It’s pretty easy to judge the boss when you’re not the boss. I’ve done plenty of it. I’ve looked at decisions made above me and thought they were slow, unnecessary, poorly timed, or just wrong. Sometimes I was probably right.

Becoming the person in the chair didn’t suddenly convince me that bosses know better than everybody else. It did make me realize how often I’d judged a decision without knowing half of what was attached to it.

From the outside, some decisions look ridiculously simple. There’s the problem. There’s the obvious answer. Why the hell won’t somebody just do it? Then you become the somebody.

Now there’s a personnel issue you can’t discuss, a legal problem, a budget problem, information you don’t have yet, or somebody else who has authority over part of the decision. Fixing the thing everybody can see may create two problems they can’t. And sometimes you know exactly what you could say to make yourself look better, but saying it would be wrong.

That’s probably the biggest thing that’s changed for me. I still disagree with decisions other leaders make, but I’m just slower now to assume I know everything that went into them. There’s a pretty big difference between “I think that was a bad decision” and “there couldn’t possibly be a legitimate reason for that decision.” I’m still comfortable with the first one. The second one gives me a little more trouble than it used to.

None of it gives the boss a free pass.

Bad leadership is still bad leadership. People hide behind confidentiality when they could explain more. They avoid hard decisions, protect themselves, and sometimes just screw it up. I’ve made bad calls too, and I’m sure that I’ll make more. But being responsible for an organization changes the view because the consequences belong to you now. You don’t get to make the easy call and hand whatever happens next to somebody else.

If I can tell people what I was trying to accomplish and why I chose one option over another, I usually should. Sometimes I can’t, and I understand that answer a lot better now than I did when somebody else was sitting in the chair.