How to deliver bad news to your team - Part 2

Disagree and Commit

In the previous post, we discussed how to rollout changes that you believed were necessary but your team thought otherwise. In this post, we will discuss the strategy to roll out changes you disagree with. *gulp*. These could be changes your manager is pushing down or is being pushed down by the executive team. But before we dive in, let’s get a bit philosophical.

Being a manager is awesome 99% of the time, but sadly this newsletter is about the other 1%. As a manager, you will be asked to do things you slightly disagree with or straight-up detest. The truth is, often, people above you will make decisions that you might not like and will expect you to push that down to the team. 

On the surface, most companies might seem like they are run by kind, democratic leaders on a noble world-changing quest. Most well-run companies do in fact, push down most of the decision-making to the teams. Most successful companies have high levels of team autonomy. However, the cold reality is, most companies are capitalistic institutions run by an oligarchy. And when the oligarchy decides to make a change, the lords and the knights have to fall in line. The bottom line is even the most employee-friendly companies, from time to time, will ask their middle management to execute plans the rank and file will hate. Obviously, this excludes doing anything illegal or unethical for your manager or company. If you think your company is laundering money, by all means go to the police!

The Return to Office policy that companies started instituting after the end of the COVID pandemic is a great example of an unpopular decision that many managers had to force on their employees. Layoffs are another example of unpopular decisions that people managers might have to help execute. So the question to ask yourself is, how do you typically respond to directives handed to you? Do you relentlessly argue with the powers that be? Do you give in to your bosses? Or maybe you are somewhere in the middle? 

What every manager is expected to do is to disagree and commit. Individual contributors who aspire to be engineering managers have to absolutely master this skill. Amazon famously codified this as a leadership principle that every employee in the company has to live by. As a leader, you are expected to respectfully challenge decisions you disagree with. However, if a decision has been made, you are expected to stop debating it and commit to executing it. You can’t begrudgingly commit to it. You have to commit to it wholly. This means you can’t complain to everyone that you disagree with the idea once the decision has been made. You can’t grumble to people that somebody else is making you do it. You can’t tell people your manager pressured you to do this. Each time you complain to your team about situations like these, you are losing a bit of authority in front of your team. You might think that being transparent with your team about your displeasure about pushing down the change will earn you brownie points with your team, but your team will see a manager who doesn’t have any decision-making powers. The more this happens, the more the team will feel you, as a leader, can’t really help them in any way. A lame-duck manager.

What about situations where you really believe that you can’t stand behind an unpopular decision made by the powers above you? If you ever find yourself in a situation where you truly, deeply, philosophically disagree with your manager, the only thing you can do is find a different manager. Or a different company. There is no point in trying to get behind a decision that goes against your internal code of ethics because if you do, it will slowly eat you up inside. The more you try to live with it, the deeper your loath towards your bosses becomes. Until one day, you will find yourself completely disillusioned about your manager, company, or both. And then you will leave. Both paths lead to a departure. I recommend choosing the road with the least pain and leaving early.

OK, you have successfully disagreed and committed and are now ready to roll down the changes. The first thing to do is, yeap, you guessed it right, to write a document that describes the change in detail. The questions you need to answer are similar to the ones we discussed in Part 1. For reference, here are the questions from before-

1. What is changing?

2. Why is it changing?

The answer to the first question is pretty straightforward. The answers to question 2 is where the dragons are. I am fairly certain that most unpopular decisions are almost always pushed down because one or two people at the top believe in it. I would bet a dollar that most unpopular decisions are impulsive, gut decisions made by the executive team and, in many cases, made by the CEO herself and not driven by data or science. Take the ‘Return to Office’ policies companies are rolling out now. The majority of research done around this controversial topic indicates that employees feel more productive when they are not wasting hours commuting to a physical office and instead working from the comfort of their homes in shorts and sweatpants with the heat cranked up to their preference. I have never worked in an office building that was set to a comfortable temperature. I swear thermostats in office buildings are mostly for decoration. 

