When the Obvious Choice Is Not Made

Why people retreat from decisions they know are right—and make someone else pay for their cowardice

By Harold Nicoll, APR

Understanding how and why people make decisions is at the center of marketing and public relations. Professional communicators try to inspire people to make what we believe is the right choice. These judgments include what to buy, how to spend our time, what to avoid and which political candidates to support. Any professional communicator who could reliably predict every human decision would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

That leads to the subject at hand: Why do people make choices that appear irrational? Are human beings in general—and Americans in particular—less rational than we believe?

There are moments when the correct choice seems so obvious that we cannot understand why anyone would make a different one.

But, alas, they—and we—do.

Family Harmony?

A family member regularly insults another and disguises hostility as humor. Everyone recognizes the behavior. They may even express sympathy privately, but when the moment comes to draw a line, they do not.

An employee repeatedly fails to complete assigned work. The evidence appears conclusive, yet the organization remains more favorably disposed toward that employee than toward the person who identifies the problem. In effect, the organization punishes—or “kills”—the messenger.

A qualified employee is passed over for advancement. Another candidate is selected by decision-makers who feel more comfortable with that person, even though the unsuccessful candidate’s experience and performance appear stronger.

In each case, the person on the losing end is left asking the same question:

Why wasn’t the obvious choice made?

The question rests on an assumption: that people making important decisions are trying to determine what is true, fair or best for everyone involved. Sometimes they are. Often, they are not—and may not even be aware of it.

The stated question may be, “Who or what makes the most sense for the organization—whether it is a family, business or civic group?” The actual question may be, “Which choice creates the least immediate discomfort for me?”

Or, more simply, “What is the easiest way forward?” Those questions produce entirely different answers.

Sympathy Is Not Support—and Appeasement Is Not Peace

Families provide some of the clearest examples. When one family member is aggressive, obnoxious and habitually insulting while another remains reasonable, the reasonable person may assume everyone will recognize the difference and respond accordingly.

Sometimes they do recognize it. They simply do not act on what they know.

Why?

Confronting a difficult person carries a price. That person may become louder, retaliate, recruit allies, disrupt gatherings or force other family members to choose sides. Some people relish attention of any kind, regardless of how embarrassing their behavior may be to those around them. The reasonable person presents a much smaller threat. That person may be hurt, embarrassed, angry or disappointed but is unlikely to overturn the dinner table, throw a punch or abruptly leave.

Reasonable people understand that what they say and do has implications beyond the immediate moment. Ironically, that restraint can be used against them.

The family therefore chooses what it calls “peace.” In reality, it transfers the cost of the aggressor’s ongoing behavior to the person believed least likely to create another problem. Family members may offer sympathy in private. Sympathy is inexpensive. Support requires action and courage—both often in short supply.

This explains one of the strangest and most painful dynamics in families and workplaces: the responsible person is often treated poorly precisely because everyone expects that person to remain responsible and fears what the bad actor might do.

The volatile person is accommodated. The dependable person is asked to understand. That is not neutrality. It is a reward system.

Organizations Do the Same Thing

Businesses like to describe themselves as rational. They use words such as performance, accountability, innovation, merit and results. But organizations are collections of human beings, and human beings do not stop being human when they enter a conference room.

Suppose an employee fails to complete assigned work. The evidence seems straightforward. Acting on it, however, may require a manager to admit several uncomfortable things:

• The employee was a poor choice.
• The person may have been hired because of friendship, familiarity or some quality unrelated to the position’s actual requirements.
• Supervision was inadequate, inattentive or uninformed.
• Warning signs were ignored.
• Deadlines were missed.
• Assignments were slow-walked, completed late or left unfinished.
• The person raising the issue may have been right all along.

Being right, however, is no guarantee of future employment.

It is often easier to question the messenger and their motivations than to confront all the failures the message exposes. The employee identifying the problem then becomes associated with the discomfort created by the problem. Management may begin to regard the truthful employee as “difficult,” while continuing to see the nonperforming employee as pleasant, familiar or deserving of another chance.

The facts have not changed. The emotional meaning of the facts has.

This is one reason competent people often leave organizations that continue protecting people who do not perform. From the outside, their departure can seem inexplicable. Why would a business allow a productive employee to leave rather than correct an obvious failure?

The answer is that retaining the productive employee was not the organization’s only objective. Avoiding confrontation, protecting previous decisions, preserving favored relationships and maintaining a preferred internal narrative may have mattered more than correcting a decision that was bad for the organization.

New employees who demonstrate exceptional know-how, creativity or competence can present another kind of threat. Their presence reveals the contrast between what is possible and what the organization has accepted as normal. The newcomer does not have to criticize anyone. Superior performance may make the comparison unavoidable.

An insecure organization can respond by learning from that person and raising its standards. Or it can protect the status quo by scrutinizing, marginalizing or removing the person whose performance exposes it.

Getting rid of the contrast may feel easier than reforming the organization, acknowledging mistakes or placing existing talent under greater scrutiny. The organization made a choice. It simply did not make the choice it claimed to value.

Merit Is Rarely Evaluated in Isolation

Hiring and promotion decisions offer another version of the same lesson. We want to believe that experience, results and leadership ability are independently measured. They are not. They are interpreted by people, and people are influenced by familiarity, affinity and identity.

Decision-makers may recognize leadership potential more readily in people who communicate as they do, share their background or resemble their existing idea of what a leader should look and sound like. This tendency is not confined to any one sex, race, age group, profession or political persuasion. People from every background can confuse familiarity with merit.

Hiring or favoring friends is not necessarily improper, but it invites scrutiny when performance problems subsequently arise. None of this means every unfavorable decision is discriminatory or irrational. Organizational politics, sponsorship, personal chemistry, communication style and information unavailable to outsiders may all influence a selection.

