The average entrepreneur tends to have limited leadership experience, especially early on. That’s especially true if your small business rapidly becomes a big business, and you find yourself managing layers of people. The skills required to lead dozens or even hundreds of people are very different from the skills required to be the boss of two or three employees.

Gaining leadership experience takes time. But gaining leadership skills—specific, real-world techniques you can immediately use—doesn’t have to.

Here are four leadership lessons from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that you can use to become a better boss, starting today.

1. Learn to spot two-way doors.

Since people don’t want to be wrong (who does?), most place equal value on nearly every decision. Big, small, doesn’t matter: When you have limited resources, every decision can feel critical.

Early on, Bezos decided not to agonize over every decision. Why? According to Bezos, there are two basic kinds of decisions you can make:

One-way doors: almost impossible to reverse. Think selling your company. Or quitting a job. In short, figuratively jumping off a cliff. Once you make a one-way-door decision, there’s usually no going back.
Two-way doors: easy to reverse.  Like starting a side hustle. Or offering a new service. Or introducing new pricing schemes. While two-way-door decisions might feel momentous, with a little time and effort—often a lot less than you fear when you’re making the decision—they can be reversed.

Granted, it’s easy to mistake one-way-door decisions for two-way-door decisions, or to let caution creep in and assume that every two-way-door decision is a one-way-door decision.

Do that, and it’s easy to put off making a decision—and indecision is a “my boss inspires confidence” killer.

As Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter,

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.
But most decisions aren’t like that—they are changeable, reversible—they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavyweight one-way-door decision-making process on most decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.

It’s easy to assume every decision is extremely important. It’s tempting to assume failure is just one wrong decision away. But that’s not how success works. Success only seems inevitable in hindsight. Every successful person has made a number of mistakes. Most have made more mistakes than you.

That’s one of the reasons they’re so successful.

The next time you need to make a decision, first decide what type of decision it is. If it truly is a one-way door—selling off a piece of your company, for example, or buying out a co-founder—then by all means take your time. But if it’s a two-way door, take a little time, but not too much.

Good leaders embrace a bias for action.

And that’s easier when you …

2. Follow the 70 percent rule.

Or in simple terms, use “pretty sure” instead of “absolutely sure” as your decision-making guide.

As Bezos wrote in the same shareholder letter:

Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a lightweight process.

Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.

The beauty of the 70 percent rule is that it makes room for a little intuition. According to the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, “Intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do. Like quickly scanning three résumés and, without thinking too hard, picking the best candidate. Like quickly scanning long checkout lines at the supermarket and deciding, without thinking too hard, which is likely to be the quickest.”

That’s why Sully decided, within seconds, to land in the Hudson River. That’s why a physician’s gut feel can have greater diagnostic value than most signs and symptoms. As Friederike Fabritius and Hans Hagemann write in their 2018 book The Leading Brain: Neuroscience Hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier:

Although there’s a common misconception that intuitive decisions are random and signify a lack of skill, the exact opposite is true. Intuitive decisions are often the product of years of experience and thousands of hours of practice.

They represent the most efficient use of your accumulated experience.

Add it all up, and intuition—supported by around 70 percent of the information you need—can be an effective decision-making tool. Consider the facts, layer in your intuition, and make a decision. Sometimes you’ll be wrong, but as long as it was a two-way-door decision, that’s OK. You can adjust and adapt. And learn from the experience, which will over time improve your decision-making skills.

But what if you want to make a decision your employees don’t agree with? Or what if an employee wants to make a decision you don’t agree with?

3. Decide to “disagree and commit.”

We’ve all been a part of the meeting after the meeting. It’s after the meeting where everyone in the room agreed on a decision, but some later huddle together to disagree, to pick it apart, and to undermine—or simply not do at all—whatever they earlier agreed to do.

The meeting after the meeting often happens when a decision has to be made quickly, with, say, only 70 percent of the information every person in the room needs to feel comfortable with that decision.

How does Bezos deal with disagreement, whether overt or hidden? Simple: “Disagree and commit.”

According to Bezos:

Use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this, but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?”

[If I disagree], it’s not me thinking to myself, ‘Well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way.

The next time you need to make a quick decision, listen. Weigh options. Assess pros and cons. If you can’t reach consensus, that’s OK. Make a decision, and ask your team to disagree and commit.

The next time someone else makes a decision you disagree with—especially if it’s a decision you’ve given them the authority to make—actively choose to disagree and commit. You might turn out to be wrong.

Even if your concerns were justified, you showed you trust your people to exercise the authority you’ve given them. Which, over time, is a win in itself.

4. Make sure you always speak last.

Everyone knows you’re the boss. You’re in charge. Your opinion matters most. So how can you make sure your employees feel comfortable disagreeing with you?

As Bezos said in 2023 on the Lex Fridman Podcast:

In every meeting I attend, I always speak last.
I know, from experience, if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high-judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, “If Jeff thinks that? I came into this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I’m not right.”

When you have an idea—or more to the point, when you think you have the answer—even if you don’t explicitly state that opinion or answer, it’s easy to ask leading questions. It’s easy to ask limiting questions. It’s easy to ask questions that assume a certain answer.

It’s easy to not even listen to others when you already presume you’re right. As Simon Sinek says:

The skill to hold your opinions to yourself until everyone has spoken does two things: One, it gives everybody else the feeling that they have been heard. It gives everyone else the ability to feel that they have contributed. Two, you get the benefit of hearing what everybody else has to think before you render your opinion.

The skill is really to keep your opinions to yourself.

Science agrees. A study published in Science found that first opinions hold considerable sway on subsequent opinions, resulting in what the researchers call “accumulated herding.”

Early opinions also impact group decisions. A study published in Journal of Risk and Uncertainty found that one person’s opinion—especially that of a “senior” person—tends to have an outsize impact on a final decision, resulting in what social scientists call an “informational cascade” that sparks similar opinions.

Bezos likes an idea? Others are bound to like it too, even if they opposed the idea when they walked into the room. You like an idea? Your employees are likely to support that idea, even if, had you not spoken first, they would have suggested something entirely different.

To ensure you hear what your employees think, what they really think:

Present a situation. “We’re going to miss this ship date.”
Ask open-ended questions. “What do you think?” “What do you think we should do?” “How can we fix this?”
Ask clarifying questions, without overt or implied judgment. “How long would that take?” “What else would we have to do?” “What problems might that cause that we would need to deal with later?”
Then, and only then, weigh in. Maybe you’ll still do what you planned to do, but often you’ll realize your employees have better ideas.

Especially when you listen first, and speak last.