Decision Making in Everyday Leadership
Many of us live in very dynamic business environments, where things happen quickly and we frequently find ourselves in the midst of dealing with business or organizational changes.
Those changes are inevitable in order to quickly react to challenges and opportunities and being successful organization is predicated on the extent of this agility.
But let’s think about it for a moment, Where this agility really comes from?
At the end of the day, it comes from our leadership skills and the way we manage people.
Good leaders achieve agility by getting people working together effectively, and often they do it even without having formal authority.
So, what is their secret sauce?
I think that it boils down to how managers make and implement their decisions.
There are managers that rely on their formal authority. They explicitly tell you what should be done. In extreme cases, they micro-manage every tiny aspect of the task at hand. When such managers ask you to do things, you do them not because you believe in their value or rationale, but just because otherwise you may jeopardize your status or even position.
Good leaders on the other hand, rely on their influence skills. They try to get you on board and convince that whatever goal they are trying to achieve is actually for your best interest.
And that’s really what sets apart bad leaders and good leaders.
Instead of relying on formal authority, you get people to want to do the things that you need them to do.
Making and Implementing Decisions
Let’s look now how to implement decisions based on persuasion rather than coercion.
As it t turns out that one of the biggest levers that we have is inclusiveness in a decision making.
By asking people to be involved in the decisions, we immediately benefit from two things:
- Information
- Motivation
Inclusiveness Information Benefits
As Gregory Northcraft put it eloquently in his lectures of “Foundations of Everyday Leadership” Coursera MOOC, information benefit is the head of effective leadership and motivation benefit is the heart of it.
By getting more information, we deal with different biases that may hinder our ability to make high-quality decisions.
In order to demonstrate it Gregory Northcraft brings this example:
Count the number of F’s in the following sentence:
“ Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years”.
How many Fs did you find in that sentence?
It turns out that when we do this with large groups of people, the numbers are pretty broad. They vary from people who find 2 Fs all the way up to people who find 6 Fs and everything in between.
If you count it attentively, you will find that there are 6 Fs in this sentence.
But this experiment shows that when you ask people to read this sentence and look for the F’s most people can’t find six F’s.
This nicely illustrates that everyone sees the world a little bit differently. When involving people in decision making we open opportunity to bring their unique perspective to the table, so we can make better decisions.
Inclusiveness Motivation Benefits
The other side of people involvement in decision making is motivational benefits.
We need to remember that at the end of the day, the quality of our decisions is limited by our ability to implement it.
It doesn’t matter how good our decision is theoretically, it wouldn’t solve any problem if the people this decision is about won’t implement it.
We have to have people’s enthusiasm and knowledge in order to assure decision implementation success.
In addition to knowing what to do, people also need to want to do it.
So, by involving people in the decision process, people feel ownership and accountability of its successful implementation.
Summary
So in this post, we took a closer look at how decision making style affects our effectiveness as leaders. We discussed the benefits of persuasion-based decision making and how inclusiveness gives us information and motivation levers, essential for making and implementing high-quality decisions.
References
- “Foundations of Everyday Leadership” MOOC by Coursera
- https://strategichrinc.com/inclusive-decision-making-principles/
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
