Item — HN Reader

> • Often don’t get a voice in major decisions – even when you “know the right answer”

I'm not sure if the use of quotes here is intended to imply one doesn't actually know the right answer, but only feels that way. It's a particularly important point, I feel in my career I've met so many managers insecure in themselves that they would never consider listening to an idea from a report, not unless you can convince them it was their own idea.

3 comments

I put that in quotes to make the meta point that it’s really hard for anyone to really know the right answer. But employees who are closer to the problem/customer often have way more insight than others.

I suspect "know the right answer" is "my institution is too bureaucratic to actually implement obvious right things" "managers don't listen" "I think I know what I'm talking about, but I don't see above my little serfdom and upper level decisions look weird from here" "I'm a prideful jerk with strong opinions"

Scare quotes are meant to cover 3 and 4 I think

There are a lot of insecure managers who don't want to be challenged on the merits of their decisions. There are also lots of individual contributors on teams who are strident in their beliefs even though they might be informed only from a narrow perspective.

If you're a manager, you can address this by inviting thoughtful debate and sharing information. But if you're a non-manager employee, you can't always rely on managers (even when they're good and capable) to have _time_ to deeply consider your ideas and share relevant info. Therefore, sometimes you have to accept that major decisions get made without your input.

Ideally you have managers you trust even when they make decisions you don't understand. In practice, getting that requires a willingness to move and enough social acumen that you're likely moving into management yourself.

I believe this is true no matter what. In a large enough organizations, decisions are going to be made that not everyone will find they like or agree with. Sometimes, this may be because even though the right answer was shared or discussed, not every other individual employee who may also have shared their input had the same answer.

Net effect is that even with open dialog, debate, or input, management teams still need to work with their employees to make decisions that are right for the company, or at least appear to be, at the time they are made. And inevitably, some employees who feel they should be entitled to influence or even make a decision outright will feel sidelined when their input is not heeded. The feeling of a lack of control sets in and this can be frustrating as it now means supporting decision(s) made by others with whom you do not agree with.

What you're saying is true, you can't rely on your manager to always have time to listen to what you're saying.

But at the same time that doesn't mean what you're saying isn't something the manager should have made time to listen to.

Of course it's easy for me to criticize management when a lot of the startups I've worked at have gone out of business and a lot of the features I've been asked to build get canceled.

True. At the same time, even well managed startups are risky enterprises and we can't always be sure a feature is right before we ship it. (But we should try pretty hard.)