The Elements of Good Judgment

LEADERSHIP

A
by Sir Andrew Likierman
From the January–February 2020 Issue

decision must be made. The facts have been assembled, and the arguments
for and against the options spelled out, but no clear evidence supports any
particular one. Now people around the table turn to the CEO. What they’re
looking for is good judgment—an interpretation of the evidence that points
to the right choice.

Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and

experience to form opinions and make decisions—is “the core of exemplary leadership”
according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning
Leaders Make Great Calls). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut,
relevant data or an obvious path. To some degree we are all capable of forming views
and interpreting evidence. What we need, of course, is good judgment.

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A lot of ink has been spilled in the effort to understand what good judgment consists of.
Some experts define it as an acquired instinct or “gut feeling” that somehow combines
deep experience with analytic skills at an unconscious level to produce an insight or
recognize a pattern that others overlook. At a high level this definition makes intuitive
sense; but it is hard to move from understanding what judgment is to knowing how to
acquire or even to recognize it.

In an effort to meet that challenge, I’ve talked to CEOs in a range of companies, from
some of the world’s largest right down to start-ups. I’ve approached leaders in the
professions as well: senior partners at law and accountancy firms, generals, doctors,
scientists, priests, and diplomats. I asked them to share their observations of their own
and other people’s exercise of judgment so that I could identify the skills and behaviors
that collectively create the conditions for fresh insights and enable decision makers to
discern patterns that others miss. I have also looked at the relevant literatures,
including leadership and psychology.

I’ve found that leaders with good judgment tend to be good listeners and readers—able
to hear what other people actually mean, and thus able to see patterns that others do
not. They have a breadth of experiences and relationships that enable them to recognize
parallels or analogies that others miss—and if they don’t know something, they’ll know
someone who does and lean on that person’s judgment. They can recognize their own
emotions and biases and take them out of the equation. They’re adept at expanding the
array of choices under consideration. Finally, they remain grounded in the real world:
In making a choice they also consider its implementation.

Practices that leaders can adopt, skills they can cultivate, and relationships they can
build will inform the judgments they make. In this article I’ll walk through the six basic
components of good judgment—I call them learning, trust, experience, detachment,
options, and delivery—and offer suggestions for how to improve them.

Learning: Listen Attentively, Read Critically

Good judgment requires that you turn knowledge into understanding. This sounds
obvious, but as ever, the devil is in the detail—in this case your approach to learning.
Many leaders rush to bad judgments because they unconsciously filter the information
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they receive or are not sufficiently critical of what they hear or read.

The truth, unfortunately, is that few of us really absorb the information we receive. We
filter out what we don’t expect or want to hear, and this tendency doesn’t necessarily
improve with age. (Research shows, for example, that children notice things that adults
don’t.) As a result, leaders simply miss a great deal of the information that’s available—a
weakness to which top performers are especially vulnerable because overconfidence so
often comes with success.

Exceptions exist, of course. I first met John Buchanan early in a distinguished four-
decade career during which he became the CFO at BP, the chairman of Smith &
Nephew, the deputy chairman of Vodafone, and a director at AstraZeneca, Alliance
Boots, and BHP Billiton. What struck me immediately and throughout our
acquaintance was that he gave me and everyone else his undivided attention. Many
people with his record of accomplishment would long ago have stopped listening in
favor of pontificating.

Leaders with good judgment tend to be good

listeners and readers.
Buchanan was more than a good listener—he was adept at eliciting information that
people might not otherwise volunteer. His questions were designed to draw out
interesting responses. He told me that when deciding whether to accept a directorship,
for example, he would ask questions such as “Where would you place this company on
a spectrum of white to gray?” “At first this sounds like a classic piece of managementese
that is clever but meaningless,” he said. “Yet it is sufficiently open-ended to draw out
replies on a wide range of subjects and sufficiently pointed to produce a meaningful
response.”

Information overload, particularly with written material, is another problem. It’s not
surprising that CEOs with huge demands on their time and attention struggle to get
through the volume of emails and briefing papers they receive. As a director of a large
listed company, I would get up to a million words to read ahead of a big meeting.
Confronted with such a deluge, it’s tempting to skim and to remember only the material
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that confirms our beliefs. That’s why smart leaders demand quality rather than quantity
in what gets to them. Three hundred pages for the next big meeting? It’s six pages
maximum for agenda items at Amazon and the Bank of England.

