The hardest decisions arrive when the rewards are uncertain and the room is against you. Make the call anyway — and own the outcome, whichever way it lands.
A lot of the calls I'm proudest of were made with my back against the wall: restructuring at Energy Labs, betting on ventures where I had no operational experience to lean on. The forces that set those decisions in motion are rarely under the decision-maker's control. We dress them up afterward as "good judgment," but in the moment they're just bets you're willing to be accountable for. When the results come in green, everyone has a flattering word for you. When a call goes wrong, the same people are nowhere to be found.
I learned that the hard way. When one of our products was on the launch pad — a button-press from going live — not a single board member backed it except me. They were paranoid enough that it pushed them to keep their distance from the company entirely, even after every commitment had been made to the right people. I went ahead with the handful of supporters who were willing to move. We earned a genuine, outsized success on that first product.
Conviction is cheap when you're right. It only counts when you're standing alone before you know.
But success has a way of breeding complacency. The unqualified support that came after that win quietly set up the failure of the next product. When it went sideways, no one stepped up to share the call. The lesson wasn't that people are unreliable — it's that alignment built on momentum rather than belief is brittle. The moment we could have built a real, durable advantage, we lost it to the assumption that the last win guaranteed the next one.
Here's what I actually took from it, stripped of the bravado I'd have used to describe it back then.
First: separate the decision from the sentiment. Personal feelings — loyalty, guilt, the sense that you owe someone for being there early — are real and they matter, but they don't get a vote on whether a strategy is sound. You can honor a relationship without letting it make a business call for you. The two are different ledgers, and confusing them is how good companies make bad decisions.
Second: commit visibly, and own the result either way. "Officially yes, personally no" isn't about hiding your doubts — it's about backing the call you've made fully once it's made, instead of hedging so you can disown it later if it fails. The leaders worth following are the ones who say "this is the decision, and it's mine," and then carry the consequences in public.
Third: judgment is earned, not assigned. It's easy to critique a hard call from the cheap seats — from the background, with nothing at stake. The people whose opinions on a difficult decision I weigh most heavily are the ones who have had to make difficult decisions themselves. Everyone else is commentary.
None of this means leading without warmth. The best teams I've been part of were held together by trust, not fear. But warmth and clarity aren't in tension. You can care deeply about the people you work with and still make the unpopular call, still hold the line on what the work requires. That's the job. Do it honestly, own it completely, and let the results speak.
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