Since their commute time is zero, employees have additional time to devote to health and wellness related activities like exercising, getting out of the house often, walking the dog, etc. And most importantly, they can now spend more time with their families and young ones. The line managers who directly manage these employees also feel the same. They feel that remote work results in happier and more productive employees. However, executives and middle managers don’t share the same level of optimism as their employees about remote work.

The single biggest reason executives want people back in the offices is that they don’t want to invest time and energy into transforming their office culture to a virtual one. Most companies are not cash cows. They live and die by their ability to keep wall street well-fed and happy. Wall Street does not give a damn about employee happiness. They care about the quarterly earnings. Given the pressures on the average CEO and executive, the last thing on their mind is to figure out how to build an effective remote culture. So they revert back to what they know works. Working in a physical office. 

So going back to question no: 2 from a few paragraphs above. How do you answer the question, Why is this changing? The mistake leaders typically make here is to cherry pick publicly available data like surveys, opinion pieces written by other CEOs etc and try to explain the reason. It won’t work. Your team is filled with smart people, and they all know how to use Google. For every supportive piece of evidence, you can show, they will show hundreds against it. Such is the nature of unpopular decisions. They are typically not backed by science. One can find multiple pieces of evidence, strengthening and weakening both sides of the argument. 

So, do not try to explain it with data. When Elon Musk told Tesla employees to come back to the office, he didn’t try to explain his decision with data or science. He just told the employees to come back or quit. 

The right way to position an unpopular top-down decision is to position it as a company policy change. Don’t try to explain it. That is the right answer to question no: 2.

When you announce this to employees, I recommend not spending more than thirty minutes on this topic. Invariably, someone (or all) on your team will ask for the supporting evidence behind the policy change. The modern product development team is typically pretty data-driven, and they will poke and prod at the policy change. Be steadfast and do not try to explain the policy change. Also, at some point in the conversation, someone will ask you if you personally believe in the decision. This is where the Kraken lays.

Your team will want to know if you support their well being and happiness or you are just a corporate acolyte. They will want you to take a side. You can’t. Most inexperienced leaders make the mistake of saying, ‘I really don’t want to do this, but the company is forcing me to do it’. As I mentioned a few paragraphs above, you can’t use that line unless you are willing to sacrifice your authority with the team, AND you will lose your credibility with your bosses. It is OK to say that you debated and disagreed with this with your higher-ups, but have decided to disagree and commit to this path forward. Focus more on the commit than the disagree. 

I am sure after the team meeting, employees on your team would want a one on one sit down with you. They will most likely ask you variations of the same question they asked you in the team meeting. ‘Are you really supportive of this?’, ‘There is no rationale behind this decision!’, ‘Do you REALLY support this?’, ‘Why didn’t you fight hard for us?”, and so on and so forth. Be consistent in your answers. You can’t deviate from what you have publicly said. Emphasize the fact that you have decided to disagree and commit to this path forward. 

Lastly, the question of exceptions will come up. Some employees would want exceptions. Think carefully before approving exceptions to the policy. When my company announced its own ‘Return to Office’ mandate, I made exceptions for a small group of employees who either had medical conditions, or poor child care coverage that prevented them from coming into the office. 

Personal Anecdote

In a galaxy far, far away, I was an engineering leader managing a small team. The pandemic had just ended. The mask restrictions were on their way out. The company had just hit a hundred million in revenue. We had just wrapped up a full company onsite week and employee morale was the highest it has ever been in the past twenty four months. Life was good, until fate decided to stir some shit up.

CEOs are a mercurial bunch, and this CEO was no different. One day, after walking around the mostly empty office, he decided to bring people back to the office. OK, fine, I am probably oversimplifying it. I am sure other productivity-related reasons precipitated the grenade the CEO lobbed at the organization. 

The CEO decided that everyone within a thirty-mile radius of the headquarters must come into the office at least three days a week. Then it was up to us, the leadership team, to push that message down. The plan was to first develop a set of talking points for the people managers, discuss it with the managers and then finally send out a company-wide email (which would be discussed with the executive team before sending) detailing the change and other FAQs surrounding it. Obviously, the corporate gods decided not to cooperate, and the whole plan exploded like the Hindenburg. 