Overload is not the only challenge when it comes to reading. A more subtle risk is
taking the written word at face value. When we listen to people speak, we look
(consciously or unconsciously) for nonverbal clues about the quality of what we’re
hearing. While reading, we lack that context; and in an era when the term “fake news”
is common, decision makers need to pay extra attention to the quality of the
information they see and hear, especially material filtered by colleagues or obtained
through search engines and social media exchanges. Are you really as careful in
assessing and filtering as you should be, knowing how variable the quality is? If you
believe that you never unconsciously screen out information, consider whether you
choose a newspaper that agrees with what you already think.

People with good judgment are skeptical of information that doesn’t make sense. We
might none of us be alive today if it weren’t for a Soviet lieutenant colonel by the name
of Stanislav Petrov. It came to light only after the fall of communism that one day in
1983, as the duty officer at the USSR’s missile tracking center, Petrov was advised that
Soviet satellites had detected a U.S. missile attack on the Soviet Union. He decided that
the 100% probability reading was implausibly high and did not report the information
upward, as were his instructions. Instead he reported a system malfunction. “I had all
the data [to suggest a missile attack was ongoing],” he told the BBC’s Russian service in
2013. “If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a
word against it.” It turned out that the satellites had mistaken sunlight reflected from
clouds for missile engines.

To improve:
Active listening, including picking up on what’s not said and interpreting body
language, is a valuable skill to be honed, and plenty of advice exists. Beware of your
own filters and of defensiveness or aggression that may discourage alternative
arguments. If you get bored and impatient when listening, ask questions and check
conclusions. If you’re overwhelmed by written briefing material, focus on the parts that
discuss questions and issues rather than those that summarize the presentations you’ll
hear at the meeting. (Far too many board packs are stuffed with advance copies of /
presentations.) Look for gaps or discrepancies in what’s being said or written. Think
carefully about where the underlying data is coming from and the likely interests of the
people supplying it. If you can, get input and data from people on more than one side of
an argument—especially people you don’t usually agree with. Finally, make sure the
yardsticks and proxies for data you rely on are sound; look for discrepancies in the
metrics and try to understand them.

Trust: Seek Diversity, Not Validation

Leadership shouldn’t be a solitary endeavor. Leaders can draw on the skills and
experiences of others as well as their own when they approach a decision. Who these
advisers are and how much trust the leader places in them are critical to the quality of
that leader’s judgment.

Unfortunately, many CEOs and entrepreneurs bring people on board who simply echo
and validate them. The disgraced executives Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani of
the start-up Theranos regarded anyone who raised a concern or an objection as a cynic
and a naysayer. “Employees who persisted in doing so were usually marginalized or
fired, while sycophants were promoted,” according to the Financial Times. Recently
jailed for 18 years, Wu Xiaohui, the founder and leading light of China’s Anbang
Insurance Group, had built up a diverse international empire, buying major assets that
included New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. He also surrounded himself with
“unimpressive people who would just follow his orders and not question them,” one
employee told FT.

The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her book Team of Rivals, noted that Abraham
Lincoln assembled a cabinet of experts he respected but who didn’t always agree with
one another. McKinsey has long included the obligation (not a suggestion) to dissent as a
central part of the way it does business. Amazon’s Leadership Principles specify that
leaders should “seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.”

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Tim Flach/Getty Images

Alibaba’s Jack Ma thinks along the same lines. Recognizing his own ignorance of
technology (he was 33 when he got his first computer), Ma hired John Wu of Yahoo as
his chief technology officer, commenting, “For a first-class company we need first-class
technology. When John comes, I can sleep soundly.” Ma isn’t the only mega-
entrepreneur who has looked for advisers with organizational and personal qualities
and experience to fill a void in himself. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl
Sandberg for a similar reason. And Natalie Massenet, founder of the online fashion
retailer Net-a-Porter, hired the much older Mark Sebba, the “understated chief
executive of Net-a-Porter who brought order to the ecommerce start-up in the manner /
of Robert De Niro in The Intern,” according to the Times of London. My brother Michael
told me that one reason his company’s chain of opticians, under the brand
GrandOptical, became the largest in France is that he partnered with Daniel Abittan,
whose operational excellence complemented Michael’s entrepreneurial vision and
strategic skills.

