Before You Decide What Went Wrong, Get the Other Side of the Story

After 20 years in corporate America, I have found myself asking one question surprisingly often: “But did you get the other side of the story?”

And I don’t just mean when two people disagree.

A project misses a deadline. A campaign underperforms. Sales are down. A customer is unhappy. Someone leaves the company. A strategy doesn’t work as planned.

We hear one explanation and, remarkably quickly, we can turn a handful of facts into a complete story, sometimes with a villain, a motive and a three-act structure.

Whatever happened to assuming good intent?

Not blind trust. Not ignoring red flags. Not pretending accountability doesn’t matter. Just starting from the possibility that there might be more to understand.

Some of the best leaders I’ve worked with have this instinct naturally. Before deciding what went wrong or who was responsible, they ask questions: What happened? What changed? What does the data tell us? What does the customer say? What does the team closest to the work see? What are we missing?

And yes, when people have different accounts of what happened: “What happened from your perspective?”

It’s not about avoiding a decision. It’s about understanding before making one.

The First Story Has an Unfair Advantage

The first explanation we hear has enormous power because it creates the frame for everything that follows.

The campaign failed because the creative wasn’t strong enough.

Did it?

Maybe. Or perhaps distribution changed. The audience was wrong. Sales follow-up lagged. The offer wasn’t competitive. The tracking broke. The budget disappeared halfway through the quarter. Or the campaign actually influenced revenue that our attribution model conveniently gave to something else.

Marketing people know that last one particularly well.

The same thing happens with projects. “The team missed the deadline” sounds pretty straightforward until you ask whether the original timeline was realistic, scope changed, approvals were late or another priority landed in the middle of the project.

None of those things automatically excuse a missed deadline.

They do change the story.

Good leaders know the difference between an explanation and an excuse. They also know you can’t tell the difference without asking.

Maybe Don’t Assume the Worst

This is another one I find fascinating.

Something goes wrong and we can jump surprisingly quickly to the most negative explanation. Someone doesn’t respond to an email, so they must not care. A team pushes back on a deadline, so they’re resistant. Sales says the leads aren’t working, so marketing must be generating bad leads. Marketing says sales isn’t following up, so clearly sales is the problem.

Ah, cross-functional harmony.

Psychologists have studied versions of this tendency for decades. One relevant concept is the fundamental attribution error: we can overemphasize someone’s character or disposition when explaining behavior while underestimating the circumstances around it.

In plain English, sometimes we decide what someone’s behavior means before we understand what actually happened.

Assuming good intent doesn’t mean lowering standards.

It means curiosity gets the first meeting. Accountability can have the second.

Facts Have a Wonderful Way of Lowering the Temperature

I learned this pretty early in my career.

A former employee resigned and sent a scathing email all the way up the leadership chain. It was emotional, detailed and, if it were the only version you read, probably pretty compelling.

Luckily, I reported to a fantastic CMO.

She understood the assignment.

She didn’t match emotion with emotion. She didn’t immediately accept one version of events because it arrived first or because it arrived loudly.

She simply responded with the other side.

Here’s what happened. Here’s the timeline. Here’s the documentation. Here are the facts.

No drama. No counterattack. Just readiness.

I remember that leadership lesson far more than I remember the email itself.

Because it showed me how quickly a situation can become bigger and more emotional than it needs to be when we react to the story instead of examining the facts.

Emotion is information. It tells you someone is frustrated, angry, disappointed or hurt.

But emotion isn’t evidence.

A strong leader can acknowledge the emotion without letting it become the entire story.

Sometimes the most powerful response in a heated situation is surprisingly boring:

Here’s what actually happened.

Boring is underrated.

There’s Research Behind This

Researchers have studied organizational justice for decades. Part of that work focuses on procedural justice, or whether people believe the process used to reach a decision was fair.

One major meta-analysis examined 190 study samples representing more than 64,000 people and found meaningful relationships between procedural fairness and outcomes including trust and organizational commitment.

Another analysis examined 166 studies and more than 46,000 people and found that leadership behaviors help shape employees’ perceptions of fairness.

That matters well beyond interpersonal disagreements.

Think about a project retrospective. There’s a big difference between “Who screwed this up?” and “Let’s understand why this happened.”

One produces defensiveness. The other has a chance of producing useful information.

