Rethinking Leadership in Decision-Making

Join Peter Maddison and David Sharrock in this thought-provoking episode of Definitely Maybe Agile as they explore the evolution of leadership decision-making in modern organizations. They dive deep into how traditional leadership models are being challenged by today's business environment and discuss the crucial shift from control-based to collaborative decision-making approaches.

This week´s takeaways: 

•  Executive decision-making challenges often stem from two distinct factors: emotional intelligence issues (dealing with unprepared stakeholders) and critical thinking problems (legitimate exploration of complex issues). 
•  The traditional "highest paid person's opinion" (HiPPO) approach to decision-making is becoming increasingly dangerous in today's rapidly changing business environment, where the speed of market changes demands faster and more distributed decision-making processes. 
•  Modern leadership requires a fundamental shift from centralized control to distributed authority, with leaders focusing on creating frameworks that enable lower-level decision-making while maintaining visibility of outcomes. 

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Transcript

Peter: 0:05

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sherrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Madison and David Sherrock. How are you today, dave?

Dave: 0:20

I'm doing very well. How are you doing, peter? Good Energy right? We were talking just in preparation for this. We were talking a little bit about decision making with executives, with the leaders in an organization, and some of the headaches that can happen when powerful, informed people with a lot of authority and responsibility all try and come together to make decisions. Maybe you want to tell a bit of a story about that or explain what you're thinking in terms of those.

Peter: 0:50

So I'm thinking of and there's always these in large organizations where once a quarter, the committee of whatever gets together and that committee consists of all the powerful people and other stakeholders who have to agree and make some decision about something that will be presented to them or has, in theory, already been presented to them in a lot of cases, and very often the committee gets together and somebody out of that powerful group of people maybe all of them sometimes hasn't read any of the pre-read material, hasn't really got any idea what it is, is going into this blind and immediately just kiboshes the whole idea, Says there's no way. We're like we can't do this because I never heard of it before. Go away and do your homework, or they come up with some objection to it, and so I thought it might be fun to explore today what are the things we can do as business agility coaches to help organisations overcome this.

Dave: 1:53

Well, and what you're describing there, peter, is the is it's actually a human condition of. Whether it's the fight or flight response or the, I've been caught. The imposter syndrome is another way of looking at it. I'm unprepared, I have a position of authority and therefore I'm going to respond in a way that protects where I'm at. Whether it's the, I always think of this, the bluff and double bluff of we're going to throw something on to distract from the fact that maybe I'm not as prepared as I could have been walking in, and I think we need to be a little bit careful because there's two elements to that right.

Dave: 2:27

One is that personal attack of being put on the spot and how do I deflect and handle that situation. And the second part of it is the almost like continually challenging a conversation until we reach a decision, or that decision is reached, that is in line with what, what my intuition says.

Peter: 2:46

And I think the second one is more of a critical thinking problem and the first one is a more of an emotional intelligence problem and I think we are talking about the, the conversations, that where it goes sideways because it's something that comes out of left field that wasn't expected, versus the quite legitimate questions where they are exploring something that actually is a problem that needs to be solved.

Dave: 3:13

And so there's loads of different ways of describing this in this sort of vernacular that we bump into, and one of the ones that gets referred to a lot is this hippo's concept of highest paid person's opinion as a decision-making model, which is basically whoever has the biggest, best title gets to call the shots.

Dave: 3:31

But you're describing something which is slightly different to that, which is there's a number of different people sort of vying for the decision-making crown, if you like, the decision-making authority, and the first thing that I would point out is that this is actually much more destructive today within an organization than it has been for decades. Right, If you go back a few decades. Let me put it this way if you go back when I entered the workforce, that was just the way decisions got made Very strong hierarchical kind of structure, and the decisions kind of move up that tree, and the politics of decision making was something that you either observed or you waited for the result of, and it came down and that was it Today. That's incredibly disruptive or very dangerous model for a number of reasons, and the two reasons that jump out immediately. One is speed of change, and we're going to put a little graphic up. There's a wonderful kind of graphic about how quickly different products took to hit 50 million users, and I just came across this image.

Dave: 4:35

I was at a conference last week. There was a really interesting talk about a transformation and they were just talking about this pace of change, the number of years it took to reach 50 million users. And even when you look at things like Facebook, it still took three years to hit 50 million users. At things like Facebook, it still took three years to hit 50 million users. But that is minuscule compared to the amount of time it took, for example, for cars to reach 50 million users, or some of the other products here, things like even cell phones, which we think of as being a massive change, took 12 years to hit 50 million users. So the pace of change now is exponentially more rapid, which makes decision making super, super critical. And let me pause there because I'm sure you have plenty to add into that particular story yeah, I mean, I mean.

