Four Keys To Training Decision-Making
He was a good military officer and is still a good friend. He is now in a sales job that does not have a leadership title, but he is developing people where he is. I recently asked him what he was doing that made him so successful.
His response was simple: “I try to help them make good decisions.” He spent his time training people how to think. Because the people around him made better decisions, they were getting promoted. Could it be that simple?
Decisions - Decisions
Four Keys To Training Decision-Making
1. See The Opportunities
As I have discussed in a previous blog – Two Ways To Stunt Leadership Development– leaders often restrict their people from thinking for themselves by creating too many rules or centralizing decision-making.
When that happens, people stop thinking about the possibilities. They only see what can and can’t be done according to the rules. A leader needs to create an environment where people are encouraged to find a better way to do everything!
It doesn’t matter if the current way works. There can still be a better way to do a good thing. People need to know they have the opportunity to try new ideas, build better systems and be praised for just trying something different.
“If we always do what we’ve always done, we will always get what we’ve already got!”
2. Identify The Weaknesses
When they do come up with a new idea, it is the leader’s role to help them see the vulnerabilities of the decision. All decisions can have a down side. Something can go wrong.
The poor results are more often about failing to see and prepare for potential problems than they are about the initial decision to move forward. Preparing for those weaknesses ahead of time is a critical step in decision-making process.
Too many people see the possibilities and down play the vulnerabilities. I naturally do that. A glass half-full guy like me can ignore the negatives because I am too amped up by the possibilities.
I had a great boss who told me to always ask myself, “What could go wrong here?” If I had contingencies for those situations, then he empowered me to move ahead without asking for permission.
Early on he walked me through the process of thinking of the weaknesses. But once he felt I was ready, he stayed out of my decisions. I never got in trouble for things not going as planned. I only got in trouble if I had not planned for things to go wrong.
3. Accept The Risks
All of us make bad decisions from time to time. The person who has never made a bad decision has never dared to make an important one.
Too many immature leaders wait for the perfect answer before they make a decision. As we train people to be better decision-makers, we must train them to make decisions without all the information.
Ambiguity is a leader’s constant companion. In order to make timely decisions, a leader must make the best decision possible with the information he has at the moment.
One leader used to bring me into his decision-making process and point out the ambiguity he was constantly dealing with. He always allowed me to see that he made his decisions based on the best available information.
“In the end, your gut is always involved. That’s when it takes courage to be a leader.”
4. Embrace The Failures
I often picked up people from other teams who were so afraid of making mistakes, that they called me for permission for everything. Their former bosses had trained them to fear failure. I had to break them of that habit and train them to embrace failure.
“If you are not making mistakes, I don’t think you are trying.” That was a statement I made constantly to my team.
I tried to praise everyone who tried something new that failed. Even when I thought the decision was the most bone headed decision ever, I started by praising them for trying. Then I coached the decision-making process.
Once people knew they would not be verbally crushed for making a well-intentioned mistake, I began to have more opportunities to coach the decision-making process. The more I coached the process, the better they got at decision-making.
The Bottom Line:
Making good decisions is a skill that can be taught. The four keys I shared above are important to building a team of leaders. A low maintenance team has leaders at all levels that are good decision-makers. It is up to the leader at the top of the org chart to train that team.
A leader who does not train her people on how to make good decisions will be stuck making decisions for a team of mediocre performers. She will be leading a team full of high maintenance followers instead of low maintenance leaders.
Question:
What other aspects of decision-making can be trained?
One can learn a checklist of finding the data needed to make a good recommendation or decision. I teach this is my life science business and marketing classes. You want to be sure you have the best information at the time and that often takes some research if you are to progress beyond the learnings of the past.
For those of us (me) who are less detail oriented, having a checklist for important data can be helpful.
The danger is not to let the checklist become the only criteria for making the decisions. It is a good tool. But the process can not take president over progress.