Knowing the difference matters.
What you communicate about the decisions you make defines your credibility. Whether a decision creates positive or negative outcomes, this is worth remembering:
- Sharing your rationale, the reasons you made the decision, builds trust—it’s an open reflection of the factors, risks, benefits, and your intentions behind a choice. There’s objectivity, vulnerable confidence, in your energy.
- Rationalizing a decision, however, is an exercise in self-preservation. This is choosing to communicate only the facts that benefit you. This means you’re shifting blame or disguising missteps in your decision-making process. There’s subjective, anxious energy that is thinly veiled behind passion or charm (read: rhetoric).
Sharing your rationale deepens alignment. Rationalizing your decision divides colleagues.
Our world values transparency. Own your choices. If you make the best decision with the information available, stand behind it so the organization can move on.
If you get it wrong, admit it so your colleagues can adjust—and trust you the next time you’re empowered to make a decision.
P.S. Most employees are more empowered to make decisions than they say they are.