Keep Your Heart Open: The Leadership Discipline of Delaying Judgement
Delaying judgement means taking what you see at face value and not attaching a motive to it. You cannot read someone's heart, history or the experiences that shaped them. Leaders who hold their verdict open stay curious, build trust on solid ground, and give people a chance to show who they really are.
In my earlier article on harshness and firmness in leadership, I argued that you can hold people accountable without being cruel to them. There’s a related discipline that I think matters just as much: holding off on judgement about who someone is for as long as you possibly can. That isn’t the same as holding off on decisions. You can and should act on behaviour when it needs acting on, but you can stay slow to reach conclusions about the person behind it. This discipline starts before you say a word, with the story you decide to believe about the person in front of you.
The problem with judging another person is simple. You can’t read their heart, and you can’t see their motives, their history or what shaped the way they respond to you. Yet most of us are very comfortable taking a handful of visible behaviours and turning them into a verdict on who someone is.
My advice is to leave that verdict open. Separate what you actually observed from the motive you’ve assigned to it, and don’t rush to attach one. Keep room for the possibility that you don’t understand this person yet, that they’re simply different from you, and that there’s something valuable in them you haven’t learned to see.
1. You Know Less Than You Think
Most of the people we judge are people we barely know. We’ve sat in a few meetings with them, read some of their messages, maybe watched them react badly under pressure, and from that thin slice we build a surprisingly complete picture of their character.
Someone is abrupt, so they’re arrogant. Someone disagrees with us, so they’re difficult. Someone seems angry, so they’re unpleasant. We reach that conclusion without knowing what happened before they walked into the room, or what our words meant to them.
You can see the behaviour, but what it means is much less certain. You might be right that the conversation was uncomfortable, or that they spoke unkindly, and that still doesn’t give you much basis for claiming to understand their heart.
It’s fine to say “I didn’t enjoy that” and leave it there for a while, because not every uncomfortable encounter needs to become a conclusion about the person. Often the most honest position you can take is this: something happened, I didn’t like it, and I don’t fully understand it yet.
2. Admiration Can Outrun Understanding Too
This cuts both ways. Someone is charming, shares your views or makes you feel understood, and you decide they must be a wonderful person. Then you hand them trust and influence before you’ve seen how they behave when things get hard.
Condemning someone too fast can shut the door on a relationship worth having, while admiring someone too fast can blind you to things you should be looking at. Either way, you’ve let a limited impression stand in for actually knowing the person.
You can appreciate a thoughtful contribution without deciding its author never gets things wrong, and you can push back on a weak one without deciding its author has nothing to offer. If you let people show you who they are over time, both your trust and your concern end up resting on something solid.
3. Difference Is Easy to Misread
Another person’s way of communicating may be unfamiliar to you. Their culture, personality or life experience might shape how they show disagreement, respect or discomfort in ways that don’t match yours. What feels natural to them can land awkwardly with you, and neither of you may know why.
Be careful about turning that discomfort into a moral judgement. Someone’s politics, race, gender or background can’t tell you everything about their character, and even when you strongly disagree with something they believe, you’re still dealing with a human being whose whole life can’t be reduced to that one disagreement.
An open heart allows for the possibility that this is a good person you’re struggling to understand. There may be things about how they behave that you don’t enjoy, and there may be good reasons for some of them that you’ve never considered. You can own your discomfort and still be curious about who they are.
That curiosity leaves room for something to grow. You might find you can learn from each other, a difficult behaviour might change, or you might simply find a way to work together. Those possibilities deserve a chance before you decide someone isn’t worth your patience.
4. You Don’t Know What Injustice Someone Has Carried
Injustice is one of the heaviest things a person can carry. Being treated unfairly, dismissed or humiliated, or being repeatedly denied a fair hearing, can leave anger that’s very hard to put down. When you meet that person, you meet the anger, but you don’t see where it came from.
They might come across as bitter, suspicious or spoiling for a fight, and their reaction might seem wildly out of proportion to the conversation you think you’re having. But you may have walked into a much older conversation in their head, one shaped by people and events you know nothing about.
They may also have judged you already. To them you might be part of the problem, or a stand in for the people who hurt them, and they expect you to behave exactly as those people did. Before you’ve had any chance to show who you are, they’re braced for it.
