Deciding Against Advice

You asked for the recommendation. It arrived, it was competent, and you are going to do something else.

This is ordinary and frequently correct. It is also handled badly in most organizations, and the damage is rarely traced back to the moment it was done, because the moment itself passes without incident.

The explanation does the damage, not the decision

Advisers are considerably more robust than leaders assume. A facilities director whose recommendation to replace a roof is deferred another year can absorb that outcome without much difficulty. Being overruled is a normal feature of working inside an organization and everyone competent has experienced it many times.

What they cannot absorb is a reason that does not hold up. And they will check. The superintendent who says the roof can wait because the membrane has five years left has made a technical claim, and the facilities director knows precisely how much life is in that membrane. When the stated reason fails inspection, he does not conclude that his boss is uninformed. He concludes that the real reason was something else, that he is not going to be told what it was, and that his technical input is now decoration in a process being driven by considerations he is not party to.

The next roof assessment he produces will be shaped by his guess about those considerations rather than by the condition of the roof. That is the actual cost, it is permanent, and it was caused entirely by a sentence that took four seconds to say.

Concede the domain

Most overruling can be done without contesting the expert’s expertise at all, and the leaders who get this right make the concession explicit rather than leaving it implied.

You are right about the roof. It needs replacing and your assessment is not in question. I am deferring it because the levy fails in November if we take on this expense now, and I would rather have a leaking building than lose the levy. If I am wrong about the politics of that, I will have made an expensive mistake and it will be mine.

Nothing in that requires the director to accept a false technical claim. His expertise has been affirmed, the decision has been located in a domain he was never asked to assess, and the accountability has been placed where it belongs. He may still think it is the wrong call. He will keep telling the truth about roofs.

Four things to get right

Tell them first, and directly. Before the announcement, before the wider meeting, from you rather than through the decision simply appearing. A person who learns from a circulated memo that their recommendation was rejected has been told something additional about their standing.

Give the real reason. Including when the real reason is uncomfortable, and including when it is that you weighed something differently and might be wrong. Advisers can work with an honest disagreement about weighting. They cannot work with a fiction.

Do not perform being persuaded. Adopting a fragment of their proposal to soften the rejection is transparent and reads worse than a clean no. If their input changed nothing, say the decision went the other way and thank them for the analysis, which you did use, because you now know what you are trading away.

Own it in advance and in front of them. Say plainly that if this goes badly it is your call and not theirs. Then, when it does go badly, actually do that. The second part is where most of these fail, and the failure is remembered far longer than the original decision.

The silent version

The worst execution is not a poorly explained override. It is no communication at all.

The recommendation goes up. Nothing comes back. Weeks later the person discovers, from a colleague or a budget document, that a different path was taken. Nobody decided to conceal it; the conversation simply never got scheduled, because it was going to be mildly unpleasant and there was always something more urgent.

What that teaches is that submitting analysis to this leader is a one-way transaction. People do not stop submitting. They start submitting less carefully, and they stop including the parts that would have been most useful, which are the parts where they express doubt.

A frequency check

Occasional overruling is a sign of a leader doing their job. Frequent overruling is a signal about something else, and it points in one of two directions.

Either you are asking the wrong people, in which case the advice function is broken and should be rebuilt rather than routinely discarded. Or you are not genuinely consulting, and the requests for recommendation are a procedural step performed before decisions you have already made. The second is more common and considerably more corrosive, because it consumes the time of capable people on work that was never going to matter.

If you cannot recall the last time advice changed your mind, the problem is not with the advisers.