Disagree and commit is not shut up and do it
The devil is in the details
“Disagree and commit” is a management principle popularized by Jeff Bezos. In his 2016 shareholder letter as Amazon CEO, he argued that “disagree and commit” is a way to timebox how much time is spent discussing a decision, so that decisions can be made and not delayed indefinitely.
As usual with these short form management tips, it all looks good on the surface, but the devil is in the details. If implemented badly after reading an HBR headline, without too much thinking, “disagree and commit” is a way to implement “shut up, I’m the one who calls the shots here”.
In my experience, these are the elements that you need to have in place for a healthy “disagree and commit” culture.
It must go both ways
There is a tendency to consider that the one who disagrees is always the one lower in the org chart. “Disagree and commit” becomes a synonym for “upper management decided that, we might not like it but it is what it is, let’s get to work”. This is why the “commit” part is important, to avoid the creation of a “us vs them” situation, where the lower management does not really commit in the sense of making an honest effort to implement what has been decided. Commit is not merely getting back to work in a disgruntled way, hoping to be right in the end so you can say “I told you so”. Commit implies siding with the decision maker and rallying the troops, which is a harder pill to swallow.
However, it is not written anywhere that this is how it should go, and do not take my word for it, listen to Jeff Bezos himself in this interview:
The CEO may not always make the decision they agree with
A well implemented “disagree and commit” company culture needs to have a healthy split of who disagrees. It cannot always be the ones lower in the org chart, because it would be perceived as coercive top down control with no room to even minimally steer the ship. It cannot always be the leadership team either (I’m not sure this ever happened to be honest). That would mean that there is no real strategic direction. It must be somewhere in the middle, where the leadership team above you is willing to swallow the commit pill sometimes.
This requires the leadership team to be secure enough to not consider conceding the decision to someone lower in the org chart as a sign of weakness. I think this is unfortunately very rare. The higher you go in the org chart, the more “ephemeral” the work becomes, disconnected from actually shipping things. Imposter syndrome might also kick in. The result is an urge to be seen as the one who calls the shots, all the shots, centralizing everything instead of building an organization of empowered A-players.
There should be space for discussion
Stay SaaSy explained it perfectly in this post, so I will not expand more on the concept:
Communicating a disagree-and-commit situation is most effective when you’ve engaged well with the issue already. If you’ve engaged properly with a decision, you can simply communicate what you did.
If the disagreement part is just being told what the decision is, with no space for questions and clarification, it is nearly impossible to implement the commit part well. Even if you lose all the disagreements and the leadership above you wins, at least you were given the space to be heard and raise your concerns. Time to move on.
You need to trust your leadership team
It is easy to avoid the emergence of “us vs them” situations if there is overall trust and respect in the leadership team above you. They must be seen as capable and rightfully in that position, with multiple receipts in the form of good company metrics but also good scores in engagement survey results. Sometimes the leadership team has information that people at lower levels in the org chart do not possess, so the disagreement might be influenced by this asymmetry of information.
If the leadership team benefits from a good amount of trust and respect, there is no “us vs them” to begin with. I have been in organizations where I had the utmost respect for the Data org leadership team. They were competent, they grew the org over time, advocating for it to secure a more prominent role in the company along the way. Disagreements were perceived more like honest discussions, and it was not too hard to compromise with the opposite view.
But I also have been in organizations where the leadership score in the engagement survey was constantly the lowest score of all, with no acknowledgement of the problem, no action plan to improve it. The leadership team was in survival mode, not really open to disagree about options, so I knew that openly disagreeing would have led to defeat on my side and a very hard commit to implement. My strategy in that case was to avoid open disagreement at all, and instead try to convince them that my idea was their idea in the first place.
I dodged many bullets with this approach, saving me from several “commits” that would have been disastrous for the team I was leading.
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