Goals-Decision Making-Collaboration-Avoiding Paralysis

Welcome to the fifth in a series of articles based on a recent OxTalks podcast in which Chris Oxley (Managing Director, Oxley & Partners) and Bradley Honnor (MatchFit Managing Director) discuss leadership and development training.

In this fifth episode, Chris and Bradley discuss the importance of clear goals, decision making and some of the pitfalls to avoid. In organisations with high performance culture activities are clearly linked to the company vision, and decisions are made at the right level – quickly.

Bradley: One of the things I often say to a leader is: if you were to walk around the office at any given moment in time, and freeze time, and you looked over your shoulder at your people and what they were doing, would you be able to associate what they were working on in that moment to the overall vision or objective of that team or organisation? Or are they lost in auto pilot, responding to emails and working on what’s coming up rather than really understanding the reason they are doing that particular thing right now is because it feeds into another thing that will ultimately achieve our vision or goals. And if you have a whole team that are always operating on that understanding of why they’re doing what they’re doing, you have a massively powerful machine. If you don’t have that, you’ve got a bunch of headless chickens running around doing lots of stuff, maybe being  efficient, but not very effective. And there’s a big difference in those two things.

Chris: That leads me on quite nicely, actually, because I remember you talking about the worst decision being indecision. I was just wondering if you might be able to explain why that is so detrimental, especially within a leadership role.

Bradely: Indecision leaves you where you are right now. So you might be oscillating between what do I do? Do I do this? Do I do that? But what I’ve really learnt over the last few years working with some very senior people is that decisions generally are time sensitive. And there are lots of expressions, aren’t there, like: strike while the iron’s hot or make hay while the sun shines. There are lots of sayings that support ‘carpe diem’. Carpe Diem isn’t about seizing tomorrow or seizing next week, it’s seize the day today. So Indecision creates a risk in that, by the time your decision is made, it’s irrelevant, the opportunity is gone, the iron is now warm, and there is no point striking with that. You’ve missed the opportunity. I’ve found, for example, that in an organisation I’m working with at the moment, their decision-making process is quite slow. So what actually happens is, by the time an individual gets that decision off of a leader, they’re in a position where their client has moved on or got it done by somebody else or doesn’t need it anymore. So that’s why indecision creates a paralysis and loss of opportunity. Leadership is about being decisive, not foolhardy, not knee jerk reactions, but making the decision and seeing where that takes us and dealing with the new reality and probably the next decision following that. So that, for me, that’s the key reason. It’s something that is a time sensitive thing, something that you don’t have forever.

Chris: What strategies can people use to overcome indecision effectively within that leadership space? Is there anything quite simple, quite basic that they could look at.

Bradely: This comes up a lot. Sometimes that decision doesn’t need to be your decision. Trust the people that work for you as a leader. If you’ve got a head of client resources, let person make the decisions about client resources. Especially because sometimes that comes up to you as a board member, and operationally, you don’t understand the client or the dynamics or the culture as well as the individual running that area. So making sure we’re making the decisions that we need to make, and not the decisions that other people could be making is one thing. And that’s not an opinion. That’s something I see coming through in lots of businesses. I’m pretty sure that people listening will be aware of that dynamic, where things get escalated to a higher degree possibly than they need. And if there was more trust in the individuals in those positions, I think decision making would be quicker for sure. I think we need to think about how much we collaborate when we make a decision. We often see collaboration to the point of paralysis. We think to involve people, which is important, but also we need to understand what we are leading personally and what our scope for decision making is, and make that decision as a leader. So collaboration is good, but we’re seeing lots of decisions made by committee, and that’s slowing things down enormously. And I think lastly, be bold. Believe you can deal with the outcome. If it’s not the perfect decision or perfect solution, believe you can get the outcome that you’re looking for. So we see those three things happen an awful lot.

Chris: I love the collaboration to the point of paralysis comment. I’ll definitely steal that! But again, it falls back into what you’ve said before. We’ve moved back a little bit again, into that point that you made around everybody has their part to play. And I guess that feeds into letting people do their jobs, right? Have that trust in them. Let them play their role. Seems like a lot of the time there’s a lack in trust in individuals and that can really slow up a business and make things quite clunky. So that’s a super-useful thank you for sharing that.

We hope that you enjoyed this conversation and remember look out for Episode 6 soon. You can listen to the whole conversation here The Transformative Impact of Personalised Development with Bradley Honnor