Trust your gut at work — but back it up with evidence and logic

Dear Bob …

You’ve written quite a bit about how people should trust their guts. I agree with you. One of my managers doesn’t, and I’m not sure how to handle it.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Bob tackles another common workplace cliche and explains how to expose empty office rhetoric — constructively. | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld’s Advice Line newsletter. ]

I’ve lost track of the times when I ask about a decision he’s made and he’s replied, “I trusted my gut.” When I explain that this isn’t convincing, he points to a bunch of research that seems to show trusting your gut works just fine. Anyway, it’s hard to convince someone who trusts their gut of anything using evidence and logic.

How do you think I should handle the situation?

– Distrusting his gut

Dear Distrusting …

He reports to you. That means you’ve delegated some decisions to him; with other matters, he’s supposed to recommend a plan or action to you for your final decision.

For the work you’ve delegated, keep an eye out for an important call that backfires. As part of your joint postmortem of what went wrong, ask how he went about making his decision in the first place. Assuming he responds that he trusted his gut, let him know that for a decision of this importance, you expect a thorough review of the evidence and a logical analysis of the alternatives. Anything else is irresponsible — and he should consider this to be a formal verbal warning (you need to put some teeth into your concerns; this is how it’s done).

For recommendations, it’s a lot easier; a recommendation will either have something behind it or it won’t. If it doesn’t, reject his recommendation without taking any time at all on it, let him know his work is unsatisfactory, and give him a very short deadline to turn in a professional piece of work.

If he pulls out one of his trust-your-gut articles to support his position, let him know that your gut is telling you something very different, which is that his recommendation can’t be trusted. Unless his article provides a solid reason for preferring what his gut tell him to what your gut tells you, it’s time to take guts out of the discussion and base it on something more solid.

This isn’t hard. However, it will take guts of a different kind on your part.

– Bob

This story, “Trust your gut at work — but back it up with evidence and logic,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.