What would it take to change your mind?

He asked for the coffee. He had been running a large team for only a few months. He arrived with the decision already made.

She was a product specialist in a technical business. She didn't sell. Her job was to show demanding professionals what could change with our products. Visits, talks, relationships no salesperson could open... At that, she was extraordinary. At administration, a disaster. Reports late or never, unlogged visits, an empty system where her week should have been.

While the numbers were good, nobody noticed. When the quarter got hard, the business started looking for places to squeeze, and on the regional dashboards the data gap in her territory came up red every Monday. He was asked about that red on every call. A new leader, with a large team and a quarter going against him, needs to show he acts.

“I've already decided,” he told me. “That person is not going to change.”

What made me doubt his certainty

Years earlier I had lived the opposite.
A leader arrived to run the largest unit in the country, brought in from another region when the business was doing better than ever. Within a few months, sales began to fall. Not sharply, just enough for there to be an explanation. And there always was one: the market, a lost client, a misunderstanding of style with the local team...

Meetings changed tone. Today I would say this leader was losing control; back then we said he was intense. The people on the team who didn't get used to it resigned, with reasons that also sounded reasonable.

With me, this leader was charming. Even so, we raised the discomfort... later we saw it was in the wrong place, with the wrong person. We ended up excusing the behavior because habit had already made it plausible.

I was assigned for several months to a project with another team, away from the unit's day to day. When I came back, he was gone.

What they told me afterwards had happened in front of me, and I had another story for every piece. We all did. We weren't missing information: we had failed to draw a line. No one had said: if this happens, I will change my mind.

The same mistake, two faces

“Not yet” and “I've already decided” look like opposites. In practice they are the same thing: neither phrase says what would make us change our mind. One waits without a criterion, the other cuts without one. Both show up, again and again, when results are under pressure, which is exactly when judgment is scarcest and pressure most easily takes its place.

It happens the same way with a market that won't take off, a product that won't move, or a supplier who always has an excuse. With people it is more visible, because the cost has a name, and because the person usually has a good story and we usually like them.

That is why there is a question I now ask myself before any decision: what would have to happen for me to change my mind? If I can answer it precisely, I have a criterion. If I can't, I'm not deciding. I'm letting the quarter decide for me.

The coffee, on paper and in cold light

I didn't argue with his decision. I asked him to put it on paper at three levels, Pérez López's.

Effectiveness: what happens to the result, not this quarter's but the following ones'. Who covers the relationships if the person leaves, how long it takes to reopen every door she had open.

Attractiveness: what leaves with her, and what the team learns from what it is watching. In this case, that the person who knew the most was pushed out over late reports in a bad quarter.

Unity: what happens to trust. Hers, the team's, and the trust he was building as a leader only a few months into the job.

Seen in cold light, the cost of removing her was higher on all three levels than the cost of trying to help her improve. And there was an asymmetry he hadn't looked at: an exit cannot be undone; three months of trying can. Before spending the decision that has no way back, it pays to buy information with one that does.

What he believed impossible turned out, once written down, to be very concrete: log each week's progress and hand in the report, for three months, with a weekly review between the two of them and a monthly one with someone else at the table. Evidence, a date, witnesses. Clear expectations.

She was grateful to be told things plainly and without a runaround. She worked on her discipline and passed the plan. The red on the dashboard disappeared within weeks; the territory's numbers took a couple more quarters.

What the pass rate says about the leader

Where I have seen improvement plans arrive on time, nobody uses them as a notice letter. Whoever opens one wants the person to make it through, and most people pass. Where the plan is the paperwork to justify an exit already decided, most people don't, and everyone knows it no matter what the policy says.

The pass rate of those plans doesn't measure the people. It measures when, and what for, their leaders decide.

With her it worked because the gap was one of habits, not judgment. With a judgment problem, the same question leads to the exit, and fast. Without clear expectations, those three months would have been just three more months.

What stayed with him

The learning belonged to the leader more than to the specialist. He had a large team and many similar decisions ahead of him. From that coffee on, every time he wanted to move someone, he arrived with the three lines written down. Sometimes the exit was confirmed. Sometimes it was stopped. What he stopped doing was arriving with the decision already made.

Deciding well under pressure is not trained in a committee. It is trained earlier, in small decisions nobody sees.

The trade-off

Drawing the line costs in both directions. With the unit leader, escalating in month four could have stained someone who was merely intense in a hard market. With the specialist, it meant three more months of red in a quarter the business could not afford to lose. Neither cost is small.

The costs of not drawing it were paid by others: the people who left the unit, and a specialist who was nearly fired over a problem that could actually be fixed.

This month's question

In the decision you have open today, whether it is a person, a market or a product, have you already written down what would have to happen for you to change your mind?

Or is the quarter going to decide for you?