Every organisation hits moments where a decision needs to be made and not everyone agrees. The best teams move forward together anyway. The worst ones splinter into factions of quiet resentment and passive resistance. The difference between these two outcomes often comes down to whether people truly understand what "disagree and commit" actually means in practice.

A principle more cited than understood

Amazon famously codified "disagree and commit" as a leadership principle. Having spent time there, I can tell you it was one of the most frequently cited and most frequently misunderstood principles in the building. People would invoke it as shorthand for "I lost the argument, so I guess I have to do this now" – spoken with all the enthusiasm of someone volunteering for a root canal.

That is not what disagree and commit means.

Disagree and commit means that once a decision is made, it becomes yours. You champion it. You inform others. You drive the outcomes that decision requires. You don't carry it like a burden someone else placed on your shoulders - you carry it like something you chose. Because you did choose it. You chose to commit.

The duty to understand

Commitment without understanding is just compliance, and compliance is brittle. It breaks the moment things get hard.

Before you can genuinely commit to a decision you disagreed with, you have a duty to understand the "why" behind it. This means being genuinely curious. It means dropping your opinions long enough to be impartial and objective in seeking out the reasoning. If you approach this exercise looking to poke holes, people will see through it immediately - and you will have undermined yourself before the decision even gets off the ground.

This obligation runs in both directions. If you are the leader or the person who made the call after a tie-break, you owe your team a clear explanation of your logic and reasoning. "Because I said so" is not a foundation anyone can build commitment on. Give people something real to work with, and most reasonable people will find their way to genuine commitment.

What disagree and complain looks like

The opposite of committing is complaining, and it takes more forms than people realise.

Sometimes it is loud and obvious - vocally trashing a decision in team channels or meetings. This mostly just makes the complainer look immature and signals to everyone else that they cannot be trusted with decisions they did not personally make.

Sometimes it is subtler. Publicly backing a decision but always prefixing it with "this was not my decision" is a classic move. It is a way of taking credit if things go well while pre-loading your excuse if they do not. Everyone sees through it.

And sometimes it happens behind closed doors - quietly telling peers and reports why a decision was wrong, slowly eroding confidence in the direction without ever raising a hand in the room where it could be discussed openly.

All of these paths lead to the same place: eroded trust, ineffective execution, and a loss of respect that flows in every direction. Leaders lose respect for the people who cannot get on board. Teams lose respect for leaders who tolerate it. Peers lose respect for each other. Nobody wins.

Most decisions are two-way doors

Here is the thing that makes all of this even more frustrating - most decisions are reversible. Amazon calls these "two-way door" decisions. You can walk through, see what is on the other side, and walk back if it does not work out.

The energy people spend fighting, resisting, and undermining decisions that they disagree with is almost always disproportionate to the actual stakes involved. If the decision turns out to be wrong, you iterate. You learn something. You course-correct with better information than you had before.

There is a stoic idea that "the obstacle is the way" - that the thing standing in your path is actually the path itself. A decision you disagree with is not a wall. It is an opportunity to learn something you did not expect, to test assumptions you were certain about, and to build the kind of resilience and adaptability that separates great engineers and leaders from merely competent ones.

Commitment is a skill, not a personality trait

Disagree and commit is not about being agreeable or passive. It is about being professional, trustworthy, and effective. It is about recognising that a team moving confidently in one direction will almost always outperform a team hedging across three directions because nobody could let go of their preferred option.

The next time you find yourself on the losing side of a decision, ask yourself: am I committing, or am I just complying? Am I championing this, or am I quietly waiting for it to fail so I can say I told you so?

Your answer to that question says more about your leadership than any decision you have ever made yourself.