If you respond with instant judgement, you risk confirming everything they already believe. Your impatience looks like more evidence that nobody listens, and your dismissal feels like one more time they’ve been written off. Both of you walk away feeling your view of the other has been confirmed.
You can’t assume every angry person has that kind of history, and you shouldn’t invent a backstory for someone you don’t know. But you can leave room for the possibility, and that uncertainty alone should make you slower to decide what their anger says about them.
5. Patience Gives Someone a Different Experience
When you hold off on judging, a different outcome becomes possible. Someone expecting rejection gets patience instead, someone expecting contempt finds you’re still listening, and someone who assumed your mind was made up discovers you’re actually trying to understand them.
What you often find is that the other person starts to soften. Whatever brought them into the room angry or defensive, they notice you aren’t reacting the way they expected, and with less to brace against they have more room to hear what you’re actually saying. That shift is usually gradual: they might become a little more willing to explain themselves, admit a mistake or ask for help, and those openings are easy to miss if you’re waiting for a dramatic turnaround.
You can’t demand that change or put it on a timetable. Someone with good reason to be guarded may need more than one calm conversation before they trust what’s happening, so consistency matters. Patience that disappears the first time it’s tested doesn’t give anyone a reason to believe things have changed.
Some people will stay difficult, and some relationships won’t improve however sincerely you try. An open heart doesn’t give you control over anyone, but it does stop you closing a door too early, and it leaves you open to finding out that your own assumptions about them were incomplete.
6. People Can Feel a Verdict You Never Say Out Loud
It’s tempting to think a judgement stays private as long as you keep it to yourself. It doesn’t. Once you’ve decided someone is hopeless, dishonest or not worth the effort, your behaviour changes: you give them less time, you ask fewer questions, and you stop really listening to their explanations.
Your tone shifts before your words do. You interrupt sooner, encourage less, and read their next mistake more harshly than you’d read anyone else’s. They may never hear your verdict, but they’ll usually feel it.
So this discipline has to go deeper than keeping your language polite. Notice when you’ve mentally written someone off, and ask yourself honestly whether you know enough to justify it. If you don’t do that work, you’re offering the appearance of an open conversation while the relationship is already closed on your side.
This is the part of the discipline worth checking yourself against most often, because it’s the part nobody else can see. Look at who you’ve stopped asking questions of, whose explanations you no longer wait to hear, and whose mistakes you’ve started reading as proof of something. Those are usually the places where a verdict has already been reached.
Keeping your heart open keeps you willing to invest. You keep explaining, teaching and looking for common ground, and you allow for growth, because you haven’t decided that the version of this person you’re seeing today is the only one you’ll ever get.
7. Forgiveness Leaves Room for a Future
Wherever I can, I want to show empathy and forgiveness. I want to understand the person in front of me and not let their worst moment become the permanent definition of who they are. People need room to take responsibility, learn something and have a future that isn’t entirely dictated by what came before.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting things slide. It can sit alongside a very clear expectation that behaviour has to change. You can deal with harm, hold a boundary and make a hard call while still respecting the person’s dignity and their capacity to grow, and you don’t have to settle every question about their character to deal honestly with what they did.
This is where it connects back to firmness. A leader can say “that was unacceptable”, explain why and be clear about what happens next. An open heart lets you have that conversation without quietly adding “and you’re worthless” or “and you’re beyond help.”
Sometimes investing in someone means coaching them through a rough patch, sometimes it means helping them find a role where they can actually succeed, and sometimes it means a fair, respectful ending to the working relationship. Whichever it is, you can make the call without pretending to know everything about another human being.
8. Leave Room to Be Wrong About Someone
I want to be slower to condemn and more careful about putting people on a pedestal. I want to remember how little I may know about someone’s motives, about what they’ve been through, or about what an encounter with me actually meant to them.
That takes deliberate effort, and it’s hardest when someone is angry with you, when their manner grates, or when they seem determined to misunderstand you. Those are exactly the moments when a snap judgement feels most justified, and they’re also the moments when a bit of patience can give a relationship a chance it would never otherwise have had.
We don’t know anyone’s heart, and we don’t know what injustices they’ve carried. What we can do is listen, forgive where we can and keep investing while growth is still possible. Give people room, and be willing to be changed by what you learn about them.