In tech leadership1, whether as people managers or as technical decision makers, we are expected to make calls. We constantly assess people, processes, systems, and risks. We’re trusted with those decisions because historically our judgment has often been right2. But how do you tell whether your judgment is grounded, or has slipped into something unhelpful?

To me, it’s when decisions are driven by emotional reactions that cloud objectivity. Judgments in those moments detach from goals and become about defending a person, a past decision, or an abstract principle or philosophy, instead of solving the concrete problem in front of you. It becomes more about winning the argument than making progress.

Some signals I have noticed in my earlier self and in others:

  1. You dwell on points that are either not actionable or have limited impact.
  2. You get pulled into abstract debates about principles or philosophies that sound foolproof but don’t resolve the actual disagreement.
  3. You critique someone’s proposal before understanding their goal, skipping the question: how can I help them accomplish it?
  4. You feel a stronger urge to be heard than to hear.

How do we guard against that tendency?

  1. Assume good intent and competence: begin from trust, not suspicion. Remember that people have different strengths, perspectives, and stages in their careers.
  2. Challenge your priors: ask yourself what evidence would actually change your mind. Spend more time looking for signals that contradict your assumptions, and less time searching for patterns that reinforce them. We, humans, are pattern-recognition machines, and far more sensitive to signals that confirm our beliefs than to those that challenge them.
  3. Stay specific: ground judgments in context, constraints, and goals; avoid drifting into abstraction. Use concrete examples to avoid talking past each other.
  4. Listen actively: stay curious about others’ perspectives before responding.

And one more thing, a universal trick: be the first to be vulnerable; that’s often the fastest way to build trust.

  1. In High Output Management, Andrew Grove argued that in tech companies, people with the knowledge and experience to make high-impact decisions naturally take on leadership roles. Leadership is not limited to people managers; senior engineers, architects, and product managers often lead because they make high-impact decisions. ↩︎

  2. “Being Right A Lot” is one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles. ↩︎