My colleague Katie Stanfield recently wrote about a well-known decision-making framework that asks you to categorize a decision before you make it: Is it a hat, a haircut or a tattoo? A hat is easy to reverse. Don't like it? Take it off. A haircut takes longer to undo, but eventually it grows out. A tattoo? You'd better be pretty sure before you commit.
But I've spent the past few months looking at what happens at work through the lens of signs and signals, and I think that adds a wrinkle, especially early in your career. The choices we make give other people something to read. They see what we do and interpret what it says about us.
So what if the decision itself is a hat, but the signal someone takes from it lasts more like a tattoo?
Consider a pretty ordinary situation at work. Your manager gives you a vaguely defined assignment and says they'll explain more later.
You could wait. That's completely reasonable. Your manager just told you more information is coming, and presumably they weren't testing your ability to communicate telepathically. Or you could take what you know and start figuring out what you think they're asking for. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe you spend an hour building something that bears only a passing resemblance to what your manager had in mind. But your manager may also learn something from watching what you did.
Maybe they see someone who's willing to work through ambiguity, take initiative and get moving without having every instruction spelled out. Or maybe they wonder why on earth you didn't wait when they specifically said they'd explain it later.
Same sign. Two very different signals.
That's the tricky part. The decision itself may be easy to reverse. You can throw out the work and start over once you get better instructions. But your manager has still seen how you responded when the instructions weren't clear. And what they take from that may stick around longer than the work itself.
Before that starts to sound terrifying, one decision doesn't become your permanent workplace identity. People see more of us over time, and new evidence can reinforce, complicate or change an earlier read. But especially when you're new and people don't have much evidence yet, the small stuff may carry more weight simply because there isn't much else to go on.
You see this in bigger decisions too. Your boss asks whether you want to present at the senior leadership meeting. You decline because you're buried and there will always be another meeting. You think this was a hat, because you can present at the next meeting, right? If your boss asked you this time, surely they'll ask again.
But your boss may read your decision as evidence that you're not interested in more visibility. Or that you're not quite ready for it. Suddenly, what looked like a hat to you may have left something behind.
This doesn't mean you should say yes to everything, leap into every half-explained assignment or spend your career wondering what your decision to eat lunch at your desk is signaling about your executive potential.
Please don't.
It does mean that reversibility isn't the only thing worth considering when you make a decision at work. Sometimes the choice itself is easy to undo, while what other people learn, or think they learn, from watching you make it may last longer than the choice itself.
Of course, that doesn't give us a handy new rule. Taking initiative can signal independence to one manager and a failure to listen to another. Waiting for more direction can look thoughtful in one workplace and passive in another. The same action can produce different signals depending on who's reading it and the context in which it's being read.
So what do you do? You can't control the read, but you can give yourself more to go on.
If you're new, watch what happens around you. What does your manager seem to reward? How do people who are trusted handle ambiguity? Ask someone who's been there longer how things tend to work. Or clarify without handing the decision back: “I'm happy to get started before we talk again. Is there anything you'd rather I wait on until you give me more context?”
None of that guarantees someone will read your actions the way you intended. You don't get that kind of control. But you can get better at understanding the environment in which your decisions will be read, and become more deliberate about the evidence you're creating along the way.
So yes, ask whether the decision you're making is a hat, a haircut or a tattoo. But taking off the hat quickly doesn't mean no one saw you wearing it.
