When you lead a team, your people will turn to you to make the final call on a huge number of decisions. People admire a leader who is decisive. But decisiveness is challenging to master. You have to live with the decisions you make. And history is rich with tales of hubristic leaders who were willing to make tough decisions — boldly ignoring naysayers — and ultimately leading their crew into crushing disasters. But you can’t always wait for more data to ensure your decisions are sound. Your hesitation could itself become an inadvertent decision.
“Decisiveness is hard,” says Raju Malhotra, CPTO of Certinia. “You are often making a judgment call based on imperfect information, very quickly.”
We spoke to tech leaders who have wrestled to master this challenging skill. They shared their wisdom, strategies, and ways to reframe the goal so that being intelligently decisive becomes your leadership style.
1. Be curious
It may seem decisive to walk into every situation posing as the person who knows everything. “It is more important, in my view, to be curious,” says Malhotra.
“It feels alpha to go, ‘I understand the whole world. I know every answer,’” agrees Dave Curtis, CTO at RobobAI. But no one — especially in technology — knows everything.
“Being able to provide direction, to help guide how you get to an answer is just as important,” says Curtis. “What’s worked well for me, is saying, ‘I don’t necessarily have the complete answer. We need to explore the options.’”
Invite your team into that process but provide a framework for the level of decision this is: Is it a strategic decision? It is a limited, local decision? What’s the context?
“Then I act almost as an MC while people work through it,” says Curtis.
This lets you gather data from a lot of sources, helps your team learn decision-making skills, and reinforces the guardrails in your company around decision-making — while helping you arrive quickly at an answer.
“Being curious serves you very well as a leader,” says Malhotra.
2. Provide clarity — and focus on the goal at hand
“Clarity is what is expected from a leader,” says Malhotra. “Clarity of vision, clarity in strategy, clarity of plan, clarity in the process, and clarity in how to measure success.”
Showing up with an answer is not as important to the decision as bringing clarity to the process. “As a leader, you’re the force multiplier for your organization,” he says. “Force multiplying is a vector quantity, not a scalar quantity. It’s a vector quantity because the direction is very important. It’s not just the magnitude. It’s the direction, too. So being a force multiplier requires that you are clear when it comes to the end state you are trying to achieve.”
Emphasize what success looks like. Focus on the goal. Enumerate the choices between now and that goal. Set up some milestones. Then explain the process for getting from here to that goal and make it clear how you will know you arrived at the goal — how you will measure success.
“Once that clarity is not only in the leader’s mind but is also something the leader has communicated to the team, decisiveness is the result,” says Malhotra.
2. Sort decisions by their complexity and impact
“There are two things you have to consider: the urgency and the importance of the decision,” says Efrain Ruh, field CTO for Continental Europe at Digitate. If something is complex and important, take your time and gather as much information as possible. But if it is a decision that is easy to come back from, he says, “I try not to go too deep.”
“There are ‘single-door decisions’ and ‘double-door decisions,’” agrees Malhotra. When it’s a single-door decision, you can never come back through that door after you have walked through it.
“That’s a big deal,” he says. “That’s a big decision.” When you are faced with a decision like that, you want to take your time, he says. “That requires deliberation, curiosity, and alignment with the company vision.”
But many decisions — perhaps most of them — are double-door decisions.
“You go in and if something doesn’t work out, you can come back,” says Malhotra. “With these, it’s very important to be decisive and quick.” You are not making blanket statements about policy or installing tools or infrastructure that will be difficult to abandon or change. You can change your mind later. Don’t dwell too long here.
3. Walk in the shoes of your decision
When you step into a leadership role, you begin to see everything from a high-level strategy point of view. But your decisions will often affect people with their boots on the ground.
“I try not to lose contact with the level where things are happening,” says Ruh. “I try to put myself in those shoes,” he says. “I do a short-term simulation of what’s going to happen.”
This can be an educated imagining of how you think the decision will play out at ground level. But it’s also a great idea to ask the people at that level to imagine it, too. Their experience of that level will be more recent than yours and they might have insights you can’t access.
4. Put up guardrails and delegate
Wherever you are in your organization, it’s important to understand which decisions are yours and which should be punted up the ladder or delegated to your team. You don’t want your team to make solo decisions on things you want to be consulted on. Nor do you want them to send every decision to you.
