Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly what it's intended to mean. Until a decision is made, feel free to express your disagreement and arguments in favor of your position. If your ideas/arguments are convincing enough (words that are doing a lot of work, I realize), then it will be chosen.

Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it.

Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't like a decision, just continue to disagree with it, pocket veto/ignore it, pretend it doesn't apply to you/your team?

View on HN

The "disagree and commit" leadership principle is supposed to represent a situation where the manager is the one who disagrees with a subordinate but trusts the subordinate's judgement enough to commit to going along with their idea (this also works for a peer relationship). The relevant LP for the subordinate is "earn trust". Simply following orders is not an LP. Of course there is enough vagueness in the LPs that Jassy can twist the meaning a bit.

In my experience as a bar raiser this is not correct. 'Disagree and commit' was about creating space disagreement/discussion, until a critical point where you need your team to align with upper level direction.

I respectfully disagree. :) The leadership principle is agnostic to the roles—the point is that people should not go along with decisions due to social cohesion but should express their disagreements and make their case. However, once a decision is made, the team should commit to implementing it. Ultimately, the decision making power still resides in the management chain, though.

But has it actually been communicated? In other words did Jassy email all Amazon employees globally and state that they must work from the office?

Why would you persist in disagreeing with an idea if you did not see real world consequences for the wrong solution in your future?

If you're dealing with obstructionist people, surely there are other ways to detect and address it than 'disagree and commit'.

Why are people people?

For nearly any policy change, you can probably find 20% or more of people who would not have made that same exact choice. Many of them, if left to their own devices, will persist in disagreeing, slow-rolling, being mildly obstructionist, or similar.

If you don't have a clear (and enforced) principle that requires the implementation of made decisions and bars re-opening discussion absent material new information, you'll end up with an organization that lazily drifts towards the new decision instead of aggressively pivots towards it. That's clearly accepted in some companies; it doesn't seem to be accepted at Amazon.

Or maybe it’s not obstructionist people and you just have a difference in opinion. Or you might be wrong. Or you’re the obstructionist person.

That’s the whole point of disagree and commit. Most decisions are not clear cut obvious decisions, otherwise it’s unlikely there would be disagreements about them.

Disagree and commit allows everyone to contribute to their max capacity and move forward once deadlock has been reached.

I've worked two places that had this rule, and both of them only needed it because they had profound issues elsewhere in their management practice that were leading to trust issues. One of them was almost certainly cargo culting Amazon.

There's only one place I can think of that might have benefited from that rule, and there were other solutions that would have worked as well if not better. Like a boss with a backbone.

The real trouble with disagree and commit comes where it's the manager/leadership pushing ideas that are gonna cause problems.

Ultimately, if you need to exercise your management authority about stuff that your reports are doing that's a time-limited move, as too much of this will lead to reports just doing exactly what they're told, which is the kiss of death if you want to build good stuff quickly.

At some point, your objections are noted and we're just going to move on and it's not useful to anyone if you continue to complain about the decision at every opportunity. I've been on both sides of that fence. At some point, you buy in or move on--whatever that means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com