How to Become a Leadership Villain: Tell People What To Do

For a short period of time, I was the most reviled person on my college campus.

It was senior year, and I had just made the biggest leadership mistake of my young life.

At the time, my school had two long semesters with a short, six-week “winter term” sandwiched in between. Partway through the year, an academic higher power made an arcane change to the college accreditation guidelines that put us in jeopardy of losing accreditation if we didn’t make a speedy change to our trimester schedule.

The college’s board of trustees had been wrestling with how to proceed, and the answer seemed straightforward: shorten the six-week term to four weeks.

As the student body president, I was there for the board meeting when we discussed this situation, and I was fully convinced that we needed to make the switch to a four-week winter semester. All that was left was for me to discuss the matter with our student senate and draft a student resolution supporting the proposed semester adjustment.

So…I personally drafted the resolution and presented it at the next senate meeting.

The general tone of my proposal could have been described as, “We have no decision but to make a change. Please sign this.” I probably spent less than five minutes explaining the reasons behind the change and flippantly assumed everyone would be on board.

They weren’t.

Several senate members voiced that the semester change would impact our sports teams’ schedules. I learned that if we made the proposed change, the timing of our winter break would now conflict with multiple end-of-year tournaments, which meant student-athletes couldn’t go home to their families during the break.

Same issue with various clubs: their big winter event would now conflict with our break schedule. A litany of unforeseen conflicts shattered my blissful ignorance that this would be an easy scheduling change.

No decision made in isolation from an ivory tower looks rosy when presented on the battlefield.

Within minutes, I became Public Enemy #1 at the college. I was now the person standing between students and their ability to go home to see their family, friends, and fur babies.

I had brazenly assumed the schedule change would have little to no impact on students, but I could not have been more wrong.

It sucked.

However, I learned a valuable lesson. Looking back on the prior month of discussions about the term schedule, I realized I should have involved the student body in the decision weeks earlier.

No one likes to be told what to do.
No one likes to hear there’s only one option for how to proceed.
No one likes to be a bystander while decisions are made behind closed doors.

I should have come to the student body with an articulate description of the problem that we collectively had to solve rather than coming to them with a dictum to be rubber-stamped.

If you’re a manager, you’ve likely run into situations like the one I just described. You’ve been involved in countless meetings regarding the minutiae of a decision, and the answer now seems evident to you. But things are often not so simple.

No decision made in isolation from an ivory tower looks rosy when presented on the battlefield. Your people are the only ones who know the full impacts of anything you decide, and it’s crucial you bring them into the decision.

3 Things You Can Do to Avoid My Mistake

1. Don’t make assumptions.

Decisions are often more complex than they seem, and it’s hard to know the ripple effects of a decision without talking to your team. Whenever possible, don’t make decisions on behalf of others without their buy-in. Ask people how a change will impact them rather than making assumptions.

2. Loop in your team early.

It’s often not enough to get your team’s buy-in at the very end. As early as possible, battle-test your idea by presenting it to other people. Ask for their help and suggestions. Don’t approach the decision alone.

3. Explain the full situation.

Even if you know an unpleasant change needs to be made, explain the full situation to everyone involved. Explain the WHY and let others develop the solution with you.

Your team is full of smart and capable people—individuals who know many things you don’t know. Lean on them rather than trying to go it alone.