Confusing decision-making with leadership is a trap too many of us fall into.
Measuring our leadership prowess by assessing our ability to make decisions is appealing for a reason: across history great leaders have had a tendency to make great decisions.
And yet, often the best use of a leader’s time is to facilitate decisions by others instead of making them themselves. The most important reason for this is that there’s simply too many decisions for one person to effectively handle.
Whether the myth of average adults making 30,000-35,000 decisions is true or not, the amount of decisions employees navigate through is staggering. However, only a fraction of these decisions are usually significant enough to truly benefit from vetting or clearance by management.
Effective managers do not co-opt decision making processes in order to generate a sense of comfort, confidence or self-importance. Instead, they hold themselves to a higher standard of involvement: intervene only where doing so adds value to the outcome.
We’ll give you tangible tips on how to do just that by leveraging tools such as the 5-5-5 method, but first, let’s examine the three archetypes of ineffective decision-making.
Hoarders, Toll Booths And Second Guessers
When it comes to decisions, micromanaging comes in three main flavors.
First we have the hoarders. Like covetous dragons guarding their mountains of gold, decision-hoarders derive intrinsic value from making decisions themselves. At worst, the act of delegation can feel physically painful or nauseating to hoarders, not least because of the perceived loss of control over a source of confidence and self-importance.
The main problem with hoarders is that they create bottlenecks. Constricting the flow of decisions as a management strategy is as likely to break deadlines as it is the employees’ spirits, leading to paralyzed processes and demotivated team members.
If you succeed in prying a decision from a hoarder’s grasp, you might just transform them into the next archetype on our list: toll booths.
Toll booths delegate tasks, but they also insist on reviewing each decision before it becomes final. Delegation is accomplished in name only, and employees are not truly empowered to make decisions. Instead, employees are only preparing decisions for approval.
Although toll booths don’t always alter the course of action, the need to seek their approval bogs down processes and kills any hopes of a sense of autonomy germinating across the team. By holding on to decisions that others have proven the ability to prepare, toll booths also make their own workloads heavier and their management experience less satisfying.
Finally, we have second guessers who delegate first and override later.
Of the three archetypes, this is often the most destructive. Second guessing decisions that were already delegated undermines trust, and it leaves team members unsure about their roles and the value of their contributions.
Second guessers also fail in allowing employees to carry the accountability for their decisions, which is one of the most powerful drivers of performance and learning. Decisions that are second guessed should have never been delegated in the first place, and leaders who lean into the yank-back method of decision making are likely to create friction and inefficiencies wherever they go.
It’s important to realize that we all exhibit a mixture of the above archetypes. In fact, micromanagers are rarely micromanagers by nature alone. The context of the decisions, the stakes at hand as well as our own narratives and predilections often steer us to retaining more decision-making power than the outcome actually benefits from.
How To Focus On Decisions That Matter
The first step to becoming a more effective decision-maker is to want to become one.
The behavioral changes involved don’t happen overnight. In some instances both you and your context need to change, making sustained transformations all the more difficult. None of this should discourage you from trying, particularly when a simple change of internal narrative and your point of view can get you far.
A key unlock for many leaders is learning to identify scalable processes and pivotal outcomes.
As a manager, your focus should not be on fine-tuning how any particular employee or team arrives at their decision. Optimizing internal processes that don’t scale beyond the individual or team should be left to the process owner, and your involvement can safely be limited to setting the right KPIs or OKRs.
Where a process is scalable across teams and individuals, the likelihood that your involvement can add value in designing the process grows. Even then, it’s important to remember that central planning is rarely a path to efficiency, and the intention is not to inject yourself into the process itself.
Instead, you should be aggressively focused on making decisions that carry sufficient consequence.
There are many ways of identifying decisions that are pivotal, one of which is trusting your instincts. More formal methods that leverage your gut intuitions include the 5-5-5 test, whereby you ask yourself whether the outcome matters in five weeks, five months or five years.
If so, make sure you are progressively more informed and involved as both the impact and temporal relevance of the decision grows.
For the rest, your job is to build teams that can handle them with your full confidence and trust.