14 How Do I Decide Leadership Issues?

Raven loved leadership, all except for one thing: making decisions. Raven loved supporting, recognizing, and encouraging her team. She felt competent in her leadership role, confident in her leadership skills, and comfortable with her leadership style. Raven, although a first-time leader, felt made for leadership and could see herself soon leading at higher levels and eventually having led for a long time. Yet she still didn’t like making decisions. Raven didn’t feel like she knew how to make a good decision. Nor did she have any confidence that the decisions she made would work out. And so, Raven avoided decisions, as much as she could. But soon, Raven began noticing her leadership suffering over the decisions she was putting off. She needed to quickly learn how a leader decides, or she wasn’t going to be a leader for long.

Process

Leaders make lots of decisions. Of course, everyone makes decisions all day long. But a leader’s decisions can have a broader impact than the everyday decisions of the rest of us who are not presently leading. The decisions of someone who isn’t leading primarily affect the decision maker, for better or worse. Yet the decisions of a leader can affect everyone on the team or in the organization, even to the point of destroying the organization or team. Leaders can hold the livelihoods, assets, and financial and vocational futures of many others in their hands, all depending on the quality of the decisions the leader makes. Leaders should thus ensure that they have a sound process for making good decisions. Shooting from the hip, making rushed and ill-considered decisions, shouldn’t generally be a leader’s practice or option. If you’re going to lead effectively, you need a sound decision-making process. 

Prediction

In developing and following a sound decision-making process, leaders first need to appreciate that decisions typically involve a degree of prediction, when predicting the future is very hard to do. When making decisions, leaders may hold a delusion of foreseeability and control, when to the contrary, leaders may barely be able to predict what will happen and may have little or no control over it. Leaders may, though, still wish to create an illusion of foreseeability and control. Others in the organization may need to believe that someone with clearer vision is guiding the organization, even if the leader knows little or nothing more about what the future holds, than anyone else in the organization. In any case, keep yourself as well informed as you can about trends in your organization’s field, so that your decisions have the best possible foresight. But don’t trust more than you should in your ability to predict the future. If you can, hedge your bets when committing to decisions that depend on predicting the future. Beware of over confidence in your ability to predict the future.

Issues

A leader’s decision requires an issue to decide. The quality of a leader’s decision depends on the issues the leader identifies, how the leader frames those issues, and the timing the leader projects for deciding those issues. Leaders must develop a fine sense of the organizational issues the leader faces. Failing to spot the issues up for decision, instead spotting the wrong issues to decide, and deciding issues too soon, too late, or out of order can wreck a leader’s tenure. Indeed, the predictive accuracy of a leader’s decisions may be less consequential than the leader’s ability to perceive the right issues to decide and when to decide them. A leader is going to decide wrong sometimes. One cannot predict the future with sufficient accuracy to make every decision the right one. But if one can at least perceive and frame the right issues, then the chances of making right decisions goes way up, even if the leader continues to guess wrong sometimes. Decide the wrong issues, and you’ll never make a good decision. Identify, frame, and decide the right issues, and at least you’ll make a few good decisions. Thus, with every decision you prepare to make, first assure yourself that the decision is the right issue, that you have framed the question in the best way, and that you are making the decision at the right time.

Information

A second concern after the question of whether you are deciding the right issue is whether you have the right information on which to decide. Decisions generally have a factual context. Leaders don’t decide in the abstract. Leaders decide in the full context of their organization’s mission, history, capacity, and interests, the commitments and capacities of their workforce or membership, the market’s condition and direction, the capabilities and interests of their suppliers, and the offerings of their competitors in the field. The quality of your decisions depends on the quality of your information. If you don’t know the capability of your organization, workforce, or membership, the market condition and direction, your suppliers’ capabilities, and the offerings of competitors in your field, among other things, then your decisions are more likely to be wrong. Whenever you have an impactful decision to make, first identify the information on which you should base it. Then gather quality information from trustworthy sources that ensure its reliability. Don’t try to make good decisions on bad information.

Analysis

Leaders should have sound processes for analyzing the information on which they make their decisions. Simply gathering the information isn’t enough. You must also review, examine, test, and weigh it in some fashion. We naturally tend to err when making decisions, for instance, by giving the first information and last information we receive greater weight than we should. We tend to decide, erroneously, by jumping to a preferred conclusion supported by the first information we receive and then fitting subsequent information into our decision framework. In other words, we make up our minds first, then manipulate the evidence. Beware doing so. Instead, consider all evidence, giving it the priority and weight it deserves. Test your inferences and assumptions as to why that evidence may be important. Consider how one piece of evidence impacts another. Look for patterns, opportunities, fortuities, and synergies. And ask that others whose judgment you trust join you in the analysis so that you get a broader and deeper view of the evidence. Follow a reasoned process for deciding that you can review later, so that if and when your decision doesn’t work out, you can trace any errors in your analysis. You’ll make wrong decisions. Just ensure that you learn from them.

Decisions

When leaders need to decide, they should decide.  A leader doesn’t have to call all of the shots. A leader may properly defer certain decisions to others who have greater knowledge and have specific responsibility over the issue that requires decision, when the issue does not involve the organization’s direction or survival. But leaders should decide issues that address the organization’s direction and ensure its survival. And a leader’s decision should directly address the significant issue that the organization faces. A leader who wishes to avoid deciding a major issue, and avoid bearing responsibility for the decision, may deliberately or subconsciously make an ambiguous decision. Ambiguous decisions unfairly force subordinates to interpret the decision at their peril. A leader who forces a subordinate to make a significant decision that turns out badly for the organization may try to blame the subordinate, but the blame game simply demonstrates the leader’s unfitness to lead. Don’t shirk your responsibility to make decisions impacting your organization’s direction or survival. When you need to decide, do so clearly in a way that directly addresses the issue. It’s on you, whether you like it or not.

