Not Mine To Make

There is a sentence I say before I say the actual thing.

“I may be off base, but I might be on, so let me throw this out there.”

Then the thing itself. No windup, no five minutes of context, no naming whose idea I am about to walk over. Just the motion. The leads are bad, the timeline for that renewal was never real, and we should take that money and put it somewhere it can actually do something.

Say the hard thing in the meeting, be brave, we have all had that poster hung on us since our first job. That part is old. The part I had to learn on my own is that the opener is not a shield…it’s a lane marker.

The fear in a room where the decision belongs to somebody else is not the fear of being wrong. Nobody gets walked out of a building for being wrong.

The fear is of being out of your lane, of putting a hand on a steering wheel assigned to another set of hands. That sentence hands the wheel back in the same breath it reaches for it. You have proposed a motion without claiming the gavel, and everybody in the room hears the difference, including the person you just contradicted.

I have done this well over a hundred times in the last few years.

What follows is almost never applause. It’s a room exhaling. Heads nodding at a speed that tells you they had already arrived there privately and were waiting to see if anyone else had. Then a message afterward. Thank you, glad you’re here, glad somebody said it.

Which means the thinking was already in the room. It was just spread across eight people who each had a hunch and none of whom felt they had earned the right to hold it out loud. (I didn’t have the evidence either. I had a theory and a bad feeling, which is the same equipment everyone else was carrying…)

The easy read is that I get away with this because I have credit in those rooms. I think the direction is backwards. Speaking up when it isn’t your call is not a withdrawal against relationship capital. It’s the deposit.

Being reliable, being pleasant, hitting your dates, forwarding the useful article. All real, none of it separating. Everyone at that table is doing the same things at roughly the same quality, which is why small deposits never compound fast enough to become a relationship.

What separates you is being the one willing to put a position on the table with peers and stakeholders watching, when the sentence costs something and could go badly in public.

Vendors get this wrong constantly. They build the relationship out of check-ins and value-adds and steady little touches, and every competitor is running that identical play from the identical playbook. The vendor a customer actually trusts is the one who once told them, in front of their own team, their process is broken as they have it. That isn’t a tactic. It’s an unhedged position taken where there were witnesses.

Stay Positive & The Toes You Are Bracing For Are Usually A Figment Of Imagination