Your best judgement is more local than you think
Readtime: 2.5 minutes
At this time of year, I do a lot of my travel in central London by bike. It's so nice cycling around the city on quiet cycle routes in the sunshine.
I follow the rules. I stop at red lights.
And most of the time, while I'm waiting there, another cyclist will sail straight through the red light in front of me.
For a second, I feel like an idiot. There's no traffic. Nobody crossing. And I'm often the only one who's stopped.
I thought about this a lot after a trip to Vietnam, where there is a different set of rules that makes the traffic look like total chaos. Scooters and bikes coming from every direction, no lanes that anyone seems to obey. And yet it works. Everyone moves carefully, everyone watches, and somehow it all flows.
In Ho Chi Minh City you watch the road, not the signal.
And that's really what the cyclist in front of me is doing when they roll through the red light. They've looked at the empty junction and trusted what they can see, rather than the light. A flash of Vietnam on a London street.
I stop at red lights because that's just what you do here. And the people flowing through Ho Chi Minh City aren't being reckless, or brave. They're doing the obvious, sensible thing, in the place where that is obvious and sensible.
Two opposite approaches, and each one feels like plain common sense to the people doing it. From inside your own system, it never really looks like one option among several. It just looks like the way things are.
The same is true at work, where there's rarely one right set of rules.
Different teams and different companies run on completely different systems. Some are all policy and process and sign-off. Others run on trust and speed and almost nothing written down. And to the people inside each one, their way is simply how things are done. The other way looks careless, or slow, or a bit mad.
You see this most clearly when someone crosses from one company to the other. Someone joins a leadership team from another company, does exactly what made them impressive there, and within a month they're a problem.
Too rigid, or too loose. Too corporate, or too cowboy. They haven't got worse. They've just brought a different set of rules, and everyone can see it but them.
A lot of what we call good leadership judgement is really just fluency in one system. You know your own place so well that the right move feels obvious. But that kind of obvious often travels badly.
Change companies, or even teams, and the judgement you were so sure of often has to be learned again from scratch.
So the next time someone at work does something in a way that strikes you as obviously wrong, notice how certain you are.
They're probably standing in the middle of their own street, just as certain that the way they cross it is simply the way it's done. And so are you.
So here’s a question for you this week: How much of what you call your leadership judgement would still hold on a different street?
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If your team is working hard but not having as much impact as you’d like, the back half of the year is a good time to change that. Reply with one thing you’d like to be different by December, and I'll let you know whether I can help. I am based in central London and work internationally (in-person and virtually).