“I put guardrails in place,” says Curtis. “I can’t be involved in every bit of minutia. So, in our regular meetings, we sort through how to prioritize decisions.” Instead of making the decisions, he explains which ones his team can make, and which should not be decided by a localized team.
“For example, if it’s something to do with a productivity tool the developers will use, I tell them to make that decision. It will impact their daily life. But it will not impact the company strategically,” he says.
When something requires a hefty commitment or could grow into something that has broad impact, Curtis instead explains why it is better decided by a team with an eye on the long-term goals and financials of the company.
This might seem like more effort than making a quick decision. But if you make every decision, you will be buried in them and your team won’t feel empowered.
“It is absolutely something you need to do,” he says. “Put that framework in place.
5. Understand your stakeholders
An important element of those guardrails, as Curtis calls them, is the people in your organization. “Part of being decisive is understanding the stakeholders,” he says.
A person who has a basic understanding of how each stakeholder processes decisions will be better able evaluate whether any single decision is something those stakeholders will want to weigh in on.
“I want the people that work for me to understand the way I think about decisions,” explains Curtis. “I do the same thing with my own leadership. Some bosses like to be involved. Others might be hands off.”
When you don’t have a clear understanding of the stakeholders, it’s hard to know when a decision is in your remit. “That’s what causes people to go around in circles,” says Curtis. “When the guardrails are not well understood, people get in a froth. They don’t understand what they’re able to make decisions about.”
6. Decide, even when you don’t have all the data
When it comes to most decisions — certainly the ones that Malhotra calls double-door decisions — you can’t wait until you have all the data.
“When you’re trying to outmaneuver, outgun, and outwit bigger players, you have to move fast, says Ken Ringdahl, CTO of Emburse. “You have to skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is now.”
This is a lot easier, he says, when you have some experience — and data — to draw from. “You have to have some conviction and a basis for your decisions,” he says. But you can’t sit around waiting for all the metrics to roll in. “If you spend too much time, it gets harder because you start to become narrowly focused and get stuck in a rabbit hole. You’ll over analyze it.”
The real key to quick decisions, though, is being willing to change your mind as the data comes into focus.
“Make decisions,” says Ringdahl, “but don’t be afraid to contradict yourself or go back on the decision if the data starts showing you something else. People refer to that as fail fast.”
7. Build your foundational knowledge
“When I see people hesitant to make decisions, it shows a lack of confidence,” says Ringdahl. “They don’t trust their own background. They don’t trust the data. Maybe they haven’t dug into it themselves.”
This is a common function of being new to a role. “Confidence comes by experience,” he says. “So, by virtue of being in a new role, you don’t have enough pattern recognition to say, ‘I am personally convinced this is the right way to do it.’”
When you feel hesitant, you need to build your foundational knowledge about the situation or the technology by asking questions, digging into the data, or finding similar scenarios. “I think a really good leader asks good questions,” says Ringdahl. Even when you aren’t going to make the decision yourself, this can help walk people toward the right decision.
“I ask leading questions,” he says. “‘Did you think of x, y, and z? What about this?’ This will not only get your team thinking about the right things; it will also get you the answers you need.”
8. Be smart about AI
“It is critical for IT leaders to become more decisive about their company’s AI strategy,” says Dr. Kjell Carlsson, head of AI strategy at Domino Data Lab. Many tech leaders struggle with this because, as Ringdahl explains it, they lack confidence in this area. “They don’t have a background or experience in AI and ML,” says Carlsson.
These decisions, though, according to Carlsson, need to come from IT leaders. “They need to make effective decisions about investments in AI and ML capabilities and which AI use cases to prioritize, for the firm to have any hope of being able to drive meaningful impact with AI.”
As with most decisions, building your foundational knowledge helps here, too.
“The key to success lies in recognizing that AI has plenty of similarities to the waves of data-oriented technologies that have gone before,” he says. “The specifics differ but the key questions that need to be asked and answered to guide these initiatives are largely the same.” How will it be implemented? What resources are needed? What are the risks? How will it be governed?
“Only the senior executive can ensure these questions get answered,” he says. “It is incumbent on them to validate that these answers hold water.”
Read More from This Article: 8 tips for being a more decisive leader
Source: News