Trust comes before any decision framework

What no decision-making model can teach you, and what I try to give my team

There was a period in my career when, before dealing with something messy or making a complex decision, I would instinctively go looking for solutions from other people: a team member who wasn’t performing well, a technological choice with major implications, a difficult conversation with another team, and so on.

Sometimes I would come in with the situation already clear in my mind; other times I would arrive confused. But there was something about simply knowing I could share the “burden” with someone else that made me feel relieved. For years, I thought I was going there for the answer, for the decision I didn’t know how to make, or for the advice of someone more capable than me.

It took me a while to realize that, often, what truly made the difference in those situations wasn’t so much having a solution to the problem, but knowing that someone I considered “important” shared my decision, and that I wasn’t the only person aware of what I was facing.

That need for “validation” changed over time. On one hand, companies change, people change, and I changed too. On the other hand, I eventually found myself in their position, with people coming to me for the very same reason. I want to try to talk about both sides, and about what I learned from moving through them, in this article.

You can’t always rely on validation from others

As I said, people move on, you move on, roles change. One day you realize that the door you would have knocked on is no longer there, yet you still keep making difficult decisions. You start wondering what changed, because if you truly needed that kind of cover in the past, by now you should be paralyzed.

Recently, I found myself dealing with one of those situations that, a few years ago, would have immediately pushed me to look for someone else. While restructuring some processes, I spent a few days circling around possible solutions, filling pages with notes, but in the end I made the decision myself. Looking back, I realized how much things had changed without me even noticing, and how little I missed those kinds of “support”.

What changed wasn’t the methodology. I already knew the frameworks back then, and they worked just as well then as they do now. What changed is that now it’s enough for me to know that the people around me trust what I’m doing. I don’t need someone to decide for me, and I don’t even need someone to tell me I’m right: I need someone who, when things go wrong, continues to show me the trust I need.

People can’t always rely on validation from you

I found that same dependence on a safety net, that desire to share the weight of making decisions with someone else, again when I started being on the other side of the table.

At different points in my career, I’ve worked with people who, eventually, start asking about everything. Sometimes they’re even very small questions: how to phrase an email, whether or not to open a certain ticket, which of two equivalent technical approaches to choose. Every decision, even the tiniest one, gets brought to someone else for confirmation.

When this happens, it’s easy to interpret it as a problem with the individual person. At first, you also start wondering how much it might be tied to a lack of competence. But it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t always the only possible reason, especially when you look at all the other things they handle perfectly well on their own. Amy Edmondson calls this psychological safety: the shared belief within a team that people can take interpersonal risks. Asking questions, disagreeing, admitting mistakes, proposing ideas that are still rough around the edges, without fear of judgment. When that perception exists, people move. Without it, even the most capable individuals shut down. And when it’s missing, it’s rarely because of someone’s bad intentions: it forms slowly, through the accumulation of experiences where there is almost never a single episode or one specific person to blame.

The good news, for anyone leading a team, is that it can be rebuilt. Far be it from me to explain how in a simple article; there are people far more qualified than I am. What I want to do instead is share what (I think as I don’t want to sound presumptuous) has worked for me.

The most important thing you can do to help people start taking ownership of decisions is also the simplest to imagine: stop always giving them the right answer. What becomes more important instead is investing that time, on one hand, in making sure people have the right information and context to make a decision, and on the other, in explaining explicitly that they are allowed to make mistakes, that mistakes are expected, and that within certain boundaries, the decision is theirs.

The difficult part is not saying it once. The difficult part is not contradicting it later through your behavior. When mistakes happen (because they always do, and it’s never wise to celebrate too early after a first success), the way you react is what proves whether what you said was actually true. If you said «you’re allowed to make mistakes» and then become rigid the moment one happens, you’ve just taught the exact opposite lesson.

Of course, everyone has their own pace and personality, but sooner or later something changes. They stop coming to you for every little thing, you see them becoming more confident in calls with stakeholders, and when they do ask for help, it’s because they genuinely need it. You also realize something else: you’ve become much less essential than you used to be.

The decision framework before the decision frameworks

The literature on decision-making is enormous. GROW, OSKAR, RACI, decision matrices, pre-mortems, weighted scoring. As I’m writing this article, I’ve just returned from a conference where, on the way there, I met someone who was actually going to speak about their experience and their own approach to decision-making.

We’ve already talked about it here as well:

The Decision-Making Framework Every Engineering Team Needs

All of them are incredibly useful, truly, and each brings its own benefits. But all of these frameworks operate at the level of content: they give you categories, criteria, and tools to organize what’s in your head. What they cannot give you is the emotional context in which you’re using those tools. The very same framework, applied by someone who feels supported and by someone who feels constantly under scrutiny, can lead to completely different decisions because of how free they feel to actually see the options in front of them.

Before any framework, then, there is something just as important: the trust you give to the people who report to you matters more than any framework you can teach them.

TL;DR

Every now and then, I think back to the doors I used to knock on ,even virtually, looking for reassurance, and how much more important it feels now to “breathe in” the trust of the people around you in order to work well. When that trust is there, difficult decisions feel lighter.

On the other hand, though, it’s just as important to give that trust yourself. In the first article of this newsletter, I wrote: “Trust your team, they will reward you properly”. And I still believe that this is a fundamental step.

Credits: Illustration 1