making decisions Archives - Let's Grow Leaders

The Roadmap to Clarity: Three Must-Have Steps in Your Decision Making Process

Karin Hurt and David Dye — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 10:00:43 +0000

Three critical questions will save you time and improve decision making with fewer headaches

In a world with a constantly growing AI presence, where data is cheap, and you can easily outsource routine tasks to large language models, your decision making ability plays a more vital role than ever. Your ability to help your organization and teams make effective decisions is a competitive advantage and rare leadership skill. Three questions will help energize and clarify your decision making process.

When Decision Making Meetings Go Wrong

You’ve been there before. One of those awful meetings that turns into a painful slog through a swamp of half-hearted participation and conversations that go in circles.

Pretty soon someone says, “Sorry, I have to get to another call,” and everyone else looks at them with a mix of jealousy and frustration. The meeting ends with no decision made, an hour or more wasted, and the team’s morale drained from their inability to act.

When decision making meetings go wrong, one or more of these factors is usually in play:

You don’t have the right people
You don’t know who owns the decision
You haven’t defined the success criteria

Invest in Clarity for Energetic Decision Making that Builds Morale

Missing clarity is at the heart of all three decision making morale busters. You can solve them by answering three key questions:

Who does this decision affect?
Who owns this decision?
What would a successful outcome do for each affected party?

Let’s look at each of these questions.

1) Who does this decision affect?

To make the best decision, make sure to include people who the decision affects in the process. You don’t need everyone. What’s the smallest group of people to get the needed input?

2) Who owns this decision?

Before discussion begins, clarify the person or people who will actually make the call. There are only three options:

A single person decides (maybe you, maybe another subject matter expert)
A group votes
A group reaches consensus (where everyone can live with one outcome)

(To learn more about clarifying who attends decision making meetings and who owns the decision check out the Advanced Guide to Lead Meetings That Get Results and People Want to Attend)

3) What would a successful outcome do for you?

This final clarity question is critical to a successful decision, and yet we regularly see leaders skip it or assume that everyone has the same success criteria in mind.

But of course, they don’t, and so people talk past one another and frustration reigns.

You can’t reliably choose effective solutions if you don’t know what success looks like.

Let’s say your team is discussing a marketing opportunity with some newly available funds. If you jump into the discussion before establishing success criteria, how will you choose between different options?

Lela and Vinesh jump in, “Let’s hire actors and do a flash mob of the thriller dance. Then the zombies will transform at the end by shedding their overshirts and revealing our product tee shirt. It will be great for social!”

Mark and Sheila suggest, “We should really do one more booth at the new conference expo they just added at the end of the year. Those leads are usually solid.”

Osa and Vik listen for a moment and then add, “Let’s not limit ourselves here. There’s an opportunity for a partnership with the magic soda corp—they’re looking for someone to package with for a winter campaign.”

The conversation likely turns into a tug of war between two or three different positions who each argue for solutions that make sense to them.

The antidote to this confusion and frustration is to establish clear success criteria. If you’ve already got clear success criteria, don’t keep them a secret. Share them before anyone presents any ideas.

A Powerful Question

But if the criteria aren’t clear or haven’t been established for you, it’s up to you to ensure a shared understanding of what success looks like.

When you first ask key stakeholders what a successful outcome will do for them, you can build a set of success criteria that will both filter the ideas people bring to the table and then give the decision maker(s) a way to evaluate choices.

“What would a successful outcome do for you?” is one of our favorite of the G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict because it gets underneath what people really need. Instead of arguing for their position (zombies, booth, partnership), you learn what outcomes matter most.

Use Your Criteria to Evaluate Options

Suppose you ask the relevant stakeholders this question and get a resounding answer like, “We need to boost overall sales and leads for next year. A secondary, but important outcome is that need to improve perceived value for our existing channel partners.”

Now you’ve got some general criteria to work with. You might drive for more detail or numeric goals. But even if you get directional criteria like these, you are in a better place to evaluate options. You can ask each group to make their case relative to the success criteria in play.

Team flash mob might take zombies off the table (it would help with perceived partner value, but probably not have much effect on sales or leads.) The expo and partner-packaging folks can make their cases for both outcomes.

Before You Stop with the Options You Have…

You can also ask your team to reframe the opportunity and look for alternative ways to achieve the same or better outcomes.

This can be a fun exercise: “We’ve been talking about increasing our pipeline by 3%. What if we needed to increase it by 10% with the same resources? What might we do?”

Your Turn

It might feel obvious to clarify what success looks before you get into a decision making conversation. But it happens all the time and teams waste too much valuable time and energy talking past one another. Energize your decision making conversations by clarifying who should be there, who owns the decision, and critically, what will a successful outcome achieve.

We’d love to hear from you: how do you ensure decision making criteria are clear before you get into discussions about ideas?

You Might Like:

The post The Roadmap to Clarity: Three Must-Have Steps in Your Decision Making Process appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

A Manager’s Guide to Better Decision Making

Karin Hurt and David Dye — Mon, 24 May 2021 10:00:26 +0000

Best Practices for Better Decision Making

Have you ever heard any of these common decision-making frustrations?

“Our conversations just go in circles, it seems like we can never make a decision around here!”

“This is so stupid—you asked for my opinion and then ignored it. I don’t know why I even bother! From now on, I’m just going to shut my mouth and do my work.”

