective decisions with greater skill.
How We Make Decisions Now
Plenty of decision-making frameworks implore leaders to use seemingly objective information more thoughtfully, and seek to help individuals to mitigate bias,4 decide differently in the moment versus over time,5 or make rigorous use of data.6
