It may not be that you are actively avoiding decision making. It is more likely that you haven’t spotted those critical moments where decisions are actually needed. If you love new ideas and value your team you will always be thinking about how to make improvements.
You have a great strategy and lots of great people to take things forward. But are you prone to leaving the door open just a crack, just in case? When actually you should be making a decision. Setting it in stone feels wrong.
Actually you are not setting anything in stone. Decisions are those next steps, those agreements and those concrete actions. They can all be reviewed. They can all be adapted. But in the meantime, you need to decide what they look like in the first place.
The tell take signs your decision making needs some attention:
- You are having meetings about meetings
- Discussions are still rumbling on over several months. Lots of e-mails going backwards and forwards and circular conversations.
- You have TBD written next to one too many things
- If you ask 3 different people in your Senior Leadership Team what has been decided, they may all say slightly different things.
- People in your team are always asking for permission. They are not quite sure what the decision is or who owns the decision in the first place.
Why is decision making so important?
Of course there are some major decisions you will need to make that really do take a lot of time. They require acute attention to detail and will be pivotal to your success.
But there are also smaller things. A myriad of decision steps that may not appear critical, but if not made slow things down. Which makes everything less efficient and takes up much needed energy that you could be putting into other things.
Stuck decision cause bottlenecks which cause frustrations. It may feel like it’s okay to have lots of “let’s wait and sees” but not a regularly sizeable list.
There is a difference between actively adapting and reviewing something. Choosing to actively review something IS the decision. This is different to just leaving something hanging.
What causes this wonky decision making?
It’s probably not that you have poor communication, a badly written strategy or a non comital team. It is more likely that there is uncertainty over when the decision needs to be made. It’s always good to have more time to mull over the different options, but where does the point come where you actually need to decide?
It may also not be clear who is the person to make that decision. The conversation continuing backwards and forwards without anyone having the final word. Even worse there may be an assumption that someone made a decision, but you are not completely sure.
Sometimes it is a question of having one too many people involved in the first place. The more people that are part of a discussion, the better the process you will need to keep that discussion on track and bring it to a conclusion. This is great for bouncing ideas around and getting some really diverse thinking. Less good for easily deciding which of these great ideas you should move forwards with.
You may also have decisions that made complete sense at the time you made them, but that didn’t get recorded. Now you are not sure what was agreed. This is problematic as you may also not be able to remember why you made that decision, so you end up going back over things…..again.
Quite simply, you may also not have given enough time to the process of decision making. You might have prioritised the collating of inputs into your strategy, but not dedicated enough time to the “what next” bit. Sometimes this means you have ended up kind of half making a few of them and the rest will be taken away by someone to finalise. Which often means there are some loose ends that don’t get tied up as people get busy and other projects take priority.
So what can you do to improve your decision making?
Think about the places that you are making these decisions. Are they in a meeting, an e-mail conversation or even a Whatsapp chat? If it is a big decision, like it or not, coming together to interrogate all the options and create really clear decisions is probably your best option. Certainly when it comes to strategy level decisions you want to give them the right amount of time and space. Choosing which restaurant to go to is for group messaging!
Have a decision making process in place. Whether you want to create consensus and agreement, do some voting, plot your ideas on a prioritisation matrix or just agree who will have the final say. You need to have something in place so conversations don’t rumble on and on.
Create some review check points so that you make sure you check in on whether you have any lose ends and how you have progressed with those decisions.
Ask yourself – is this something we need to make a decision on at the end? Or are we just throwing around ideas?
Do some decision mapping. Look back at the kinds of decisions you have made in the last quarter:
- Which of these have you acted upon and followed up?
- Which of these have stalled and why?
- What are the assumed decisions that may not actually be?
- What the things you did not actually decide in the first place?
If you need some help with decision making, creating a decision map or even just thinking about when you might need to make those decisions, get in touch!