To improve:
Cultivate sources of trusted advice: people who will tell you what you need to know
rather than what you want to hear. When you are recruiting people on whose advice
you will rely, don’t take outcomes as a proxy for their good judgment. Make judgment
an explicit factor in appraisals and promotion decisions. Usha Prashar, who chaired the
body that makes the UK’s most-senior judicial appointments, pointed to the need to
probe how a candidate did things, not just what he or she had done. Dominic Barton of
McKinsey told me that he looked for what was not being said: Did people fail to
mention any “real” difficulties or setbacks or failures in their careers to date? One CEO
said he asked people about situations in which they’d had insufficient information or
conflicting advice. Don’t be put off by assessments that a candidate is “different.”
Someone who disagrees with you could provide the challenge you need.

Experience: Make It Relevant but Not Narrow

Beyond the data and evidence pertinent to a decision, leaders bring their experience to
bear when making judgment calls. Experience gives context and helps us identify
potential solutions and anticipate challenges. If they have previously encountered
something like a current challenge, leaders can scope out areas in which to focus their
energy and resources.

Mohamed Alabbar, the chairman of Dubai’s Emaar Properties and one of the Middle
East’s most successful entrepreneurs, gave me an example. His first major property
crisis, in Singapore in 1991, had taught him about the vulnerability that comes with
being highly geared in a downturn—and in real estate, only those who learn the lessons
of overgearing in their first crash survive in the long term. Alabbar has since navigated
Dubai’s often dramatic economic cycles and today owns a portfolio that includes the
Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and the Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest
shopping malls.
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 But—and it’s a big but—if the experience is
Success Is Not a Reliable narrowly based, familiarity can be
Proxy for Judgment dangerous. If my company is planning to
It’s tempting to assume that past enter the Indian market, I might not trust
successes are a sign of good judgment, the judgment of a person whose only
and in some cases they may be. The product launches have been in the United
multigenerational success of some States. I would probably be less worried
German midsize companies and the about someone who had also launched new
sheer longevity of Warren Buffett’s products in, say, China and South Africa,
investment performance are frequently
cited examples. But success can have because such a person would be less likely
other parents. Luck, the characteristic to ignore important signals.
that Napoleon famously required of his
generals, is often the unacknowledged In addition, leaders with deep experience in
architect of success. Those in sports a particular domain may fall into a rut,
can vouch for the importance of luck as making judgments out of habit,
well as skill. Grant Simmer, successively
navigator and designer in four America’s complacency, or overconfidence. It usually
Cup yachting victories, has takes an external crisis to expose this
acknowledged the help of luck in the failure, for which the lack of lifeboats for
form of mistakes made by his the Titanic is the enduring symbol and the
competitors. 2008 financial crisis the moment of truth
for many apparently unassailable titans.
Sometimes, what looks like sustained The equivalent today are those leaders who
success may conceal trickery. Before have underestimated the speed with which
the Enron scandal broke, in 2001, CEO
Jeff Skilling was hailed as a highly environmental issues would move center
successful leader. Toshiba’s well- stage and require a tangible response.
regarded boss, Hisao Tanaka, resigned
in disgrace in 2015 after a $1.2 billion To improve:
profit overstatement covering seven First, assess how well you draw on your
years was unearthed. Bernie Madoff own experience to make decisions. Start by
founded his investment firm in 1960 going through your important judgment
and for 48 years was seen as both calls to identify what went well and what
successful and a man of the highest
integrity. went badly, including whether you drew on
the right experience and whether the
analogies you made were appropriate.
Record both the wrong and the right. This/
 When you are trying to assess whether is tough, and it’s tempting to rewrite
a CEO—or a new hire—has good history, which is why it can be helpful to
judgment, don’t just look at that share your conclusions with a coach or
person’s achievements. Instead try to colleagues, who might take a different view
assess the person according to the six of the same experience. Try also to recruit a
elements described in this article. Does
she ask you questions or is she just smart friend who can be a neutral critic.
making a pitch? How did he get where
he is and whom does he listen to? What Leaders with deep
kind of training has she done? Does he experience in a
like to challenge his own assumptions? particular domain
may fall into a rut.
Second, especially if you’re a young leader,
work to expand your experience. Try to get postings abroad or in key corporate
functions such as finance, sales, and manufacturing. Get yourself on an acquisition
team for a major deal. And as a CEO, a crucial support you can give high-potential
managers is more-varied exposure, so get involved in career planning. That will not just
do the young managers a favor; it will help the company and very possibly you, because
it will broaden the experience into which you can tap.

Detachment: Identify, and Then Challenge, Biases

As you process information and draw on the diversity of your own and other people’s
knowledge, it’s critical that you understand and address your own biases. Although
passion about objectives and values is a wonderful leadership quality that can inspire
followers to greater efforts, it can also affect how you process information, learn from
experience, and select advisers.

