A Good Reputation Will Not Protect a Bad Decision
Why leaders need judgement and Adaptive Stability before they Act
“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”
Rio Tinto had a permit to destroy the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in 2020. That permission did not prevent what followed.
Australia's parliamentary inquiry report titled “Never Again” condemned the blast. It found serious failures in how the company dealt with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, and criticised the company for putting commercial interests ahead of properly listening to the Traditional Owners whose sacred site was destroyed. Senior executives lost their jobs following intense public and shareholder backlash. Social license to operate was lost.
Leaders can damage trust in one of two ways. Leaders abandon a principle under pressure, or they keep pursuing an objective after new information should have changed what they were doing.
The Adaptive Stability approach asks leaders to be clear about what should remain steady, while being willing to change the way they are going about it, or how quickly they move when the evidence changes.
Your decisions show people what you value
A leader cannot decide that people will trust them. Other people decide that for themselves.
What leaders can decide is whether they listen before acting, whether they treat people with less power with the same respect they show those with more, and whether they are willing to let new evidence to change a decision already underway.
Trust is often described as a bank account, with good decisions as deposits and bad ones as withdrawals. I like that metaphor but it is not quite that simple. Trust can take years to build and one serious decision can damage it very quickly.
Over time, people learn what a leader really values from what they do, not just what they say. One serious lapse in judgement can make them question what they thought they knew.
The difficult decisions are rarely the obviously bad ones. They are often legal, commercially attractive, already underway and supported by people around the table. Those are the decisions that can be easiest to stop questioning.
Three ways to check yourself before you decide
Ask who can affect you, and separately, who you can affect. Most stakeholder mapping focuses on power and influence. That can create a blind spot: the people most affected by a decision may have the least power to change it.
Extend the front page test. Don't just ask whether you would be comfortable seeing the decision published tomorrow. Ask whether you would be comfortable seeing why you made it, what you weighed up and who would be affected published beside it.
Notice what you are telling yourself to justify the decision.
It's legal.
Everyone does it.
We've come too far to change now.
They'll understand.
We need the result.
None of these means the decision is wrong. But each is a reason to look at it again before you go forward.
A Question Worth Reflecting On
Leaders earn trust through the decisions they make, particularly when the pressure is high, the answer is not obvious and changing course would be inconvenient.
If this decision became part of what people used to judge whether to trust you next time, would you still make it the same way?
