The Art of War

You are not alone. You work with people – and no matter how well we communicate, we have different opinions and beliefs.

"The Ancient Art Of War" video game (1984)

You will try to make the best decisions, but don’t expect your assignees to always agree with them. No matter how many arguments you will raise or the time you will spend thinking on it – your engineers will not always agree with your conclusions. Yes – you probably have more experience them, possibly more technically qualified, and so on… and you can still be wrong. After all – disruptive technology achievements are all about doing something different. Your decisions making process is not an obvious one – many time there are endless possibilities.

If you hired the right people – they will have their own opinions. On everything. For many dilemmas, their diverse knowledge might exceed yours. It’s a good thing!

Yet – you are the manager. You are the decision maker – and you will make the final call.

Some managers think that working in a team means reaching a consensus. Those managers will get frustrated when they will fail to convince their reporting engineers that their decision is the ‘absolute right’ decision. Sometimes – their will get pulled to endless convincing sessions until the engineers get bored / give up / just say ‘you are right’. In other cases – they refusal to accept their absolute truth will be conceived as mutiny… and they will think it is impossible to work with those engineers: “I know he is SOOO talented … he just so stubborn. It’s impossible to work with him! I think he is not suitable for my team!”

If you raised an A team – you recruit A people. You are not necessarily smarter than them – and not always agree with them. But it’s enough if they acknowledge you are the one that decide on the strategy, it’s OK to not agree – as long as you respect the chain of command.

Saying something like “I understand what you mean” followed by your own words explaining their argument respectfully. And finishing with asking they will go and continue according to your directions is much more respectful then wasting their time in endless arguments. It’s enough for you to ‘win’ simply because you are the managers that cut decisions. You don’t have to win because everyone thinks your decision is the only way to go.

Try to listen to your engineers. Let them explain their reasoning, their view. You might actually get convinced and change your mind, or minimally acknowledge its possible you are wrong.