The ability to detach, both intellectually and emotionally, is therefore a vital component
of good judgment. But it’s a difficult skill to master. As research in behavioral
economics, psychology, and decision sciences has shown in recent years, cognitive
biases such as anchoring, confirmation, and risk aversion or excessive risk appetite are
pervasive influences in the choices people make.

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The German utility RWE provides a cautionary example. In a 2017 interview its chief
financial officer revealed that the company had invested $10 billion in constructing
conventional power-generation facilities over a five-year period, most of which had to
be written off. RWE conducted a postmortem to understand why an investment in
conventional power technology had been chosen at a time when the energy industry
was switching to renewables. It determined that decision makers had displayed status
quo and confirmation biases in evaluating the investment context. It also found a
number of cases in which hierarchical biases had been in play: Subordinates who
doubted the judgment of their bosses had kept quiet rather than disagree with them.
Finally, the CFO said, RWE had suffered from “a good dose of action-oriented biases
like overconfidence and excessive optimism.”

It is precisely for their ability to resist cognitive biases and preserve detachment in
decision-making that we often see CFOs and lawyers rise to the CEO position,
especially when an organization is in a period of crisis and people’s jobs are under
threat. This quality was widely praised after the International Monetary Fund chose
Christine Lagarde as its director following the dramatic exit in 2011 of her predecessor,
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in the wake of a lurid scandal. Although Lagarde was not an
economist—unusual for an IMF chief—she had demonstrated her abilities as France’s
finance minister despite little political experience. And, undoubtedly, having been a
partner in a major international law firm equipped her to approach negotiation with
detachment—a critical capability at a time when the global financial system was under
severe stress.

To improve:
Understand, clarify, and accept different viewpoints. Encourage people to engage in
role-playing and simulations, which forces them to consider agendas other than their
own and can provide a safe space for dissent. If employees are encouraged to play the
role of a competitor, for example, they can experiment with an idea that they might be
reluctant to suggest to the boss.

Leadership development programs are a great forum in which to challenge assumptions

by exposing people to colleagues from different cultures and geographies, who come to
the discussion with different views.
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Tim Flach/Getty Images

Finally, people with good judgment make sure they have processes in place that keep
them aware of biases. After discovering how much value had been destroyed, RWE
established new practices: Major decisions now require that biases be on the table
before a discussion and, when necessary, that a devil’s advocate participate.
Acknowledge that mistakes will occur—and doubt the judgment of anyone who
assumes they won’t.

Options: Question the Solution Set Offered

In making a decision, a leader is often expected to choose between at least two options,
formulated and presented by their advocates. But smart leaders don’t accept that those
choices are all there is. During the 2008–2009 financial crisis, President Obama
pressed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to explain why he wasn’t considering
nationalizing the banks. Geithner recalls, “We had one of those really tough
conversations. Are you confident this is going to work? Can you reassure me? Why are
you confident? What are our choices? I told him that my judgment at the time was that
we had no option but to play out the thing we’d set in motion.”

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Obama was doing what all good leaders should do when told “We have no other option”
or “We have two options and one is really bad” or “We have three options but only one
is acceptable.” Other options almost always exist, such as doing nothing, delaying a
decision until more information is available, or conducting a time-limited trial or a pilot
implementation. Tim Breedon, formerly the CEO of the UK financial services company
Legal & General, described it to me as “not being boxed in by the way things are
presented.”