But it would be equally naïve to pretend affinity has no effect. Ability does not suddenly appear when a more receptive manager arrives. What changes is the perception of that ability.

This is where reality and perception become inseparable. Performance may exist as a fact. Opportunity depends on whether someone with authority perceives—and values—that performance.

Irrational According to Which Objective?

What appears to be an irrational choice may become understandable once we identify the decision-maker’s actual objective. If the objective is fairness, tolerating a bully makes no sense. If the objective is avoiding a family confrontation, it makes perfect sense.

If the objective is performance, protecting an employee who does not work is irrational. If the objective is avoiding embarrassment or preserving a favored relationship, the decision becomes predictable. If the objective is selecting the best leader, affinity bias is a defect.

If the objective is surrounding oneself with people who feel familiar and reassuring, affinity may carry more weight than achievement. None of this makes the resulting decision admirable. Understanding a choice is not the same as excusing it. It does, however, explain why two people can examine the same situation and see entirely different “obvious” choices.

One person may be comparing right and wrong, performance and nonperformance, evidence and denial. The decision-maker may be comparing comfort and conflict, familiarity and disruption, self-protection and self-examination. Under those conditions, facts are not always decisive. Sometimes they are not even the primary consideration.

The Cost of Seeing Clearly

There is a price attached to recognizing this pattern. Once someone understands that an organization or family is protecting something other than fairness, that person must decide whether to continue participating in the arrangement.

Remaining may require accepting repeated disrespect, carrying work that belongs to someone else or pretending an obvious truth is still an open question. Leaving carries its own losses. There may be income, status, history, family relationships, friendships or hopes attached to the situation.

Walking away does not mean those things never mattered. It means the cost of remaining has finally become greater than the cost of departure. That decision can look emotional from the outside. Often, it is the most rational decision anyone involved has made.

When Prudence Becomes Cowardice

There is a respectable vocabulary available for avoiding difficult decisions. People call it preserving harmony, exercising patience, being diplomatic, giving someone the benefit of the doubt or choosing their battles. Sometimes those descriptions are accurate. Not every confrontation is necessary, and not every offense deserves a war. Looking the other way may occasionally be prudent, particularly when confrontation would cause greater harm without correcting the underlying problem.

But there is a point at which prudence becomes surrender. It becomes surrender when repeated accommodation begins to erode a person’s self-respect, confidence and willingness to defend deeply held values.

When a family repeatedly accommodates its most obnoxious member, it teaches that person to become more aggressive. When managers protect an employee who does not perform, they teach everyone else that performance is optional and honesty is dangerous.

When leaders retreat from every difficult decision, they do not preserve peace. They merely decide who will pay for their unwillingness to act. That is the part polite explanations often omit.

Avoiding conflict does not eliminate the conflict’s consequences. It transfers them from the person responsible to someone less willing or less able to fight back. The passive decision-maker gets to feel reasonable. The aggressor gets what they want. The responsible person absorbs the loss.

This arrangement is frequently described as diplomacy. Mostly, it is cowardice.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard asks while confronting the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation:

“When are we going to stand and fight?”

The Borg may be fictional, but the pattern is familiar. The bully advances, and the family adjusts. The nonperformer advances, and coworkers take on more work. The dishonest person advances, and the truthful person is cautioned about their tone or attitude—or simply told to mind their own business. The politically protected person advances, and the competent person is told to be patient.

Each retreat may appear practical when considered by itself. Taken together, the retreats establish a new reality: the person most willing to create discomfort gains power over everyone trying to avoid it.

That is when someone must stand. Not because confrontation is pleasant. Not because victory is guaranteed. Not because the consequences will be evenly distributed. Someone must stand because continuing to retreat is also a decision—and other people are already paying its price.

Courage does not require starting or ending every fight. It requires recognizing the fight that has already been brought to you. There eventually comes a moment when sympathy is inadequate, patience becomes complicity and neutrality favors the person doing the harm. Sometimes courage means confronting wrongdoing directly. Sometimes it means walking away.

Confrontation may be necessary and worthwhile. In other circumstances, continuing the battle may amount to tilting at windmills, consuming time and energy without producing meaningful change. Discernment is essential. What matters is refusing to pretend the wrongdoing did not occur.

Believe the Choice

People can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to persuade others to make the choice their stated values should produce. Sometimes that effort is worthwhile. People can reconsider. Organizations can correct themselves. Families can establish boundaries. But repeated choices are also information.

When a family consistently protects the person creating the disturbance, it has revealed its priority. When an employer repeatedly excuses nonperformance but scrutinizes the person reporting it, it has revealed its culture. When decision-makers continually select familiarity over demonstrated ability, they have revealed their definition of leadership.

People Will Tell You Who They Are

At some point, the task is no longer to make the evidence clearer. The task is to believe what people’s choices have already made clear. People do not always choose what is true, fair or effective. They frequently choose the relationship, identity, explanation or arrangement they most want to preserve.

That may not be the obvious choice to anyone else. But it reveals something important about their reality—and helps others decide what they will accept in their own. The clearest evidence of what people value is not what they say when the choice is easy. It is what they defend when doing the right thing would require effort, expense and, most importantly, courage.

About Harold Nicoll, APR

Harold Nicoll is a public relations and marketing communications executive whose career has included leadership positions at The Dow Chemical Company, TIC Gums and TDECU. He holds a Master of Strategic Public Relations from The George Washington University and owns Media Public Relations and SwampButt Underwear.

He has served in leadership roles with the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences, the Brazosport Symphony Orchestra and the Brazosport Rotary Club. He lives with his wife, Marla, in his hometown of Lake Jackson, Texas.