Avoid Making Decisions

If you're a "Missing In Action" manager that needs to make more, not fewer, decisions, ignore this section!

Decision making skills, just like muscles, get better as you use them more often. As a manager, think about how much you've learned by exercising these muscles, and how you've been able to move the team forward with your confident (or at least confident-sounding) decisions.

That makes sense, right? Now flip it around to look at it from the team's side: the more decisions you make for your people, the fewer they make for themselves. For every decision you choose to make for the team or for someone, you've deprived the team or that person of an opportunity to exercise their decision muscles. Even bad decisions can be valuable, when the person learns from them.

By making decisions for them, you're teaching them to become dependent on you and less self-reliant. This is true even if that person wants the decision to come from you - you can still decline to accept. An obvious example: "Should I stay in my position and earn another promotion, or try to move to another group where I might find my job more fulfilling but will earn less?"

Yes, there will be decisions that ultimately HAVE to be made by you, but many fewer than you think, such as significant organizational changes, [examples] I bet most of the decisions you current make are ones you don't have to make but that you choose to make.

As a manager, it's your decision to make as many, or as few, decisions as you want with the team. You can choose to encourage your people to get approval on everything new they try, on every discount, on every kind of new marketing message, of every change in seating arrangements...or you can choose to let them take responsibility for their own decisions. Decision-making as a whole will improve and they will truly appreciate it.

Are you (or your company's processes) depriving your people of the opportunity to make decisions?

Are You Paying Them for Achieving the Wrong Results?

It doesn't matter how fast or well you solve the wrong problem. It is always challenging in setting individual and team goals and compensation, especially when the results of the team aren't as easily measured as sales (business development, marketing, product management, internal audit...). Are your goals aligned with what matters to the company, or are they your goals because they're the easiest to track and measure?

For example, let's take a mature company who's board is focused on three things: growing cashflow, ROI and net profit. What should marketing be measured on? Oftentimes it's the total number of leads generated, without any quality criteria. Measuring marketing on quantity of leads can actually be harmful if it encourages marketing to generate leads that are a waste of sales' time. What about:
* The number of leads, but only from 'high quality' sources (referrals, 'contact me'...), and excluding low-quality sources (webinars, tradeshows...).
- These are just examples - what are your own hgh and low quality sources?
* The number of leads that get positively qualified by sales
* The revenue generated from the leads
* The cashflow, ROI and profit from the leads

Companies often don't measure marketing on these better metrics because, for example, they would need to update their reporting to track these metrics, or marketing resists measurement, or "that's not how we have ever done it here".

Another example is in customer service. How many companies measure, as key metrics, time per call, first call resolution and cost per call? Are those more important to your executives or less important than customer satisfaction and net recommender metrics? Is customer service viewed as a cost center, or an investment in making customers happy?

The closer you can align people and teams to the company's strategic goals (whatever they are), the more aligned and productive they will be, and you can stop paying them for the wrong results.

Work Less, Think More

Thinking before you act can save you a tremendous amount of time. Whenever we get a new project, we're tempted to jump right in and start, without considering "what are we trying to accomplish, and why does it matter to the organization?" Studies suggest that workers are only adding true value to the business during about 5% of the time they are at work.

Of course workers are busy 95% of the time they're on the job, so what's the problem? The problem is how much of the activity is a waste of time. Consider a software developer that writes code non-stop for two weeks. If it turns out that the code was sloppy, and it needs a week of QA and fixing to correct it, that's three weeks of activity for a beta. What if the product manager that spent two weeks designing it in the first place didn't use customer feedback in his design, and realizes in beta testing that they need another two weeks of changes to fix it? And what if the CEO realizes that the market he decided the company should get into, widgets, actually doesn't have the right margins and we're shifting to thingamajiggies and cancels the project? All that busy activity added no value to the business, unless the people in the process learned, as a group, how to think more about what they really want to accomplish BEFORE acting.

Motivate Through Aspiration, Not Fear

There is still a stereotype of the "kickass manager" who blows in, lays down the law (ever seen Glengarry Glenross?) and blows out, leaving his troops scared yet highly motivated through this fear of God...and they rise to the occassion to save the day by blowing their numbers away!

That might work once. Or twice. Or even longer, if your people aren't skilled or self-confident enough to find jobs elsewhere. But it's not the best way to build a great team that can make a business sustainably successful over the course of years.

People are motivated by 1) fear and 2) aspiration. Which one do you use more? What idea gives meaning or vision to each individual to create long-term, sustainable motivation?

Fear can work wonders in the short-term, but isn't a sustainable a motivator - it takes too much energy and burns you and your people out. Great managers first motivate through aspiration, and then secondly only occassional rally the team with adrenaline-producing anxiety around achieving major goals, deadlines and projects.