Why do good leaders make bad decisions? Because they’re imperfect. Even the best decision-makers can show poor judgment and make bad calls. You’re often a victim of your own success. Success breeds confidence, and confidence breeds overconfidence – the curse of the experienced leader.
It’s easy for experienced leaders to forget that good decision making comes from the awareness of your specific situation and circumstances. As situations change (subject matter, complexity, expertise, etc.) the consideration that goes into decisions should change.
The best leaders are aware of the context of the decisions that they’re making and consider their options accordingly. Is this their decision to make? Should they seek input from others? How can they encourage a culture where their team feels comfortable challenging flawed decisions.
Know yourself and your limitations
Have you found success recently in your leadership journey? Why? Are you exceptionally smart? Are you tenacious? Do you have a special talent for [management skill]? It’s important that you have some idea why. You need to know where your strengths are and where they aren’t. It’d be easy for you to believe you’re great at everything, that you’re a natural, talented at every aspect of the job. Possible, but unlikely.
By understanding your successes and the skills, circumstances, good fortune, and hard work that have contributed to those successes, you can better understand where your continued success might come from. This reflection will also help you identify your blind spots and weaknesses. Most of us find success despite our flaws and shortcomings because we do a good job of keeping our flaws out of the spotlight. If you don’t recognize them and control for them, you risk exposing them.
Is this your decision to make?
Never make a decision that doesn’t need to be made. There’s a reason that many successful executives wear the same thing every day: preserving their brainpower and time. You only have so many strong decisions you can make every day and seeking out unnecessary decisions whittles away needed mental energy.
There are hundreds of decisions you can involve yourself in everyday if you really wanted to. You could contribute to hiring decisions, how work gets assigned, process decisions, or customer service issues. But none of that is a good use of your time. Should you have visibility to these things? Sure. But you certainly shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat, because almost none of them are what you should be doing with your time and energy.
You need a methodology for when a decision that’s being made is yours to make. Think of the best CEOs in the world, they aren’t making all of the decisions for the organization. They’re making only the decisions they need to make. Their job is to seek out those decisions and put in the work to make the most of them. You should be making important decisions, but you should also be learning how to delegate important decisions to the right people. Make it a goal to see how few decisions you can make while still achieving team goals.
Surround yourself with competent decision makers
What if your team can’t make their own decisions? Then you need to find a new team. If you’re the sole person that can make decisions, then you’re in an unsustainable situation. It’s impossible for any leader to be the single point of failure on their team and have consistent success. You’re going to be on vacation, be sick, be focused on some other important project when a decision comes up that you can’t make the decision for. You have to be able to depend on others in the team to handle themselves in your absence.
Build a team of people that you can depend on to take responsibility when you’re not around. You need individuals with competence in areas where you don’t have the experience or expertise. When facing a challenging situation, ask the team members that you trust what they would do. How would they handle this? If this catches them off guard, you can tell them: “I want to know what you’d do if I wasn’t here.” It’s your job to engage, enable, and grow those around you.
Will the team challenge your poor decisions?
In the event you do make a poor decision, do you have people around you that would tell you? Leaders complain when employees allow them to make foolish choices, but these same leaders punish dissenting voices. Think on your behaviors. Are you defensive when an employee challenges a decision? If you have a culture of silence, it’s because you’re creating it.
Ask specifically for feedback when making decisions. Tell your team that “it’s an option” and that you’d “like to hear some alternatives before deciding”. Ask someone to suggest or present an alternative before you’ve made a final decision. This is why shared decision making is valuable, it avoids the cognitive bias that comes from critiquing your own ideas. We’re bad self-critics.
For some employees, challenging you will always feel like insubordination, especially in public. It’s difficult to feel comfortable speaking directly to “the boss”. Encourage your team to approach you in private to voice their concerns, so that you (and they) save face. Afterwards, be vocal about praising people that speak their mind and challenge you on key decisions so that others can follow their example.
Next time you find yourself faced with an initiative or decision, pause and ask yourself these questions:
- Is this decision going to have a major impact on my goals?
- Am I the best person to make this decision?
- Have I given people room to share feedback to make this a better decision?
By being more intentional, you’ll make better decisions and be better at deciding when to make better decisions. In turn, by being more willing to delegate and challenge your team to do their own thinking and evaluating the right ideas, you’ll encourage them to grow and learn. This will leave you the brainpower to do your best work. You’ll have created a virtuous cycle through a simple change in perspective and methodology.
Have your own method for making good decisions? I’d love to hear about it. Message me on Twitter or send me an email. Appreciate my advice? Consider sharing this post with someone who could benefit. Good luck out there.
-Patrick