Hoping Is Not a Decision

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty years ago — I genuinely can't pin the year — I had someone on my team who was very smart, and who was building something on his own. Good instincts, real ideas. He started a tool by himself, and when the first version worked, I did what you do with something promising: I started promoting it inside the organisation.

Then it turned out the tool didn't actually do everything I thought it did — or that he'd claimed it did. I sat down and analysed the situation with him. He promised to fix it. Then a month passed. Then two. Then three. Nothing changed.

I finally assigned the work to someone else.

What I didn't say out loud

Here's the part I didn't tell anyone at the time, including myself: I knew he was struggling before month three. I'd seen the signs. I just didn't want to push, because I was afraid pushing would make things worse. So I waited. Meanwhile I told the organisation things were in control. They weren't, and the organisation got angrier every week that the tool didn't do what I'd promised it would.

If you'd asked me at the time, I'd have told you I made a calculated call — give him room, protect him from pressure, trust the process. That's not what actually happened. What actually happened is I made a call to be understanding, and let myself believe that counted as a plan. I was hoping he'd come back to performing the way he used to. He didn't. And hoping is not the same thing as deciding, even though from the inside they feel almost identical.

I was too lenient. I should have acted much faster — assigned him to something less critical the moment I saw the pattern, instead of waiting for a recovery that was never going to arrive on its own. I wasn't senior enough yet to recognise the situation and act on it. That's the honest version. Not "I trusted my team." I hoped, and called it trust.

Withholding your view is still a decision

The instinct to hold back — to not push, to give someone room, to avoid imposing — looks like patience. Sometimes it is. Past a certain point, though, it's just a different way of avoiding the moment where you actually have to decide something and say it out loud.

It's the same category error as the opposite mistake: handing someone a finished decision and expecting them to execute it faithfully. Best case, they do exactly what you would have done. That's the ceiling — you get your own idea back, if you're lucky, and nothing more. Staying quiet to seem less controlling has the same ceiling from the other direction. You're not making a better decision by not making one. You're just delaying whose fault it gets to be.

Both moves dress themselves up as something better than they are. Handing down the finished decision looks like decisiveness. Withholding your view looks like humility. The harder thing is showing up with what you actually see, and then working it out with the other person instead of around them.

What I do differently now

Now, the moment I notice that same signal — someone's performance slipping on something that matters — I call it out immediately. Not eventually, not once it's undeniable. Immediately. Then I try to understand why, because the response depends entirely on the cause. And I put a backup in place fast: pair someone else in on the same work, so that whatever happens next, the thing doesn't stall for another three months while I decide whether I'm imagining it.

Calling it out, understanding the problem immediately, and building in a backup — that's the whole difference between now and the guy who waited three months and called it patience.

The version that actually works

I spent most of this piece on when it goes wrong, because when it goes right you don't really notice. You're just happy, and you move on. That's not a dodge — it's the reason there's no clean success story to tell here, I honestly don't remember the happy times, but I do remember the mechanism.

The mechanism: we discuss priorities first, together, before anyone starts building anything. Once we agree on what actually matters, I usually ask the other person to make the first proposal — not me. I'm happier when somebody else brings the first draft, because it shows me how they think and how they approach the problem. About half the time I change something small. About half the time I change a lot. Either way, I engage with their draft rather than replacing it with mine.

The exception is seniority. If someone's genuinely junior, I bring the draft myself, because they don't yet have enough context to know where to spend their effort. I'm working with my eighteen-year-old son right now, on his first real work — and with him, I'm precise about the deliverables and extremely precise about what he shouldn't be spending time on. That's a different calibration, not a different principle. The principle is the same one, in a room and with a person where I have to supply more of it myself.

What changes between the two is not whether I have a view. I generally have one. What changes is whenand how I bring it, and whether the other person gets a real chance to push back on it before it becomes the plan.

The decision you hand down is only ever as good as you already are. The other one doesn't have a ceiling.