Communication

Making a decision isn’t enough. A leader must also communicate it. The leader’s choice of to whom, when, and how to communicate a major decision can be as important as the decision itself. If you fail to communicate your decision to the organization’s members who need to carry it out, then in practical terms, you will have failed to decide. As soon as you make a major decision, communicate it clearly, confirmed in writing, to those who need to know it to carry it out. Make sure that those others receive, understand, and acknowledge your communication. Don’t give anyone who needs to follow your decision a way to wiggle out of doing so. If you need accountability to your decision, then show others that you expect accountability. Otherwise, they may assume that your decision was only advisory or was only for others. After communicating your decision to those who need to carry it out, consider whether others inside or outside the organization should know of your decision, to appreciate that you have addressed and decided an issue important to the organization. Leadership is in the decisions. Leadership is also in communicating the decisions.

Control

A common error that leaders can make is not to control for the decision. To control for the decision means to put in place measures that ensure that others continue to do as the decision directs. We are habitual beings. We often find it hard to break old habits and change our behavior. When a leader makes a decision, team members may immediately respond with the appropriate new behavior. But in time, that change may wear off, and team members may return to the old behavior that the leader’s decision addressed and attempted to correct. A periodic report to the leader is one form of control. If you make a decision that you need to ensure gets implemented and remains implemented, consider requesting a weekly, monthly, or other periodic report from those who must implement it, describing the implementation’s impact. The reporting requirement will remind the reporters to keep at it. Periodic inspection is another form of control. Try, though, to find natural controls that do not require additional burdensome activities and irksome monitoring and correction. Changing a physical layout or electronic form to reflect the decision and effectively facilitate or force implementation may be a less annoying and more effective control. 

Evaluation

Include evaluation of the impact of your decision in your decision-making process. Making decisions isn’t simply about deciding. It’s also about monitoring the impact of your decisions, to learn what you can from that impact, including how your team responds to decisions and how to make better decisions. Let the team members who must implement your decision know that you intend to evaluate the decision’s impact on whatever schedule or in whatever manner makes sense. Your doing so may ensure full implementation of your decision, while reassuring the team members implementing your decision that they can trust that you will remain accountable to them and the organization for your decision’s impact. Then follow through with that evaluation. Include in your evaluation input from those whom your decision most impacted. Let them know that you are accountable for your decisions and will correct them when needed. Express your appreciation for their diligent implementation of your decision, if that’s what your evaluation found. 

Adjustment

Don’t hesitate to adjust decisions that your evaluation finds you could have decided differently and better. Some decisions are done and over with. You can’t go back to correct them. But other decisions involve ongoing processes where you can make adjustments or even decide differently. Some decisions are, in effect, experiments, the results of which you should monitor to make tweaks or wholesale changes, whatever the situation recommends and requires. Work with your team to get from them the information you need to make appropriate adjustments. Listen to their input as to what they recommend. But if the decision is for you to make, involving the direction or survival of the organization, then make the adjustments you discern that the situation needs. As the organization’s leader, you should have the full view of the organization’s needs, resources, capacities, and opportunities. When you make a shaky decision, be ready to go back and fix what you can of it. Sometimes, the outcome isn’t in what you first decide but instead in what you later adjust. Decisions can involve a process of gradually making better choices. Be humble enough about your original decision to make a better decision as time goes on.

Intuition

The above discussion takes a traditional, analytical approach to decision making. Analysis isn’t, though, your only approach. Conscious reasoning has limits. Our conscious, rational minds consider only a tiny fraction of the available information at any one time. And we frequently introduce all kinds of biases and other flaws into our conscious reasoning. We have, though, an alternative intuitive sense that can account at once for many more variables and account for many more subtle markers than the rational constructs we mull in a deliberative process in our minds. Don’t reject your intuition when making decisions. Listen to your subtle feelings and leanings, even if they don’t call rational constructs to mind. Actively imagine having made certain decisions to see how you feel about them, again in your subconscious emotional or sensual state rather than your conscious, rationalizing mind. Leaders who make especially good, if surprising or unconventional, decisions sometimes describe them as going with their gut or going on instinct. Don’t throw out or rationalize away your intuitive sense. Listen to your instincts.

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how effective do you believe yourself to be as a decision maker? In what area could you improve your decision making? Do you choose and frame the right issues to decide? Do you time your decisions well? Do you get the best information on which to make your decisions? How balanced and reasoned is your analysis of the information on which you decide? Do you adequately include the views and insights of others in your analysis? When you make a big decision, do you do so clearly and firmly so that others can rely on it? Do you communicate your decisions to those who must implement them, in a manner on which they can rely and on which you can hold them accountable? Do you put in place controls to ensure that your decisions stick? Do you return to your decisions to frankly evaluate their impact, while including others in your evaluation? Are you willing to adjust your decisions when they don’t work as well as they could? How keen is your intuition for making strategic decisions? Do you need to rely more or rely less on your intuition? Do you have subordinates whose intuition seems more keen than your own, from whom you could get input when making decisions?

Key Points

• The broad impact of your leadership decisions requires sound process.

• Remain humble over your ability to predict the outcome of decisions.

• Choose and frame the right issues to decide with the right timing.

• Your decisions’ quality depends on the quality of your information.

• Analyze the evidence you collect, using a sound and balanced process.

• Decide clearly and firmly any impactful issues you need to decide.

• Communicate your decision clearly to those who must implement it.

• Put in place measures to ensure that your decision remains in place.

• Evaluate your decision’s impact, involving those who implement it.

• Adjust your decision as necessary to ensure the best outcome.

• When making decisions, value your sensitive and aware intuition.

Read Chapter 15.