Everybody Gets a Voice, One Person Gets a Vote

When I was a nuclear officer in the US Air Force, I adopted a leadership technique called the Two-Objection Policy. It was a way for my crew partner and I to make decisions in a fast-paced environment, and it ensured that not only did a decision get made but also that there was a chance for the junior person to offer their inputs.

That worked well in a 2-person environment, but what about when you have a larger group?

When leading a team, whether a permanent group or a project-based task force, it’s important to gather inputs from everyone who has them. No leader knows everything, we all have our blind spots, and the ideas from two people could highlight a third option that combines the best of both. We will never know unless we ask, so it’s important to have those conversations before decisions get made. Plus, let’s face it, if people feel like they do not have an input into decisions, they will become disengaged from their jobs, and that’s already a big enough problem in the global workforce.

But once it comes time to make that decision, it needs to come down to one person. Whoever is going to be accountable for the results of a decision needs to have the authority to make it, and that does not mean taking a vote, but instead means making a decision, even if it may be unpopular with some (or many) of those in the group. It’s seems easy to get the responsibility off your shoulders by saying “Let’s take a vote” and then blaming bad results on group decisions, but that’s not your job. This is why managers typically get paid more: not because they do more hands-on work (thought they might), but because they carry the weight of responsibility for making the decision that leads to the best results.

Team members need to understand this, and recognize that once a decision is made, then the time for debate is over and the time for implementation has arrived. Once a leader makes a decision it becomes everyone’s responsibility to make it work. There is no point in wasting time discussing whether or not the decision should have been made; instead, effort needs to go into making it work. Only if all reasonable options have been tried and failed should a group go back to re-evaluate a decision, and in this case that process needs to be an orderly one, rather than a series of hushed discussions around the coffee machine or some disappearing texts on Snapchat.

Any organization that ignores inputs from its people is missing out on a lot of talent (after all, if they were not talented, you would not have hired them, right? Right????). At the same time, any organization that cannot make a decision and move forward will get passed by the competition, and the most talented people will probably find somewhere else to work. You need a process for collecting those ideas as well as a process for making decisions and moving on, and everyone needs to understand how that’s going to work. Everybody should have a voice, but in the end, just one person needs to have a vote.