Judgment is 99% Listening

Good Judgment in Leadership

Good judgment is not a nice-to-have in leadership; it is a fitness test. Teams feel it in how managers decide under pressure, how they weigh context, and how they share accountability. When judgment falters, the immediate harm is the incident itself. The lasting harm is cultural—trust erodes, psychological safety shrinks, and people learn the wrong lessons about how power is used.

The Problem With Rushed Judgment

Rushed judgment masquerades as decisiveness. It feels efficient, projects control, and reassures anxious stakeholders. But it often confuses proximity to power with proximity to truth. The result is brittle decisions that fail basic fairness tests: they ignore context, flatten nuance, and misassign blame.

Leaders under pressure are vulnerable to three traps:

• Performance over process: optimizing for looking decisive rather than being thorough.
• Selective hearing: preferring information that confirms a pre-selected narrative.
• Accountability dumping: assigning fault to those with the least power to push back—usually an individual contributor (IC)—because it is fast and tidy.

Good judgment resists these traps. It trades speed for accuracy when the stakes require it. It favors process over performance, even when the room wants a quick villain and a shorter meeting.

A Case—Security Flaw, Pressure, And Accountability

A composite case from my experience: a security flaw made it through our pipeline, was exploited, and caused a loss. The work had been reviewed by a manager, tested with reasonable diligence, and signed off by an external expert for the risk area. Despite that, something slipped. Within hours, senior leaders wanted a public remedy and a visible consequence. A message began to circulate that the IC responsible for the change should be fired.

I made a different call. I shielded the IC and accepted accountability as the manager. We owned the incident publicly, started containment and remediation, and communicated timelines to normalize operations. I asked the IC to focus on technical recovery and root-cause analysis, not on defending themselves in meetings.

Several days later, after the immediate fire had cooled, a senior leader hosted what became a one-sided postmortem. The conclusion, presented as settled fact, was that my judgment was the problem. The same external expert who had provided sign-off deflected responsibility; their report contained an obscure, near-match risk that, in their view, should have triggered a red flag. In reality, the report issued a green light. Bringing this nuance into the conversation was actively discouraged. The room was quiet—founder power carried the air, and very few were willing to slow the train to hear all sides.

Team morale never quite recovered; the team broke apart two months later.

Standards Of Care And Shared Responsibility

The standard of care for the work had been met. As the manager, I had ensured reasoned reviews, reasonable tests, and explicit sign-off from an external expert. We had drawn up a risk matrix, and the remaining risks were explicitly accepted. No one cut corners. The flaw exploited a subtle edge case that has only a passing, obtuse, misnamed mention buried in the middle of the expert’s report. It made sense in hindsight, but was easily overlooked in the heat of battle. In other words, the system behaved like systems do under stress—weak links show up where multiple small gaps align.

Shared responsibility is not a slogan; it is how complex systems avoid scapegoat logic. In this case:

• The IC followed the documented process and raised concerns when they saw them.
• The manager confirmed the design choices, ensured testing, and took the release through the review gates.
• The external expert reviewed the material risks and affirmed readiness with a green light.
• Leadership set the delivery tempo and accepted risk in service of business goals.

With that frame, the question is not, Who do we fire? It is, Where did our system of controls, reviews, and incentives allow this to pass? That question is only answerable if leaders invite context rather than suppress it.

Due Process For Judgment—99% Listening, 1% Talking

Due process in leadership is not a legalism. It is the discipline of hearing all sides and pulling maximal context before rendering a view. In practice, that means:

• Start with a neutral timeline: assemble from artifacts, not memories.
• Hear from the people closest to the work: especially the IC—without interruption or leading questions.
• Invite external context: that cuts against the room’s preferred narrative.
• Test for contributory factors: standards, processes, incentives, capacity, power dynamics, and time pressure.

When I am doing this well, I talk for a minute and listen for an hour. The goal is not to produce a perfect verdict; it is to arrive at a balanced one that reasonable people can accept without pressure.

Rendering Balanced Judgment That Good-Faith People Can Accept

Balanced judgment acknowledges contributory fault without theatrical blame. It recognizes that in complex work, multiple small misses compound. A manager might own a gap in review depth. An external expert might own the ambiguity in a report that read as a green light. Leadership might own pushing tempo without a matching control. The IC might own a missed edge case.

The judgment itself should be concise and nuanced: specific about what happened, clear about who owns what, and explicit about changes. What makes it acceptable is not wordsmithing; it is the integrity of the process. When good-faith people see that all sides were heard and the context was maximized, they rarely argue with the conclusion—even when it is uncomfortable.

A Leader’s Judgment Rubric And Practical Next Steps

If judgment is 99% listening and 1% talking, here is a practical way to apply it in the moment:

• Slow the moment: buy time proportionate to the stakes; tell the room you will return with a complete view.
• Build the timeline: collect artifacts, logs, and diffs; separate facts from interpretations.
• Check standards of care: what was expected, what was done, what was tested, and who signed off—including any external expert involvement.
• Map power dynamics: note who benefits from simple blame, and make space for dissenting context.
• Hear the IC and the manager: uninterrupted accounts first, clarifying questions after.
• Identify contributory factors: process gaps, ambiguous guidance, incentives, workload, time pressure, and risk trade-offs.
• Render a concise, nuanced judgment: acknowledge shared responsibility, specify changes, and explain why the decision is fair.
• Communicate accountability: state who will own which fixes, by when, and how they will be verified.
• Normalize operations: pair remediation with a plan to restore confidence and stability.
• Document and share: write the postmortem for learning, not theater; include the timeline, decisions, and follow-ups.

Conclusion

Judgment is a power. Be proportionate in its responsible use. When leaders listen first, weigh context, and render balanced, transparent decisions, they earn durable trust. Use judgment well, and you will have the respect of your teams on the other end of crises.