Page 404 - Ray Dalio - Principles

minded and assertive at the same time and get in tight sync with those who work with you,
recognizing that sometimes not all or even the majority of people will agree with you.
b. Don’t worry about whether or not your people like you and don’t look to them to tell you what you should do. Just
worry about making the best decisions possible, recognizing that no matter what you do, most
everyone will think you’re doing something—or many things—wrong. It is human nature for people
to want you to believe their own opinions and to get angry at you if you don’t, even when they have
no reason to believe that their opinions are good. So, if you’re leading well, you shouldn’t be
surprised if people disagree with you. The important thing is for you to be logical and objective in
assessing your probabilities of being right.
It is not illogical or arrogant to believe that you know better than the average person, so long as
you are appropriately open-minded. In fact, it is not logical to believe that what the average person
thinks is better than what you and the most insightful people around you think, because you have
earned your way into your higher-than-average position and you and those insightful people are
more informed than the average person. If the opposite were true, then you and the average man
shouldn’t have your respective jobs. In other words, if you don’t have better insights than them, you
shouldn’t be a leader—and if you do have better insights than them, don’t worry if you are doing
unpopular things.
So how should you deal with your people? Your choices are either to ignore them (which will
lead to resentment and your ignorance of what they are thinking), blindly do what they want (which
wouldn’t be a good idea), or encourage them to bring their disagreements to the surface and work
through them so openly and reasonably that everyone will recognize the relative merits of your
thinking. Have the open disagreement and be happy to either win or lose the thought battles, as long
as the best ideas win out. I believe that an idea meritocracy will not only produce better results than
other systems but will also ensure more alignment behind appropriate yet unpopular decisions.
c. Don’t give orders and try to be followed; try to be understood and to understand others by getting in sync. If you want
to be followed, either for egotistical reasons or because you believe it more expedient to operate that
way, you will pay a heavy price in the long run. When you are the only one thinking, the results will
suffer.
Authoritarian managers don’t develop their subordinates, which means those who report to them
stay dependent. This hurts everyone in the long run. If you give too many orders, people will likely
resent them, and when you aren’t looking, defy them. The greatest influence you can have over
intelligent people—and the greatest influence they will have on you—comes from constantly
getting in sync about what is true and what is best so that you all want the same things.