3 Ways to Save Your Company from DECISION PARALYSIS

I’ve suffered through it. I’ve worked with CEOs who seem to have this as their primary MO…we have all seen it or felt it before, “decision paralysis”—the inability to decide. A recent incident showed us something profound—that decision paralysis can happen to anyone, and with the right strategies, it can be avoided.

Recently, a CEO I was consulting for and I met in Las Vegas en route to a meeting with a potential partnership inking in California. Ahead of us, on the 5-hour drive to our destination in San Diego, we had planned on going over all of our qualification criteria for this partnership evaluation. We needed to confirm our understanding of the market, the risks we’d undertake, and the amount of labor involved versus the ROI – we had to ensure we hadn’t missed anything before our meeting the next day. Decisions were to be made and made well. Hunger set in, and we pulled over at a fantastic Italian restaurant, the name of which escapes me.

Halfway into our working meal, I came to a quick realization – we were being too binary in our decisions. I believe this was a direct response to time constraints and the fact that we didn’t want to overcomplicate issues. But it got me thinking about a study I read many years ago by researchers at the University of Minnesota which found that “empowerment is a major motivator to employees.” At the very basic level of empowerment is the ability and freedom to make decisions. Your employees want to do a good job and succeed – and they will accomplish this in the best way they can when they are trusted by leadership to take action. What lies at the very heart of empowerment is the freedom to make decisions and solve issues.

In the back of my mind, I felt that the decisions I was making weren’t really mine – they were stolen by the situation, modified by time and compressed into a “Do, or Do Not” type answer. I didn’t feel as if I had contributed or solved any issues.

Reflecting on this, I envisioned an employee in the daily grind and asked myself two very important questions:

• “When employees are given autonomy to make decisions, do they?”
• “Do leaders really want their employees making decisions?”

After considerable pondering and reflection back to when I was reporting to a Director or Manager, I reached the conclusion that, in both cases, most of the time, they do not.

Social programming has taught us that companies seek out employees who can eventually be groomed for the roles of future leaders. But experience teaches us, subconsciously, that this theory holds no water.

A 2013 survey by development consultancy firm Head, Heart and Brain, revealed that nearly half of the 1,277 employees surveyed (47%) feel “actively threatened” by their supervisors and leaders. The same study showed that "leaders are not sending overt positive signals about rewards to workers for strong performance." Harvard Business Review published a study which showed that while only 42% of respondents surveyed say they trust their boss, an astounding 62% of respondents said they would trust a stranger. With these statistics, how is it possible that employees would feel trusted to make the right decisions?

So, how do we fix this internally? How do we change? How do we ensure our decisions aren’t always binary, and how we engage and groom our employees to become the future leaders we will inevitably need?

We can accomplish this in three adopted practices:

• Pause and ask one good question: A 2012 study shows how even a few milliseconds of pausing can change the outcome of a decision. “Postponing the onset of the decision process by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds enables the brain to focus attention on the most relevant information and block out irrelevant distractors," said Jack Grinband, Ph.D., associate research scientist in the Taub Institute and assistant professor of clinical radiology at Columbia University Medical Center.

• Develop a minimum of options: Too often decisions get mistakenly framed in binary terms. Either we do this, or we do that. Rarely does this reflect the realities of decisions. Studies show that work is three times more likely to be valued as ‘important’ when someone has changed the mix by adding or removing an element or two. Think of the decision solution not as a single, rigid choice, but a collection of elements that can be recombined in many ways. Decision-making is not a “one and done” activity, it’s an ongoing process that should facilitate adaptation along the way. Avoid making decisions when pressed for time. And if there is no alternative for the time-crunch then make sure you run the idea past someone to get a different consideration – they may inspire your third option.

• Talk to five people: Decision making is a team sport. However, most people don’t reach out beyond their own team to talk through the decision before they make it. Then they wonder why their decision lacks innovative new thinking, or they only discover after the decision is made that another group has become adversely affected. We found that 72% of award-winning outcomes happen when people reach out and discuss their decisions with others who may have differing opinions—people outside their inner circle of associates. A smart way for leaders to encourage better decision-making is to ask the question, “Who have you talked to about this proposed decision?” This question provides a great teaching opportunity to help a team member identify multiple people to talk to in order to gain new or different perspectives.