Your team loves all your decisions. That's the problem.

If everyone on your team agrees with your decisions, you are irrelevant as a leader.

That's not hyperbole. That's the actual job description.

Think about it. The decisions where everybody's happy—where you've got consensus, where nobody's pushing back, where it's obviously the right call—those don’t require leadership. That's just collective decision-making.

And if that's all you're doing, what's the point of you being there?

Leadership isn't the easy, teachable stuff. It's not setting goals, getting KPIs right, learning how to delegate, or writing mission and vision statements. Those are important, but obvious. Those are table stakes.

Ben Horowitz—author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things—talks about this. He says people don't run into trouble with the obvious leadership stuff. They run into trouble with the hard stuff.

The hard conversations with people you actually like. Handling a reorg when people are going to lose power and all the emotions that come with it. Demoting somebody. Firing somebody. Telling someone you're killing their passion project.

Or making decisions where you're 60-65% sure, but not certain. Decisions that are unpopular with your team or even your customer base.

Those are the hard things. And from personal experience and working with other leaders, those are exactly the things people tend to avoid.

In fact, the default is avoidance.

But, if you don't sprint towards those hard things, they're going to find you anyway. They're going to hunt you down. You'll have to deal with them eventually—only now they're bigger, messier, and harder to fix.

When you avoid the hard decisions, the hard conversations, the hard changes, you end up with what Horowitz calls "management debt."

Management debt is all the decisions you should have made but didn't. All the conversations you should have had but avoided. All the changes you should have implemented but put off.

And just like financial debt, management debt compounds in the background.

If you don't fire the person who should be fired, your business continues to operate with that inefficiency.

If you don't kill the product who needs to be killed, your business continues to sell and support something that doesn’t work.

If you don't change the behavior that needs to be changed, that problem permeates your organization.

It keeps adding up. It accumulates.

And it's not just that specific problem. As it spreads through your organization, it impacts your culture. Good people start leaving because they see the dysfunction. Your business stagnates. You plateau.

The longer it goes, the more it adds up, and the harder it becomes to actually unwind. If you were avoiding it when it was small, you're definitely going to want to avoid it when it's massive.

Here's what I've come to understand: the point where you add value as a leader is literally when you do things that people don't like.

When you have the conversation other people won't have—the one the person at the other end of the table doesn't want to hear.

When you make that decision you're confident in but not certain about. You feel pretty good about it, but you're operating in uncertainty. That's what leaders do. We make decisions with incomplete information.

And when people push back on those decisions, that's you doing your job.

If you're trying to make everyone happy, or you're avoiding decisions because you know people are going to disagree with you, you're avoiding your job as a leader.

Your job is making unpopular decisions. If you're not willing to make them, you’re irrelevant.

That's why leadership takes courage.

And why it’s not about whether you're liked and respected in the short run. It's about whether you're liked and respected in the long run.

Leadership isn't consensus-building. It's making the hard calls that need to be made, having the hard conversations that need to be had, and doing the hard things that everyone else is avoiding.

So if you find yourself with a team that agrees with everything you're doing, that's not necessarily a sign you're a great leader.

That may be a sign you're not leading at all.

Sprint towards the discomfort. Your business—and your future self—will thank you later.

Adios,

Ray

P.S. - If you read one business book this year, I recommend The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Easily one of my top 5 business books. I've read it multiple times, and I read it through a different lens every time.