How to Head Off a Dysfunctional Culture: Disagree and Commit
If you’ve ever worked in a truly dysfunctional culture, you can spot the telltale signs a mile away.
Meetings drag on with zero decisions made. Or even worse, people politely agree with each other, and then you see them in the hallway having a “meeting after the meeting” to confirm their true feelings. Decisions you thought were made are subtly undermined for weeks and eventually become unrecognizable.
This type of culture is a disaster—it’s horrible to work in, causes great people to leave, and systematically blocks forward progress in achieving the company’s goals.
To combat this at Riskalyze, I implemented a powerful management framework called “Disagree and Commit.” I can’t take credit for it — most people believe the legendary Andy Grove of Intel was the inventor. It can be a superpower for your organization.
The premise is simple.
You have a duty to voice your disagreement if you disagree, and you have a responsibility to commit to the decision once it is made.
Let’s unpack it.
How to Disagree
Perhaps your impression of your organization is that you have no lack of disagreement. Perhaps your culture is even built on arguing! But I’d challenge you to look again. In most organizations, 20% of the people do the disagreeing, and 80% largely go along with the flow.
A few years into our journey, we had a decision to make at Riskalyze. I don’t recall the precise decision, but it was a clear choice between A or B. I walked into the meeting we’d scheduled to decide the issue, fairly certain that A was the right answer.
That said, I had long since learned that my CEO title would often cause people to shift their opinions. So I kept my cards close to my vest, and I turned to the person on my left (after all, we read from left to right!) and asked them to share their perspective first.
They made a strong case for A, and then we proceeded down the table. A, A, A, A, A, A, A. Every person in the room really felt that A was the right answer. And of course, given that this coincided with my prior belief that A was correct, I was feeling pretty good about my CEOing at that point.
Then we reached the final person at the table. Sitting at my right was Micaela Barraza. (Whip smart, I had hired her straight out of college, and she was constantly taking on more as the company grew. She is a phenomenal leader even though she prefers to stay behind the scenes.)
I remember how she started her comments, like it was yesterday.
“Well, clearly the consensus in the room is to choose A, but I have to confess that I walked in thinking that B was the right answer, and here’s why.”
Micaela then proceeded to systematically destroy any logical basis for choosing A as our answer. She’d done her homework, she’d thought about things many of us hadn’t, and the room was electric — everybody could sense that she’d just changed most or all of the minds in the room.
We chose B.
I tell this story not just to pay a compliment to an executive I admire (and hope to work with again someday), but to perfectly demonstrate how the “Disagree” part of this framework is meant to work.
It took courage to advocate for B after an onslaught of As flooded the room. It would have been easier for Micaela to stay quiet, tell herself “this ship has sailed” and say “I’m good with A…let’s proceed.”
Instead, she had the courage to voice her disagreement when she disagreed, and truly contribute value to her team.
This was so instructive for me that I started telling this story in the Mission and Values training I would lead for all of our new hires, and I would use very strong language — I’d tell people they were effectively committing fraud if they didn’t follow Micaela’s example.
When eyebrows raised, I’d explain. “You were hired to contribute your intelligence, wisdom, and perspective to this company. You’re getting a pay check every couple weeks in exchange for those contributions. If you refuse to have the courage to voice your disagreement when you disagree, and yet continue to cash the check, aren’t you committing fraud?”
Exercising your duty to voice your disagreement when you disagree means…
- Speaking up even when you feel outnumbered
- No meetings after the meeting to express our true feelings
- No snide remarks after people are out of earshot — if you disagree, say it while they are still there, and explain why
How to Commit
Equally important to the framework is that we must commit to the decision once it is made. We’ve all seen the person who just can’t get over it when a decision didn’t go their way, and they spend the next six months blaming everything that goes wrong on that decision.
To get to the promised land of a great organizational culture, you first need a clear framework for how your organization will make decisions. I find committee-based decision making to be horribly slow and inefficient, but I also find autocratic decision making to be low quality, lacking in context, and eventually, it gets slow too, as that autocrat becomes the bottleneck!
The optimal approach is to appoint one person as the decision maker for any given issue, and they leverage a small group of people to advise on the decision. That might result in a meeting to discuss the impending decision, but those meetings will be way more effective. You know those ones that drag on with no end in sight? It’s usually because there is no clear decision maker in the room!
If you’ve been called upon to advise on the making of a decision, the commit part of this framework requires you to fully embrace the outcome, even if you spent most of the meeting exercising your duty to disagree before the decision went the other way.
I heard this once expressed as “you should be able to articulate the decision as if it was your idea in the first place.”
One important way this happens is in your choice of words — specifically “we” vs. “they.” If Steve’s teammates excitedly send him into a discussion to argue for A, and the decision is ultimately B, the typical thing for Steve to do is walk back to his pod, shake his head, and say “geez, I argued really hard for A, but they chose B.”
What this implicitly communicates is that Steve is not an effective leader in his organization. Is that true? No — his leadership was one of the reasons he was invited to contribute to the decision. Truly committing to the decision means that Steve will instead say “hey everyone, I argued hard for A, but there were some really compelling arguments for B, and ultimately, we decided B was the best choice for all involved.”
Committing to the decision once it is made means…
- Articulating decisions as if they had been your idea in the first place.
- Using “we decided” instead of “they decided.”
- Not undermining the decision by blaming everything bad that happens on something that didn’t go your way.
- Not attempting to reopen or re-litigate the decision without new data and appropriate buy-in from the decision maker.
Bottom Line
Great organizational cultures are forged in the fires of dissent and decisiveness. They get the best ideas onto the table, question orthodoxy, avoid “loudest person wins,” make high quality decisions, and then execute those decisions with speed, purpose and clarity.
I’m proud of much of what we accomplished at Riskalyze, but one of the things I’m most grateful for is the culture we built — a culture of teamwork, customer focus, high-impact communication, and accountability. We could not have done it without Disagree and Commit.
Raise your expectations for disagreement, and demand commitment to decisions once they’re made — and watch your organization fly.
Many thanks to Donna White and Ethan Pope for reviewing drafts of this essay.