Peter: 5:23

One thing I would say about that graphic is that the uh. And then for the users, for the listeners, they can't see it, of course, but the last four products that are much faster are all software-based as well. So the distribution method as well for products has significantly changed as well. Yeah, there is this. Decision-making problem is one of the pieces. Where does the decision that's being made actually need to go up to that level in the organization, or could it have been made sooner and could it have? And the further down we can push those decisions, the better. And this, I think, comes to, as we were talking about before, we started recording the root of leadership. Change that leadership, pushing decision-making and accountability and ownership into the low-level organization and enabling those organizations to be able to make decisions is one of the things that can help with this. So fewer decisions end up being pushed up the hierarchy to these committees, who have very little time to then look at or even consider them, and so that's one sort of almost avoidance mechanism to try and avoid the problem.

Dave: 6:41

So yeah, I really like what you're saying about that route of leadership change, because I think there is a lot of buzz around the fact that leaders in a post-COVID world have to be different to the ones that we had before, whatever that might mean. But it's very difficult to find exactly what those changes have to be, and I think what we're addressing here is beginning to recognize a couple of things. There's a maturity of leadership. That increased maturity has two quick things. One is recognition that I'm unprepared to make a decision. So, instead of the bluffing or instead of the let me distract you with a question over here that I know you're not prepared for, a realization that number one, I'm not prepared to make that decision and that vulnerability, which is a request of leaders in today's world, is very important. I think that's one element of it. And the second one is a realization that the constriction of decisions all coming to those one individual individuals or single controlling committees.

Dave: 7:41

Let's say and to your point of what decisions are being made where in the organization. I think that's a leadership maturity as well. How do I get decisions away from me deeper into the organization, because speed of decision making is of the essence. So how do I push that responsibility and authority deeper into the organization? Without losing visibility into what those decisions are or the outcomes.

Peter: 8:05

The organization without losing visibility into what those decisions are or the outcomes. And there is very much that style of leadership which says, well, I actually want all those decisions to come to me because I'm the guy, I'm the one that has to make the decision, because I'm the big boss, and so it's that part of one of those types of leadership change that you may see, and I agree and I like what you're saying to your point, it will be different for different individuals. It's like the different it will be different for different individuals. It's like the different leaders will have strengths in different areas. But that understanding and pushing decision-making to where it belongs, I think is a key element of helping avoid that the lengthening of decision-making that occurs because of these sort of large, infrequent meetings that occur between executives.

Dave: 8:49

Well, and I point out as well, there's a well-understood leadership development model, or almost like an adult maturity model as well. This is a psychological development model for how we evolve and develop our skills over time and think of it as leadership skill, and that one of control is an expert. Leadership level is a lower maturity level to the one of how do I collaboratively get decisions made or even how do I nurture decision making within the organization, away from me, where my role becomes one of guidance and support and direction, but not one of authority and decision making. So that maturity is a significant shift and it comes with, as we kind of have hinted at, vulnerability, about having the vulnerability to stand up and say you know what you know more, you make those decisions. Here's the scope within which you can make those decisions go away and learn and and and do what you can.

Peter: 9:48

Yes, exactly. So well, how would you sum this up in sort of two or three points for our listeners?

Dave: 9:56

I think we identified first of all, that there are still many challenges associated with executive decision making, with that whole idea of how do you make decisions with individuals with authority and responsibility in the room, and so on. That goes with that.

Dave: 10:12

The second thing that I think we've picked up is that there's two elements to it. One is the sort of emotional intelligence, the recognition of when me, as a leader, maybe need to be able to come back to the table and just say, hey, you know what, either we need more time or we need to. You know, I'm not going to be able to contribute to the conversation here because of a lack of preparation, a lack of knowledge, lack of awareness, whatever it might be in that decision. So that's the emotional intelligence piece.

Dave: 10:41

And then I think the other side is the cognitive critical thinking element, which is and I see this as something I'm sure we'll talk about many times in the future as well, and I see this as something I'm sure we'll talk about many times in the future as well, which is the recognition of how to make critical decisions and what our role is in that. We talked about leadership maturity and we talked about how do we make sure that we're saying this decision is being made by the right people at the right place in an organization. We talked about decision making as being that root of leadership change, the maturity that we're expecting to see in our leaders and what that really means.

Dave: 11:17

So we kind of scratched the surface on that but there's a lot more to dig into in there as well.

Peter: 11:22

I think so. Yeah, one of the other topics before we started that we thought might be good to bring up again was this Another thing that can help with those uh, regular meetings is the taking the amazon approach of having a sort of 20 minute memo at the start where you read through all of the details of what's exactly going to happen, so that everybody is brought onto the same page before you start the discussion around what the decisions are that need to be made.

Dave: 11:50

Yeah, and I have to say I'm glad you mentioned that. It's one of my sort of go-tos for running effective meetings, in the sense that it directly addresses some of those emotional intelligence requirements that we have to deal with, which is, you know, I've gone from one meeting to the next, to the next. I'm just not prepared. How do I catch my breath? Well, it gives everybody that space, and it ensures proper preparation, which is no bad thing at all.

Peter: 12:17

No, totally agree with that. Well, thank you very much, Dave. It's always a pleasure. I love these conversations and I look forward to next time.

Dave: 12:25

Absolutely Looking forward to it.

Peter: 12:28

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the. You've been listening to definitely maybe agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and devops at scale.