Your Opinions Are Killing Your Company

Opinions complicate your processes and slow things down...and slowly kill you

If you find yourself in any position of authority at any size company, you’re going to also find yourself asked about your opinion a lot. You’re going to be expected to have an opinion about everything. Or you’re going to naturally form an opinion about everything going on around you. If that sounds remotely familiar, let me warn you that this might be killing your company (and also you). Note: all hyperbole intended.

I’m going to borrow a bit from a great post about this from Ryan Holiday, but give it more of a business spin. For those not familiar with Ryan’s work, he does a lot around the great Stoics of the past. The basis of this post come from Marcus Aurelius.

We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind–for things have no natural power to shape our judgment.

The bottom line is this: the more opinions you have, the more stressed you’re going to be. This applies to both life and business. If you don’t have an opinion about something, it can’t ever bother you. Ryan’s post summarizes this well.

The Stoics saw opinion as the source of most misery. It’s what takes objective situations and makes them good, bad, wrong, unfair, essential, deserved or outrageous. It’s also what takes things that have nothing to do with us and makes them problems for us.

And this is exactly what happens in most companies and why things get off the rails. As soon as someone comes to you asking for your opinion on something, you’re now part of the process...part of figuring out the problem even if you have no business being in that position. That is, your opinion be quoted every time that process or idea comes back up and everyone will need to get approval from you before moving forward. That’s probably better explained with an example.

Let’s say your product team is developing a new feature with a specific interface design. You’re a senior person at the company, so early on the product team comes to you for feedback (i.e., for your opinion). You might give some advice or notes and give some overall impressions. And now, for better or worse, you’re now part of the development process for that feature. The reason for this is that every iteration of this feature and likely before launch, the team will feel compelled to check back in with you for your updated opinion. Through no fault or intention of your own, you’ve just slowed down your development process simply by having an opinion.

But that’s the best case scenario. In the worse case scenario, at companies with deeper issues, these collected opinions from different people about the same feature will get played against each other to push agendas, get pet projects approved, and to kill the competing projects of other teams.

There’s a simple solution to all of this that comes with two great sets of benefits. The solution is to just not have an opinion about everything. So, in our example above, when the product team comes to you, think VERY hard before giving any opinion (or even taking the meeting in the first place). Consider if you’re opinion is really going to help things or if you should just trust and defer to your team to make the right call. Try this: “Thanks for bringing this to me to take a look, but I’m going to leave it to the team to make the call here.”

Trust me. I know that’s really hard to do. I love (to a fault) having my hands in everything and knowing everything that’s going on, but at some point I did realize that it often caused more problems than it helped.

As for those two sets of benefits I mentioned, the first is that you’ll be far less stressed and upset about most things. As Ryan’s earlier quote alluded to, opinions are “what takes objective situations and makes them good, bad, wrong, unfair, essential, deserved or outrageous.” It’s exhausting to feel that way about every part of every team and every project at your company. The related benefit is that your teams will move more quickly and will feel more empowered. Well managed teams will always thrive in that sort of environments (if you just let them).

Jonathan Richman (your friendly author) has spent more than 25 years learning hard lessons about business (and life) across multiple industries and all sorts of different roles. His latest endeavor is a new full-service automation agency, Obvify.

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