And useful information is generally more valuable than a beautifully organized blame chart.

Use Data as a Flashlight, Not a Spotlight

I love data. Give me the numbers. Show me the research. Tell me what actually happened.

But data can be a flashlight or a spotlight.

A flashlight helps you see the whole room. A spotlight illuminates exactly what you’ve already decided everyone should look at.

Good leaders use the flashlight.

If revenue dropped, don’t grab the first metric that explains it. Look across the funnel. If a campaign missed its target, don’t stop at CTR. If a product isn’t selling, don’t immediately conclude customers don’t want it. If a team is consistently late, don’t automatically decide you have a performance problem.

Maybe you do.

But first ask what else the evidence tells you.

What changed? What happened upstream? What happened downstream? What does the trend show? What are customers saying? What does sales see? What does marketing see? What does operations see?

Different functions can look at the exact same business problem and see entirely different things.

That’s not necessarily dysfunction.

Sometimes that’s where the answer is hiding.

Being Heard Is Not the Same as Being Agreed With

This distinction matters, especially when the “other side” actually is another person.

Hearing both sides doesn’t mean splitting the difference. It doesn’t mean avoiding a hard decision. And it definitely doesn’t mean everyone gets a participation trophy at the end.

It means giving people a genuine opportunity to explain what they saw, experienced or understood, and then evaluating it against the facts.

You may ultimately conclude that one person got it completely wrong.

That’s okay.

There’s something powerful about being able to walk away from a conversation thinking, We completely disagree, but I know that person actually listened.

That builds trust.

And it applies far beyond leadership. Think about the smartest people in your life: the great friend, the trusted colleague, the strong leader, the good partner.

They rarely hear one version of a complicated situation and say, “Excellent. Investigation complete.”

They ask questions. Sometimes annoyingly good questions. The kind that occasionally make you realize you may not be 100% right either.

Those are good people to have around.

“I Don’t Know Yet” Might Be the Smartest Answer in the Room

Somewhere along the way, leadership became associated with having an immediate answer for everything.

A metric drops and someone instantly knows why. A customer complains and suddenly there’s a product crisis. A project slips and apparently someone needs to be put on a performance plan before lunch.

Maybe we could investigate first.

Some of the smartest leaders I’ve known are perfectly comfortable saying, “I don’t know yet. We don’t have enough information.”

There’s confidence in that because it opens the door to much better questions: What am I missing? What does the data say? Who else should be involved? Is there another reasonable explanation? What assumptions are we making? What would prove our current theory wrong?

And one of my favorites: What do they know that I don’t?

That applies to people, projects, customers, strategy and pretty much every messy business problem I’ve encountered.

Curiosity may be one of the most underrated leadership skills there is.

The Goal Isn’t to Avoid Judgment

It’s to make better judgments.

Sometimes you hear the other perspective, dig through the data and reach exactly the same conclusion you started with.

Great. Now it’s an informed conclusion.

Other times you discover that the campaign everyone called a failure generated pipeline six months later. The employee who “missed the deadline” was waiting on three approvals. The unhappy customer had been flagging the same issue for months. Or the team everyone blamed was actually solving a problem created somewhere upstream.

Well. That changes things.

Getting both sides of the story isn’t about making excuses. Assuming good intent isn’t about being naive. And staying factual doesn’t mean ignoring emotion.

It means resisting something humans are remarkably good at: turning incomplete information into complete certainty and then adding a little unnecessary drama for good measure.

After 20 years in corporate America, I still find myself asking:

“But did you get the other side of the story?”

The other person. The other team. The customer. The data. The part of the process nobody looked at.

And maybe one more: “Is there another reasonable explanation?”

Sometimes there isn’t.

But the best leaders are curious enough to check.

Sources

Cohen-Charash, Y. & Spector, P. E. (2001). The Role of Justice in Organizations: A Meta-Analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 190 study samples representing 64,757 participants.

Karam, E. P., et al. (2019). Illuminating the ‘Face’ of Justice: A Meta-Analytic Examination of Leadership and Organizational Justice. Journal of Management Studies. 166 studies representing 46,034 participants.

Colquitt, J. A., et al. (2001). Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review of 25 Years of Organizational Justice Research. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee Voice and Silence: Taking Stock a Decade Later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.