One of your jobs as a leader is to make tough decisions
Here’s how to make better ones
“Should I stay or should I go now?”, “To be or not to be?”, “Where do we go from here?”. Artists, thespians and leaders alike grapple with complex decisions such as these on a daily basis.
The one presented to you today is a little less existential but no less stressful; your top platform partner is demanding a critical feature has to be delivered YESTERDAY!
Someone needs to make a decision on what to do about it and as it turns out your team is unable to reach consensus and has requested you step in to help evaluate.
You notice that the engineering team that would create this feature is the very same one that is also building critical platform functionality that’s been frustrating customers for months now.
Decision time
The best leaders make decisions, all the better if they’re the right ones.
As a leader, when tough decisions are escalated your team looks for outcomes that in the best interest of your group. That means you’re going to fight tooth and nail to get that partner feature done ASAP, right? Well, maybe…
Better decisions: balancing needs
On the one hand, no one knows more about the needs of your team than you and if you don’t fight for them who will? That said, if the business fails then all teams within it fail. Hmm, tough one.
Your job as a leader is to both provide and ascertain context from across the business. Why is this important to developers? What is the impact to the business of not delivering the feature or delivering it late? How does this stack against the other platform work that would be deprioritized because of it?
You will know when you’ve answered these questions effectively as:
- You’re able to make a decision
- You’re able to justify that decision in simple terms to your own team and to cross function colleagues
Done all that and still not 100% confident of what decision to make? Top tip: make a decision anyway.
No decision is a decision; remember, the best way to predict the future is to actively shape it.
Jees, OK, I’ll flip a coin, make the decision and move on. Alright! Any decision is often better than none at all. Still, we can do better.
Better decisions: luck vs skill
One of the greatest assets you have as a leader is experience. Remember all those gut wrenching mistakes you made which still keep you up at night? Yep! Oh, and all those decisions that you’re currently thinking through which you’re spinning endlessly on? Good! Well, while I do honestly wish you’d get more sleep at night there’s incredible value to be found in those experiences.
Wisdom.
Each decision you make and outcome you experience, good and bad, is a treasure that culminates in wisdom. The key question you need to ask yourself is: “how can I best learn from these experiences?”. Great question, ⭐!
Introducing the all encompassing QoSaF (quadrant of success and fuckups — cwo-saf).
The first and most often overlooked takeaway is correlation != causation. More specifically:
Just because an outcome was positive doesn’t mean you made a good decision.
Extra bigly font here to emphasize the point. The inverse is true of course and also an important consideration. The goal is to improve outcomes over time and the only way you do that is understanding the difference between luck and skill when it comes to decision making.
Let’s take a concrete example. You decide to offer substantial engineering on-call and comprehensive but costly weekly updates to a key platform partner. Post launch, you promptly head out on an absolute bender 🍺 elated that their content has sold absolute gangbusters! Waking up bleary eyed you think to yourself: “what a great decision I made to provide all that support!”.
Or was it?
All decisions that focus in one area incur an opportunity cost in another. What else could those engineers have been doing? What other partners may have missed out on support during this time?
Upon further review it turns out that this key partner barely contacted your support team and there was substantial wasted capacity spent waiting around for a need that never manifested. Luckily, no other fires came up at the same time, lucky bugger!
How can you learn from this and make a better decision next time?
Better decisions: collective intelligence
A key way to improve decision quality is to collate and assimilate the collective intelligence of your team. Regardless of your seniority and all the great work you’ve done to get there, you don’t know sh*t vs the collective intelligence of the 30 other humans in your team — trust me.
Key to being able to collate this wisdom and help it inform decision making is finding the right spot on the consultation continuum:
On the one hand you’ve got the leadership YOLO approach — consult with no one, fire from the hip, move fast and break everything! On the other hand you have ‘analysis paralysis’, speak to everyone endlessly and make no decision whatsoever.
For anything outside of day to day trivialities the sweet spot is somewhere between the two. That said, this sweet spot will vary considerably based on the situation.
General principles that can help you out here:
- Is this decision extremely impactful and irreversible? If so, you may want to spend more time considering options
- Who’s impacted? These folks should at least be informed ahead of time, potentially even consulted
- Who’s an expert? Get in a room with them and be the debate maker
Note, reaching absolute consensus is not a requirement but making a well justified decision is.
Your job is help facilitate decisions
Becoming an effective leader and increasing your teams ‘hit rate’ of good decisions takes time, experience and plenty of mistakes along the way.
Notice that your job is a facilitator first and a decision maker second. A teams capabilities is the summation of its collective intelligence and capabilities. With this in mind, even more critical than understanding how high quality decisions are made is helping your team reflect on their own decisions.
Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative.
Humans are messy, unpredictable and can be, at times, rather irrational. That said, whilst you and your team will certainly make plenty of mistakes, through careful reflection, consultation and deliberation the quality of your decisions is certain to increase over time.
Now get out there and start deciding, your team will be thankful for your new found effective decision making process!
