Don’t Make a Decision You’ll Regret

This is Part 4 of my series, How to Leave Something the Right Way.

There is something I’ve told my kids for years:

Don’t make a decision you’re going to regret.

That doesn’t mean every decision will work out.

Sometimes you make what you believe is the right decision and still get a bad result.

Sometimes doing the right thing might even cost you something.

I learned that again while managing a golf course in Michigan.

We Had a Payroll Problem

Like most golf operations, payroll mattered.

We had budgets to hit, and there was pressure to bring our payroll numbers down.

At one point, there was discussion about letting our Director of Golf go.

From a spreadsheet, I could understand the argument.

Remove a salary and payroll immediately looks better.

But I wasn’t managing a spreadsheet.

I was managing a golf course.

And I didn’t believe our Director of Golf had done anything that justified losing his job.

More importantly, I had to think about what would happen afterward.

What Happens After I Leave?

There was another part of the situation that nobody could see on a payroll report.

At the time, I was already questioning my own future there.

I didn’t know whether I would stay.

I was looking around and thinking about what might come next for me.

That created an uncomfortable question.

What happens if I fire our Director of Golf today and then I leave a few weeks later?

Now the golf course has lost both of us.

And once you fire someone, you can’t assume you can simply call them three weeks later and ask them to come back.

People have lives.

People have pride.

People move on.

I kept coming back to the same conclusion.

Firing him might make the short-term numbers look better.

I wasn’t convinced it made the golf course better.

So I didn’t do it.

Short-Term Numbers and Long-Term Decisions

This is one of the difficult parts of being a general manager.

Sometimes the easiest decision to explain on a financial statement isn’t necessarily the best decision for the operation.

Payroll matters.

Budgets matter.

Profit matters.

I believe that strongly.

But people matter too.

And more importantly, the long-term health of the business matters.

A good manager has to look at all of it.

If reducing payroll today creates a leadership problem three months from now, did you really save anything?

If you remove somebody who is doing a good job simply because the number looks better afterward, what did you actually accomplish?

Those aren’t always easy questions.

And sometimes there isn’t one obviously correct answer.

You make the best decision you can with the information you have.

Then you live with it.

Did It Cost Me My Job?

Maybe.

I’ll probably never know for certain.

There were several things ownership and I didn’t completely agree on during my time there. My refusal to make this particular change may have contributed to what eventually happened.

Or maybe it didn’t.

I’d probably call it 50-50.

What I do know is that I eventually lost my job.

And our Director of Golf kept his.

Looking back, would firing him have helped me keep my position?

Possibly.

But that’s not really the question I ask myself today.

The question is:

Would I make the same decision again knowing what I know now?

Yes.

I would.

Integrity Is Part of It, but Not All of It

It would be easy to turn this into a story about integrity.

There is certainly some of that here.

I didn’t want to fire someone I believed was doing his job just to make my own position safer.

But I don’t want to make myself the hero of the story either.

My responsibility as GM wasn’t simply to protect my conscience.

My responsibility was to make decisions that I believed gave the golf course the best chance for long-term success.

Sometimes those decisions benefit you personally.

Sometimes they don’t.

That’s leadership.

You aren’t supposed to make every decision based on what protects your own chair.

You’re supposed to think about what happens to the operation after you get out of that chair.

The Decision I Can Live With

I’m no longer at that golf course.

Our Director of Golf is.

And I’m glad he is.

I believe he’ll continue doing a good job and help keep the place moving forward.

That’s enough for me.

Maybe I could have made a different decision and changed my own outcome.

I’ll never know.

But I do know this.

I can look back at the decision I made without wishing I had done something different.

That’s something I’ve tried to teach my kids, and something I have to remind myself too.

You can’t control every outcome.

You can’t guarantee that doing what you believe is right will reward you.

But you do have to live with the decisions you make.

So when the choice is difficult, think beyond tomorrow.

Think beyond the spreadsheet.

Sometimes, think beyond yourself.

Then make the decision you believe you can still stand behind years later.

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This is Part 4 of my series, How to Leave Something the Right Way.

Have you ever made a decision that cost you something in the short term, but you still believe was the right decision? I’d like to hear about it in the comments.