If everyone on your team agrees with your decisions, you are irrelevant as a leader. In this episode, I’m auditing my biggest lessons from 2025 and diving into a hard truth: real leadership isn't about consensus; it’s about having the courage to make unpopular calls.
I discuss Ben Horowitz’s concept of "Management Debt"—the compounding interest we pay when we avoid hard conversations, difficult firings, or killing passion projects—and why sprinting toward these uncomfortable moments is the only way to avoid organizational stagnation. Tune in to find out why your actual job description is doing the things no one else wants to do.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
If everyone on your team agrees with your decisions, you are irrelevant as a leader. And that's not hyperbole; that is the actual job description. What I mean is, the decisions that you make where everybody's happy—where you've got consensus, where nobody's pushing back, where it's obviously the right call—those aren't leadership. That's just collective decision making. And if that's all you're doing, what is the point for you?
This was a really big lesson for me this year that I'm going to dive into. Now, quick thing: I actually break down frameworks like this in a weekly email newsletter that I send out. You can subscribe if you want at raysemail.com It's completely free; I send it out every week.
e been doing here is auditing:
The thing is, leadership isn't the easy teachable stuff. It's not actually setting goals, getting KPIs right, learning how to delegate, writing a mission statement or vision statement—things like that. Those are the obvious things. And I'm paraphrasing a little bit of what Ben Horowitz talks about in an interview that he did. Ben is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which, by the way, is an epic book. If you read one business book this year, I recommend The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I've read it multiple times, and it's phenomenal every time. I'm actually going to put a clip of him in the description, the show notes below, if you want to dive into this further.
But he talks about this; he says people don't run into trouble with the obvious leadership stuff. They run into trouble with the hard stuff, like the hard conversations with people that you actually like. How do you handle a reorg and all the emotions that are involved in that, and people are going to be losing power and all that? How do you handle demoting somebody? How do you handle firing somebody? Talking to someone about a project that they're really interested in—it's almost like a passion project for them—and you're going to kill it? You've got to have that conversation.
And it's like making the decisions where you're 60-65% sure, but you're not certain. Maybe it's something that's unpopular with the team or unpopular with your customer base. Those are the hard things. And from personal experience and working with other leaders, those are the things that people tend to avoid. As a leader, you are better off sprinting to those things instead of avoiding them so that you can actually handle them. But the default typically is avoiding the hard decisions, the hard conversations, the hard things.
And the thing is, if you don't sprint towards those things, they're going to find you one way or the other. They're going to hunt you down. You're going to have to deal with those things no matter what. And if you don't, what you end up with is what Horowitz calls "management debt."
Which is basically all the decisions you should have made, all the conversations you should have had, all the changes you should have implemented, but you didn't. You avoided them, and then they accumulate in the background. They just start to compound, just like financial debt.
Management debt compounds in the background; it accrues just like money debt. And there's a real compounding impact of not making the decisions, or not having the conversations, or not doing the things that you need to do as a leader. Because if you don't fire the person who should be fired, if you don't demote the person that needs to be demoted, if you don't change the behavior that needs to be changed, your business continues to operate with that inefficiency.
It keeps adding up in the background, and it accumulates. It's not just that specific problem, because as that problem permeates within the organization and within your team, you end up with impacts to your culture. You get good people leaving, so you've got attrition in your team. Your business stagnates; you start to plateau. That's management debt. And you've got to deal with it because you don't want to accrue that debt the same way that you accrue unhealthy financial debt.
Because, like I said, the compounding is real. And the longer those things go, the more they add up, and the harder it becomes to actually unwind. The harder it becomes to fix. And if you wanted to avoid it in the first place, as it accumulates and as it grows, you're definitely going to want to avoid it later on. If you're avoiding the things like trying to make everyone on the team happy, or because you know that people are going to disagree with your decision, you're basically avoiding your job as a leader.
Because your job as a leader is basically making unpopular decisions. If you're not willing to make unpopular decisions, you are irrelevant. The point where you add value as a leader is literally when you do things that people don't like. When you have the conversation other people won't have—the one that the person at the other end of the table may not want to have. When you make that decision that you're confident in but you're not certain. You know, "I feel pretty good about this, but we operate in uncertainty." That's what leaders do. We've got to make decisions. And when people push back, that's you doing your job.
And when people push back, that's you doing your job. That's why leadership takes courage. That is the essence, at least to my mind—that is the essence of leadership: courage. And it's not about whether you're liked and respected in the short run; it's about whether you're liked and respected in the long run.