“We talked about so much I’m not even sure what we’re talking about. Are we making a decision or what?”

Avoid These Two Big Mistakes

We’ve both heard these words and so has nearly every manager we’ve ever worked with. We imagine you have too. This kind of frustration and anger reflects a broken process. To make more efficient decisions your team can get behind, start by avoiding these two big mistakes.

Mistake 1: Combining “Where are we going?” conversations with “How will we get there?” decisions.

Start your conversation with two vital pieces of information.

1. What kind of decision is this?

and

2. Who owns the decision?

What kind of decision is this?

The first step to making decisions that everyone gets behind is to make just one decision at a time and limit discussion to that single decision.

“Where are we going?” decisions

The first type is a decision about goals.

The question, “Where are we going?” can take many forms, but it’s always about your group’s goal, destination, or outcome.

Other ways to ask this question are, “What is the outcome we need to achieve?” or, “What does success look like?”

You can’t talk about how you’re going to do those things until you’ve first clearly decided what success looks like.

For example, say you’re looking at your employee engagement survey results and realize your front-line supervisors are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

Of course, you have many strategic “Where are we going?” choices you could make.

Perhaps they could use training on how to effectively and efficiently lead their remote teams.

Or, maybe you want to revisit your scheduling or time-off policies.

Another option could be to find ways to create more human connection and support through virtual water coolers and other fun.

First, make the decision on which approach you will take, and what success looks like BEFORE you start talking about what training partner to use, or best practices for time-off policies.

Know where you are going before you discuss how to get there.

“How will we get there?” decisions

The second type of decision is: “How will we get there?”

This is a decision-making discussion about methods.

For example, if the decision has been made to invest in front-line leadership training, now you can entertain the “How will we get there?” questions.

Should it be in-person or live virtual training? What competencies should we focus on? Will we include a leaders-as-teachers approach? How will we reinforce the training to ensure it’s sustainable?

Separate discussions about where you are going from how you will get there.

Managers get in trouble when they allow these discussions to get mixed up.

The team starts out talking about whether to change up schedules and then suddenly the conversation shifts to which training partner to use. And then, someone else starts talking about the need for focus groups.

The discussion is confused, perplexing, and wastes time because the question isn’t clear.

Mistake Number 2: Failure to Define Who Owns the Decision

Let’s return to the upset employee we quoted at the beginning of this article.

“This is so stupid—you asked for my opinion and then ignored it. I don’t know why I even bother! From now on, I’m just going to shut my mouth and do my work.”

If you’ve heard this or said it yourself, you’ve experienced the second decision-making mistake managers commit: lack of clarity around ownership.

People hate feeling ignored. Unfortunately, when you ask for input and appear to ignore it, employees feel frustrated, devalued, and powerless. In contrast, when you are clear about who owns the decision and how it will be made, people will readily contribute and are far more likely to own the outcome.

This isn’t difficult, because there are only four ways to make a decision:

1. A single person makes the decision.

Typically, this would be the manager or someone she appoints.

In this style, you might ask your team for input and let them know that after hearing everyone’s perspective, you will make the call.

2. A group makes the decision through a vote.

This might be a 50-percent-plus-one majority or a two-thirds majority, but in any case, it’s an agreement by vote. With this option, you ask everyone to contribute input, and they know that the decision will be made by a vote at a specific time.

3. A team makes the decision through consensus.

Consensus is often misunderstood. Consensus means that the group continues discussion until everyone can live with a decision. It does not mean everyone got his or her first choice, but that everyone can live with the final decision. Consensus can take more time and often increases everyone’s

4. Fate decides.

You can flip a coin, roll the dice, draw from a hat, etc. There are times where flipping a coin is the most efficient way to make a decision. When time is of the essence, the stakes are low, and pro-con lists are evenly matched, it’s often good to just pick an option and go.

For example, if you have 45 minutes for a team lunch, it doesn’t make any sense to spend 30 minutes discussing options. Narrow it down to a few places, flip a coin, and go.

Each way of deciding has advantages, but what’s most important is to be very clear about who makes the final call.

When that person said, “You asked for my opinion and then ignored it. I don’t know why I even bother!” he was under the impression that the team would decide by vote or consensus when in reality it was the leader’s decision.

This type of confusion wastes tons of precious time and energy, not to mention, leads to disengagement.

Before the decision-making discussion begins, state how the decision will be made.

You get yourself in trouble (not to mention that it’s unfair, disempowering, and quite soulless) if you suggest a vote and then change back to “I’ll decide” when you think the vote won’t go your way.

Be specific.

For example, you might begin a decision-making session by saying, “Okay, I’d like to spend the next 40 minutes getting everyone’s input, and then I’ll make the call.” Or, you might describe the decision to be made and say, “We’re not going to move forward until everyone can live with it.”

You might even combine methods and say, “We will discuss this topic for 30 minutes. If we can come to a consensus by then, that would be great. If not, we’ll give it another 15 minutes. After that, if we don’t have consensus, I’ll take a final round of feedback and I’ll choose, or we’ll vote.”

You save yourself grief, misunderstanding, and hurt feelings when everyone knows upfront how the decision will be made.

You also empower your people to be more influential because when they know who owns the decision, they also know how to share their information.

Your turn. What are your best practices for better decision-making?

The post A Manager’s Guide to Better Decision Making appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.