There is a comforting version of leadership in which good decisions eventually produce agreement.

• Explain the rationale.
• Listen carefully.
• Bring people on the journey.
• Communicate clearly.

If people understand why, they may not like the decision, but they will understand it. Sometimes.

Other times, they understand perfectly well and still think it is a terrible decision. They may even be right. At least from where they are standing.

This becomes increasingly common as leaders move higher through an organisation because the nature of the decisions changes.

• A team leader can often optimise for the needs of a team.
• A functional leader can often optimise for a function.
• Senior leaders rarely have that luxury.

Senior leaders make decisions across competing interests, different time horizons and groups of people who will experience the consequences very differently.

Which creates an uncomfortable contradiction: The higher a leader goes, the more people they are responsible for considering, and the less likely it becomes that any decision will satisfy all of them.

Leadership does not necessarily become harder because people become more difficult. Sometimes the mathematics simply becomes worse. The same decision can be both good and bad.

Imagine an organisation closes a regional office. From an enterprise perspective, the decision may be entirely defensible. For the people who work there, however, the decision may mean longer travel, disrupted routines, relocation or redundancy.

Telling them the decision is “good for the organisation” does not make those consequences less real. Both things can be true. The decision can be strategically sensible, and it can negatively affect good people.

Senior leadership contains a lot of these situations.

• Centralising one capability improves consistency but removes autonomy elsewhere.
• Investing heavily in one division means another receives less.
• Changing a structure creates opportunity for some people and removes it for others.
• Holding a high performer accountable may destabilise a team in the short term.
• Protecting long-term capability may require accepting worse short-term results.

There is no communication technique that removes these contradictions. Sometimes there is no version where everybody wins.

DISAGREEMENT IS NOT NECESSARILY RESISTANCE

Organisations have developed a habit of treating disagreement as something to overcome.

• Resistance to change.
• Lack of buy-in.
• 
  
• Poor engagement.

Occasionally those descriptions are accurate. But disagreement can also be entirely rational. If a decision makes somebody's work harder, reduces their resources or threatens something they value, why wouldn't they disagree with it?

Senior leaders can make this worse by assuming opposition means people have failed to understand the bigger picture. Sometimes they understand the bigger picture. They simply occupy a different part of it. That distinction matters.

Because treating legitimate disagreement as an engagement problem encourages leaders to keep explaining until people produce the desired response. At some point, communication stops being explanation and starts becoming an attempt to manufacture agreement.

People are allowed to understand a decision and still dislike it.

APPROVAL IS UNUSUALLY POOR FEEDBACK

This creates a problem for leaders. Most human beings prefer approval to disapproval. Senior leaders are still human beings. When a decision is well received, it feels like evidence that it was good. When people are angry, disappointed or critical, it creates an uncomfortable possibility that something went wrong. Sometimes it did. But approval is a noisy measure of leadership effectiveness.

Popular decisions can be disastrous. Necessary decisions can be deeply unpopular. A leader who uses approval as their primary feedback mechanism will eventually learn which decisions produce the least resistance. That may make the organisation more comfortable. It does not necessarily make it better.

There is a reason difficult issues can survive several generations of leadership. Every individual decision to leave them alone was easier than confronting them.

FAIRNESS DOES NOT ALWAYS LOOK EQUAL

Senior decisions also expose leaders to competing definitions of fairness.

• One team receives additional investment because its market is growing. Another asks why it is being punished despite performing well.
• A struggling business unit receives additional support. A successful one wonders why competence appears to be rewarded with fewer resources.
• One employee receives flexibility because of unusual circumstances. Others see inconsistent treatment.

Treat everyone identically and individual circumstances disappear. Treat everyone according to circumstances and consistency disappears. There is no perfectly clean answer.

Fairness and sameness are not synonymous. But neither is every inconsistency evidence of sophisticated leadership. Senior leaders have to live somewhere in that tension. And whichever side they choose, somebody will probably have a reasonable argument for the other.

DISTANCE CHANGES PERSPECTIVE

There is also an unavoidable difference in what senior leaders can see.

A person inside a team experiences a decision through its immediate consequences. A senior leader may be considering consequences across 20 teams, three years and an entire organisation. Neither perspective is inherently superior. The senior leader has breadth. The employee has proximity. Breadth can reveal consequences invisible locally. Proximity can reveal consequences invisible from the executive table.

This is why “they don't see the bigger picture” is such an unsatisfying dismissal of criticism. Perhaps they don't. But senior leaders don't necessarily see the smaller picture either. And sometimes the smaller picture contains something important.

The challenge is not deciding which perspective counts. It is making decisions while knowing no single perspective contains the whole organisation.

LISTENING DOES NOT REQUIRE SURRENDER

The obvious danger is that leaders become hardened to disagreement.

If criticism is inevitable, why pay attention to it? Because disagreement still contains information. A decision being unpopular does not make it wrong. Nor does being prepared to make unpopular decisions make a leader right. That distinction is important.

Some leaders wear opposition as evidence of courage. People are upset, therefore I must be making the hard decision. That logic is no better than chasing approval.

Disagreement needs examination.

• What are people seeing that we are not?
• Which consequences did we underestimate?
• Is the objection self-interest, legitimate operational concern, or both?
• Has something changed since the decision was made?
• Would we make the same choice knowing what we know now?

Strong leadership does not require being unaffected by criticism. It requires being capable of hearing criticism without automatically obeying it or defending against it.

THERE MAY BE NO APPLAUSE

Leadership becomes different when decisions affect people who did not choose the trade-offs behind them.

• Sometimes the organisation benefits and a particular team does not.
• Sometimes one group absorbs a cost so another part of the organisation can survive.
• Sometimes the least bad decision is still genuinely bad for somebody.

Those people are not required to be grateful for the quality of the leader's reasoning. They may never agree. That does not remove the obligation to listen to them, explain the decision or take responsibility for its consequences. But neither does leadership require turning every difficult decision into a shared conclusion.

Perhaps one of the transitions into senior leadership is accepting that understanding is not agreement, disagreement is not necessarily failure, and approval is not the same thing as effectiveness.

The question is not whether everybody liked the decision. It is not even whether everybody eventually agreed. The more difficult question is whether the leader considered what needed to be considered, heard what needed to be heard, understood who would carry the consequences, and remained willing to own the decision afterwards.

Sometimes that will earn respect. Sometimes it won't. There may be no applause. That doesn't necessarily mean the decision was wrong.