Oh, where to start ? The email from HR went out BEFORE the managers got their talking points. As soon as the email hit employee inboxes, the internal slack channels lit up like the fourth of July. Employees were filled with confusion, anger and disbelief. HR made the mistake of trying to explain an unpopular decision with shaky assumptions. A few months ago, we, as a company, got together in person for a week. The goal was to get teams to hang out in person and get to know each other better. Half of the engineering team was hired virtually, so a lot of the engineers met each other for the first time in the onsite. The event was a huge success. The results of the survey that HR did a few days after the onsite clearly showed that the entire employee base loved hanging out in person. HR decided to use the survey results to justify the ‘Return to Office’ mandate. The gist of the email was, ‘We believe that you will be happier coming to work because you can then work with your team in person. You all said so yourself in the survey that we sent out after the company onsite.’

The employees fell upon this misguided message from HR like a pack of wolves and tore it apart. In the internal Slack channel, they repeatedly (and angrily) pointed out that most engineering teams have a mix of local and remote people. In fact, only one team (out of a total of twelve teams) was fully local and would benefit from a physical office. They also painfully pointed out that coming to a once-in-a-year casual company onsite vastly differs from commuting daily to a physical office and wasting many precious hours in a car. Our HR team tried to put out the fire, but the only way this was a fire that had to burn through its course.

Next, the employees fell upon their direct managers. They all demanded answers and explanations from their leaders, who had none. The managers never got their talking points in time. So, they pushed their frustrations and anger upward to me. I decided to pull all my angry and frustrated managers into a zoom meeting. Twelve sets of accusing eyes stared at me in disbelief, anger, and confusion. The tension in the room was thick enough to cut with a butcher knife. I got peppered with all the questions I anticipated, ‘Why are we doing this? What’s the f’in reason?, ‘Remote work has been proven to be more effective!’, ‘Do you support this?’, ‘Did you fight hard for us?’ , and so on. 

Before logging into the meeting, I had decided not to try to defend the decision with data. However, in the first five minutes of the meeting, I wavered from my resolve quite a bit. I started off by calling the decision a policy change but then veered off into the unsafe territory of gut feelings. Once I started arguing on the basis of my own personal beliefs (I actually prefer an in-person culture), the meeting started to sour. In the middle of arguing a point, I suddenly remembered my resolve from before and pivoted back to my original message. I kept repeating the fact that I disagreed and committed to the company policy, and I expected them to do the same. After a few more jabs at me, the team resigned to the reality that they had to adapt to a new world where they and their local employees would have to commute to the office. Well, except one. There was one engineering manager who was incredibly incensed about this change. After a few days, he messaged me, asking for a one-on-one meeting.

When I met him over a zoom call, it was clear that he was still pretty exasperated about the whole thing. For the first ten minutes he argued against the change and tried to convince my mind. This is after I had already pointed out to him that the decision cannot be unmade. After a few more minutes of pointless arguing, he said, ‘Mahesh, I don’t think I can disagree and commit to this decision. It goes against everything I believe in’. Now I knew what was going on. He knew that disagreeing and committing to this decision would eat away at his conscience. What I told him next caught him by surprise. I told him that he should leave the company if he couldn’t fully disagree and commit. I explained to him that I wasn’t asking him to leave because he was defying a company policy but because I knew that if I forced him to comply, his frustration would grow, and eventually, he would come to distrust the entire executive team, which will frustrate him even further. And then he will leave, completely disillusioned and broken. The manager chose the less painful path and resigned that evening. 

A quick recap of takeaways from this chapter

1. If you want to climb the corporate managerial ladder, be prepared to enforce unpopular top-down mandates

2. Learn how to disagree and commit. Commit wholly, not begrudgingly 

3. If disagreeing and committing means killing a part of your soul, don’t do it. Instead, leave the company.