In hindsight, many bad judgment calls were

When You Have to Move inevitable simply because important
Fast options—and the risk of unintended
In most cases, good judgment requires consequences—were never even
reflection before action. A pause for considered. This happens for a variety of
reflection may well make you less likely reasons, including risk aversion on the part
to be swept along by anger or fear and of people supplying potential answers.
more likely to ask for additional That’s why thoroughly exploring the
evidence, consider reframing the
question, formulate new options, or solution set is key to a leader’s exercise of
reevaluate whether a project is feasible. judgment. It’s not the CEO’s job to come up
When you receive a provocative or with all the options. But he or she can
hostile email, for instance, counting to ensure that the management team delivers
10 (or even 1,000) will help you build the full range of possibilities, counteracting
emotional detachment and save you fears and biases that cause the team to self-
from writing something you might later edit. When all the options can be debated,
regret.
the judgment is more likely to be right.
Of course, sometimes you need to act
fast. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson To improve:
provides a case in point. One day in Press for clarification on poorly presented
2018 an employee in Philadelphia called information, and challenge your people if
the police, asking for the arrest of two you think important facts are missing.
black men who were sitting at a table Question their weighting of the variables
but hadn’t ordered. As social media on which their arguments depend. If timing
users started to call for a boycott, “his appears to be a key consideration,
response was personal, swift and
concrete: he fired the employee who determine that it’s legitimate. Factor in the
had called the police, agreed a risks associated with novel solutions—
settlement with the two men and closed stress and overconfidence—and look for /
 all 8,000 US stores for an afternoon of opportunities to mitigate them through
anti-bias training,” according to the piloting. Use modeling, triangulation, and
Financial Times. The speed of Johnson’s the opportunities afforded by artificial
response almost certainly prevented a intelligence. Follow King Solomon (a
disaster from turning into a catastrophe popular nominee in answer to my question
for Starbucks.
“Who do you think has/had good
Compare that response to United’s after judgment?”) and dig out people’s stakes in
a passenger, David Dao, was dragged the final decision. A telltale sign is being
off a Chicago-to-Louisville flight in 2017. oversold on a particular outcome. What are
Instead of addressing the widespread the personal consequences to them (and to
outrage in reaction to the video of Dao’s you) if their solution works or fails?
ordeal, which had gone viral, Oscar Consult those you trust. If there isn’t
Munoz, the CEO of United, sent a anyone, or enough time, try to imagine
supportive letter to staff members.
Good for morale, perhaps, but not as a what someone you trust would do. Get
first response, and Munoz was criticized clear about rules and ethical issues, because
in the press as klutzy and heartless. they will help you filter your choices.
Finally, don’t be afraid to consider radical
If you’re in a situation like these, ask options. Discussing them could make you
yourself three quick questions before and others aware of some that are less
responding: Do I tend to act impulsively radical but well worth considering and may
and then regret it? Do I have insufficient encourage other people to speak up.
relevant experience? Are the stakes
high? If your answer to any of these is
yes, think hard rather than react with Delivery: Factor
of Execution in the Feasibility
your gut.
You can make all the right strategic choices
but still end up losing out if you don’t
exercise judgment in how and by whom
those choices will be executed. In 1880 the French diplomat and entrepreneur
Ferdinand de Lesseps persuaded investors to support digging a canal in Panama to link
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Because de Lesseps had just completed the Suez Canal,
investors and politicians—failing to understand that building a canal through sand does
not qualify you to build one through jungle—did not give his plans the scrutiny they
deserved. His approach proved disastrously unsuitable, and it was left to the U.S.
government to complete the canal by taking a very different approach.
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When reviewing projects, smart leaders think carefully about the risks of
implementation and press for clarification from a project’s advocates. This is as
important for small decisions as it is for big ones.

A leader with good judgment anticipates risks after a course has been determined and
knows by whom those risks are best managed. That may not be the person who came
up with the idea—particularly if the proposer is wedded to a particular vision, as was
the case with de Lesseps. More generally, flair, creativity, and imagination aren’t always
accompanied by a capability to deliver—which is why small tech firms often struggle to
capitalize on their inspiration and are bought out by less-inventive but better-organized
giants.

To improve:
In assessing a proposal, make sure that the experience of the people recommending the
investment closely matches its context. If they point to their prior work, ask them to
explain why that work is relevant to the current situation. Get the advocates to question
their assumptions by engaging in “premortem” discussions, in which participants try to
surface what might cause a proposal to fail. RWE now does this as part of its project-
evaluation process.

CONCLUSION
Leaders need many qualities, but underlying them all is good judgment. Those with
ambition but no judgment run out of money. Those with charisma but no judgment lead
their followers in the wrong direction. Those with passion but no judgment hurl
themselves down the wrong paths. Those with drive but no judgment get up very early
to do the wrong things. Sheer luck and factors beyond your control may determine your
eventual success, but good judgment will stack the cards in your favor.

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Sir Andrew Likierman is a professor at London Business School and a director of Times Newspapers
and the Beazley Group, both also in London. He has served as dean at LBS and is a former director of the Bank
of England.
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7 COMMENTS

SHUBHEN SARANGI 2 months ago

Is sound judgement a skill and can it be taught - is an important topic to reflect on. The points about CFOs,
lawyers making good CEOs and Christine Lagarde's qualities are quite simplistic & flaky.
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