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It's not a manipulation, it's acknowledgement of the reality that one party has the power and the other doesn't. Why have a leader who cannot make decisions wit

It's not a manipulation, it's acknowledgement of the reality that one party has the power and the other doesn't. Why have a leader who cannot make decisions without taking a vote?

anigbrowl 10y ago
Then what is the point of asking for buy-in? As opposed to 'Interesting views everyone, thanks. I'm gonna go with option B.' Then there's no ambiguity about who took the decision. I didn't remember it when I commented earlier, about 15 years ago I was in a job where boss walked in when I was with clients and asked me to proofread some ad copy. I did and made one minor correction (with a pen, I didn't talk about it). He called me into his office a few moments later and reamed me for 'undermining him in front of clients' because I had failed to understand that his intention was to show off rather than actually have me proofread the copy. He became so abusive (threatening violence and so on) that I quit on the spot. tl;dr don't ask an open-ended question if what you actually want is validation of your decision.
- true_religion 10y ago
  I'm not really seeing a buy-in clause. It's called 'disagree and commit', wherein you can disagree with the direction the leader has decided to go in, but still commit to following direction. This is opposed to 'disagree and dig your heels in' which is the default expectation. Or 'disagree and implement poorly'.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Where Bezos asks 'will you take a gamble with me on this?' If you're not seeing it that's because it's already fallen below your language-processing radar and you're not actually evaluating the words coming out of his mouth, but rather the subtext you feel is being communicated. This isn't an accident.
actsasbuffoon 10y ago
Sometimes underlings see problems that leaders do not. Underlings were hired for a reason; you trust their judgement. If you find yourself disregarding their opinions on a regular basis then you may have a dysfunctional team (maybe your problem or theirs). Here's a juicy real-world example. I used to work at a publicly traded Fortune 500 tech company. My boss' boss called us into a meeting to see a pitch deck he was planning to show to the executive team. He'd done a survey that showed we should completely change the way we monitized our product. We would slash the price of our bread and butter product and charge more for add-ons. His survey showed that respondents really liked our add-on products, so it should be possible to make more money this way. Our team worked on add-on products, so that was nice to hear. His survey validated our opinion that we were doing good work and the company should pay more attention to us. However something in the back of my brain said that his survey didn't add up. I asked him some questions about his methodology and discovered a big problem. He only contacted people who had made money by using our add-on products. Roughly half of users didn't earn a penny, and he was ignoring those people in his survey. That would have dramatically lowered the satisfaction numbers in his survey. I brought it up and he got very angry. He insisted that he'd conducted the survey correctly, and he didn't consider non-money-makers to be real customers. Several engineers chimed in and said I was right; he'd biased his sample and this survey wasn't accurate. He got even angrier and so we dropped it. He brought it to the executives and they loved it. They completely changed the monitization system for the whole company. Within a year revenue had collapsed. It was so bad than many investors accused management of actively trying to hurt revenue. At least 5 class action lawsuits were launched over our rapidly declining stock price. Most of the executives were forced out by the board, and the company was acquired for a fraction of its former value. I had a chance to stop all of this during that meeting, and I didn't. I let my boss' boss intimidate me into dropping it, and I can't help but feel like I'm partially to blame for everything that happened after. He was a smart person, and generally someone I enjoyed being around. The problem is that he didn't have a science background and didn't understand how to create a controlled study. He also didn't understand the concept of statistical significance. Some of the engineering team did understand these things, but he dismissed our feedback. The result was a disaster.

It's not a manipulation, it's acknowledgement of the reality that one party has the power and the other doesn't. Why have a leader who cannot make decisions without taking a vote?

anigbrowl 10y ago

Then what is the point of asking for buy-in? As opposed to 'Interesting views everyone, thanks. I'm gonna go with option B.' Then there's no ambiguity about who took the decision. I didn't remember it when I commented earlier, about 15 years ago I was in a job where boss walked in when I was with clients and asked me to proofread some ad copy. I did and made one minor correction (with a pen, I didn't talk about it). He called me into his office a few moments later and reamed me for 'undermining him in front of clients' because I had failed to understand that his intention was to show off rather than actually have me proofread the copy. He became so abusive (threatening violence and so on) that I quit on the spot. tl;dr don't ask an open-ended question if what you actually want is validation of your decision.

true_religion 10y ago
I'm not really seeing a buy-in clause. It's called 'disagree and commit', wherein you can disagree with the direction the leader has decided to go in, but still commit to following direction. This is opposed to 'disagree and dig your heels in' which is the default expectation. Or 'disagree and implement poorly'.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Where Bezos asks 'will you take a gamble with me on this?' If you're not seeing it that's because it's already fallen below your language-processing radar and you're not actually evaluating the words coming out of his mouth, but rather the subtext you feel is being communicated. This isn't an accident.

actsasbuffoon 10y ago

Sometimes underlings see problems that leaders do not. Underlings were hired for a reason; you trust their judgement. If you find yourself disregarding their opinions on a regular basis then you may have a dysfunctional team (maybe your problem or theirs). Here's a juicy real-world example. I used to work at a publicly traded Fortune 500 tech company. My boss' boss called us into a meeting to see a pitch deck he was planning to show to the executive team. He'd done a survey that showed we should completely change the way we monitized our product. We would slash the price of our bread and butter product and charge more for add-ons. His survey showed that respondents really liked our add-on products, so it should be possible to make more money this way. Our team worked on add-on products, so that was nice to hear. His survey validated our opinion that we were doing good work and the company should pay more attention to us. However something in the back of my brain said that his survey didn't add up. I asked him some questions about his methodology and discovered a big problem. He only contacted people who had made money by using our add-on products. Roughly half of users didn't earn a penny, and he was ignoring those people in his survey. That would have dramatically lowered the satisfaction numbers in his survey. I brought it up and he got very angry. He insisted that he'd conducted the survey correctly, and he didn't consider non-money-makers to be real customers. Several engineers chimed in and said I was right; he'd biased his sample and this survey wasn't accurate. He got even angrier and so we dropped it. He brought it to the executives and they loved it. They completely changed the monitization system for the whole company. Within a year revenue had collapsed. It was so bad than many investors accused management of actively trying to hurt revenue. At least 5 class action lawsuits were launched over our rapidly declining stock price. Most of the executives were forced out by the board, and the company was acquired for a fraction of its former value. I had a chance to stop all of this during that meeting, and I didn't. I let my boss' boss intimidate me into dropping it, and I can't help but feel like I'm partially to blame for everything that happened after. He was a smart person, and generally someone I enjoyed being around. The problem is that he didn't have a science background and didn't understand how to create a controlled study. He also didn't understand the concept of statistical significance. Some of the engineering team did understand these things, but he dismissed our feedback. The result was a disaster.