The best executives make their mark with strategic, even prescient, decisions. This kind of leadership often spells the difference between success, failure or, more often than not, just muddling along.
A good decision can be made better and create lasting change throughout the organization by following a few simple steps in both the decision-making and implementation phases.
Test kitchen
Decision-making: Socialize your high-level concepts for a policy change or major initiative during the early stages. While the concepts are being cooked, bring key groups into a test kitchen to taste test the initial thinking and act as sounding boards. This will help insure the idea is not being cooked in isolation.
Implementation phase: When the idea is ready, go to the test kitchen participants who can influence others. Keep them in the know, and arm them with information. Ask them to help spread the information throughout the organization. Don’t let managers hide behind being too busy to support the project. Make them aware that the success of this project will be on their personnel review.
Be ready to make adjustments
Decision-making: Seek out possible deficiencies in the project plan by listening for what is really being said, who is saying it and why they are saying it. Where we stand depends on where we sit — and unintended consequences of a change can surface for staff members whose jobs are impacted. Actively soliciting feedback, playing devil’s advocate on your own idea or pending decision can often reveal hidden pitfalls in time for them to be repaired.
Implementation phase: As the project is rolling out, listen for the difference between disagreement with the decision itself and disagreement with how it is being implemented. These are separate issues with separate solutions. Skepticism about the decision’s wisdom or potential effectiveness is a persuasion or even personnel fit issue. A question about the rollout is an operational issue.
Servant as leader
Decision-making: Getting a change to stick has little to do with how smart the change is for the organization and much more to do with the employees implementing the decision in a smart way. For employees to buy in to the change, they must be able to answer the question, “What does this mean to me?” Leaders who understand the concerns and address them along the way will have a better chance of embedding their ideas into the organization.
Implementation phase: Your decision will result in change, some of it uncomfortable for your colleagues and employees. Understanding this and embracing techniques and attitudes of the “serving” professions (counselors, religious leaders) can help. For instance, providing a sympathetic ear and praising collaborative behavior that pushes your good decision toward a sticky one is a smart move. And, don’t forget to celebrate success.
We all have used a version of a classic tool — the Ben Franklin balance sheet — to weigh the pluses and minuses of a decision. Well, old Ben had this to say about making a decision stick: “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.”
Joseph D. Ames has consulted to a wide range of organizations on issues of internal organization and collaboration, and internal and public communications. An experienced coach, he has helped executives and managers navigate challenging organizational and marketplace imperatives. His background includes more than 25 years of political and business reporting, editing, and management for major newspapers, where he was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Community Service. He is the author of California’s Afterschool Expansion funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. In addition, he has worked with executives in universities, large publicly held companies, and nonprofits, including the National Institutes of Health and SRI International. www.amesassoc.net
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