There's a trap a lot of managers fall into, and it usually starts with good intentions.

You make a decision. Maybe you weren't totally sure what your team was doing day-to-day, so you implemented daily activity reports. Or you rolled out a new process to assign work or customer accounts. You had your reasons - and at the time, they made sense.

Then you start to notice things. Your team seems frustrated. People are spending time on the reporting itself instead of the actual work. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you think: maybe this wasn't the right call.

But you don't want to say that out loud, because the next thought most managers have is: but if I change it now, I'll look weak.

So they keep going. Not because it's working - but because reversing course feels like you're wishy-washy.

In this week's video and blog, I'll give you a reframe to consider: changing your mind isn't the problem. How you change it - and how you tell your team - is what actually matters.

Why Managers Don't Change Their Minds (Even When They Should)

The reluctance is common - and human. When you step into a leadership role, you feel pressure to be decisive. To have the answers, and act on them.

So when something isn't working, the instinct is often to either quietly pivot without explanation (just announce the new thing and move on) or to double down because reversing yourself feels like weakness.

Both of those approaches have a cost.

When you change direction without explanation, your team notices - and fills the silence with their own story. And that story is almost never a good one. Why did they change it? What does this mean? What went wrong that they're not telling us?

When you double down on something that isn't working, you waste time, energy and trust - three things you can't afford to lose as a manager.

What to Do Instead

Before you decide what to change it to, talk to your team about what isn't working.

This doesn't have to be a formal conversation. It can be as simple as:

"I put the daily activity reports in place because I wanted to make sure I had a good sense of what everyone was working on and where I could support you. But I'm realizing it's probably just adding time to your day without giving either of us what we really need. I'd rather pause on that and think together about what would actually work better."

That's it. No long apology or over-explaining. Just honesty about what you were trying to do, what you're noticing and an invitation to think through it together.

A few things that conversation does:

It shows your team you're paying attention - not just to the work, but to how they're spending their time. It models that changing your approach based on new information isn't weakness, it's judgment. And it gives people a chance to share what would actually help - this almost always leads to better solutions than the ones we come up with alone.

The Bigger Picture

There will be decisions you make that your team pushes back on - and you'll hold firm anyway, because you have context they don't or the decision isn't yours to reverse. That's part of leading. But being able to explain your thinking, even when the answer is no, builds trust in a way that "because I said so" never does.

And when you can change course? Doing it transparently - with your team, not just to them - isn't a sign that you don't know what you're doing. It's a sign that you do.

If situations like this come up for you - or you want to give your managers better tools for navigating them - our Manager 101 and Manager 201 courses are built exactly for that. And if you want the full framework, The Manager Method is available now in hardcover, digital and audiobook.