Skip to main content

Leadership Secrets: How to Make Your Best Decisions


Argue as if you are right; listen as if you're wrong

- Karl Weick


It's hard for any leader to balance is their confidence, it's one of the hardest things for a new manager. You have been promoted, you have been validated, you are driving results and now, you are in charge.

People gravitate to those with confidence. We look for people that are sure of themselves and what they are doing; your team will not move forward if they don't see this in you. The important thing however, is not make sure you are balancing your confidence, with humbleness.

Being humble makes you more accessible. It makes your team trust you and gives them the comfort and security to bring up new ideas or to let you know that there is something that they don't feel right about. The ability to be vulnerable with your team, to let them know that you will make mistakes, but that you take what you learn, reapply it with a goal to make better decisions is powerful.

There are a few ways that you can create the right balance so that you are able to effectively make decisions while getting your team's buy in.

First, read the quote at the top for a second time. Confident in your argument or position is important. It allows you to effectively share why you feel a certain decision is the right one. You are willing to explain and lay out your thinking for your team to see.
Listen as if you are wrong. Extremely powerful. A massive mistake that you will want to avoid in your career is falling into situations where you can't see past your own thinking and biases. 

Second, don't fall on your sword because you are technically right. A lesson I learned early in my career, some battles aren't worth the win.
Be disciplined with yourself and don't get preoccupied with always being right. New managers are especially at risk for this. We equate being right and having an answer equal to being a good leader. Wrong. There are a lot of times you may be technically right, be careful with these. You are not a lawyer trying to get your client off at all costs, you are leading a team and shattering someone's confidence or making them see you as someone who is arrogant and won't listen is never a benefit.

Lastly, don't keep score. People may frame this as extending an olive branch or splitting the difference; as Chris Voss says "Never split the difference" - typically this means everyone is losing. 
The risk that you open yourself up to when you are keeping score is that you may start avoiding conflict, you may stop making certain decisions because you are trying to keep things 'balanced'. You have to be confident in your why so that you can protect and defend it without defending it solely on principal.

 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This 1 Thing Increases Your Career Capital More Than Anything Else

The Art of Better Decision Making Have you felt scared to make a decision? Maybe you get preoccupied with making the 'wrong' decision?  Did you know that 68% of people have admitted to not doing because they thought it would be harder than it actually is. Getting comfortable with making decisions is one of the biggest challenges new leaders face. You will be placed in situations where there isn't enough time to get all of the information. Or even harder, you will be placed in situations where you'll never get more information than what you have. The good news? Making better decisions is something that you can improve by being deliberate with your learning and how you choose to approach it. This is the approach I take to decision making. These have been test and is what I have used over my 15 year career to teach and develop teams. - Accept that you will make mistakes. There is rarely a perfect answer. Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a leadership muscle you need to
2 comments
Read more

Your Next Five Moves

 There are two streams of thought when you start reading a book and you don't feel like you are connecting with it. Some people will say to stop reading it and move onto something else, the theory is that there are so many things in the world that you will enjoy reading, that you shouldn't be wasting your time on things that you don't. Camp B will tell you to stick with it, get through it and see what happens. If I had to "pick a side" I probably fall more into team B than team A, even though I do feel that there will always be some books / material that you should just put down. What has me more B than A? Some of the books that have had the most impact on me were a STRUGGLE to get through. I challenge that this may because they are pushing your boundaries and putting something up against your current worldview / paradigms. True growth and learning comes from when you can challenge and dismantle your own ideas, and rebuilt them anew. My first real experience with
Post a Comment
Read more

Decisions, Positions and Frames

  Making decisions and getting consensus is the most common activity that every person goes through. Whether in your personal or professional life, we are all selling, all the time. Selling? I'm not selling anything! Actually, that's not really true. At the most fundamental level, selling is about the transfer of belief. You are trying to get a person or a group to see things the way you do. If they accept that, you make the "sale" (i.e. you have transferred your idea/belief) as another has chosen to accept it. Where things get hard is when people hold onto certain ideas, frames or positions around a circumstance. It's interesting how little people realize what they share related to their position without even knowing it. The information is there, as long as you are listening. Always be listening. When someone repeats a variable or constraint that is a difference, that has major impact. They themselves they may not realize that they are essentially confirming what
Post a Comment
Read more