Relentless Resilience: Keeping Teams Performing Under Constant Pressure — with Maggie Reed

Fact or Feeling? Maggie Reed on Why the Only Bad Decision Is No Decision

In this post: Gilbane Building Company Vice President Maggie Reed sorts every problem with two words: fact or feeling? She explains why indecision fuels burnout and how better questions lead to better decisions.

Maggie Reed keeps a note nearby that says "just decide already."

She wrote it after a problem sat with her for weeks. She brought it to her therapist for the third week in a row, and the therapist pointed out that they had talked about it for four weeks in a row now. Reed was ready to argue. Then she called her sister and asked for the truth. "She's right," her sister told her. "You've talked to me about this at least six times."

"I didn't realize I was failing to decide," Reed said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group.

That admission matters because deciding is the core of how Reed leads. She is Vice President at Gilbane Building Company and leads its Richmond, Virginia office, after more than 20 years in construction and design. Her entire adult career has been at Gilbane. It started when she knocked on a trailer door and asked if they were hiring. "If you don't ask, no one's ever going to tell you yes," she said.

Fact or Feeling

Asked for the one leadership habit she relies on every day, Reed answered in three words: "Fact or feeling?"

When something is said, she sorts it first. Is it a fact, or is it a feeling? Only then does she work it through. Her sister sometimes answers her texts with a feelings wheel, which Reed dismisses as "trash." Still, she said, "if I am sitting with something, is it a fact or is it a feeling?"

The habit shows up on job sites. Reed described walking into a project having its best year and asking the team to walk her through what was happening. The first answer: The steel contractor is behind. "OK, that's not what I asked," she said. On a different day, the steel contractor is way ahead, and as a result, metal panels are behind. The facts are one thing. The alarm attached to them is another, and a leader who cannot separate the two will make decisions on the alarm.

The Deadline Nobody Believed

Reed learned how feelings disguise themselves as facts from a boss named Tony. He set a deadline that she and her superintendent, Mark, were sure was impossible. They had "1,000 reasons" why the project could not finish on time. Tony did not argue. He gave them until the end of the day to produce a plan to get back on schedule, and then he left.

So Reed and Mark grumbled, pulled out a sheet of paper, and set out "to prove to him all the ways it doesn't work," she said. Instead, the list turned into a chain of possibilities. If this happened, that could happen. They got within about a week and a half of the date, and then the mindset shifted. "We could probably beat date," she recalled thinking.

Later, she asked Tony what he had been doing. "You weren't giving me answers that were based in your best work," he told her. They were answering from what they could see in the moment. The project turned over early.

Host Alec McChesney connected the story to how Velocity coaches decision making: Calling an idea good or bad is not enough. You have to make the case and walk through the options.

"The only bad decision is refusing to make a decision."

Maggie Reed, Vice President, Gilbane Building Company

Ask for Information, Not Agreement

Reed named the most underrated leadership skill as "the ability to ask a clarifying question that is not leading the witness."

"You can ask a question that gives you the answer you want, or you can ask a question that gives you information," she said. "You get to choose that every time." Pitching your idea and asking for an opinion gets one kind of answer. Describing the problem and asking how someone would solve it gets another.

She applies the same discipline when a manager complains that an employee keeps getting it wrong. Her first questions are about the manager. "Are you asking, or are you telling?" Is the request in writing? Who sets the agenda? Sometimes, she said, the answer is that you are not the right person for that conversation, and someone else can translate. Harry Barnick explored the same skill in handling difficult conversations.

Burnout Lives in the Undecided

Reed sees a direct line between indecision and exhaustion. Burnout, she said, "isn't from resilience." It comes from attacking the same problem with the same skills and the same support. The other source is "when we're just holding the object," carrying a choice without making it.

Her fix is to step back without stalling. "Taking a step back is not an admission of failure," she said. It lets you see the field and choose the next move. "That being said, not deciding, not an option."

She also urges perspective. A friend in supply chain worked in a warehouse with a mural that read, "We don't save lives, we just ship couches." Reed said construction is similar. "We're just building a building. It's not that deep." Joe Crandall offered his own view on making hard decisions.

Feedback Is Something to Test

The same sorting applies to feedback, a lesson Reed stresses when she coaches other women in construction. She recalled lying on the floor coloring drawings with colored pencils to understand a design, until a manager told her to get up. Honest coaches helped her see when being authentic meant being too much.

"You have to be receptive to the feedback. It doesn't mean you have to agree with it," she said. The job is to hear the perspective and "think about whether there's reality in it."

Rapid-Fire Leadership Lessons

• Daily habit: Asking "fact or feeling?" before working through anything that is said.
• Most underrated skill: Asking clarifying questions that seek information rather than the answer you want.
• Stop doing: Beating yourself up for a decision that went wrong. Refusing to decide "in and of itself is still a decision."
• Best advice: "The only person that you have to own up to is the face that you look in the mirror."

The Takeaway: Own the Story You Tell Yourself

Reed closed with advice about narration. "You have the ability to choose kind of how you narrate that to yourself," she said, "and then your bounce back story is yours."

That choice starts with the habit she uses every day. Sort the facts from the feelings, ask questions that return information, and then decide. Leadership can be lonely because you sit with your decisions, Reed said. The ones that do the most damage are the ones you never make.

Listen to the Full Episode

Hear Maggie Reed's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Find it on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.