Decision-Making Impacts Your Team Culture
For the last two weeks, we’ve been sharing ways to reboot your leadership momentum. These practices are based on a March 2022 study published by Gallup Research which addresses why people are leaving jobs more frequently these days. Beyond pay and benefits, forty-two percent of respondents said they left a job recently due to bad bosses and toxic organizational cultures. While you may not have much control over your organization’s pay and benefits budget, every supervisor has the ability to change the culture in their team. We are providing four ways to change your culture right now and ultimately decrease employee turnover. These include teambuilding, working agreements, decision making processes, and sensemaking. Today we are talking about decision making process.
Decision-making is choosing actions via mental processes which are influenced by reason, emotions, biases, and memories. What we think is happening in our decision-making processes is a linear event where everyone is clearly identifying a problem, discussing solutions, and acting on the best one. However, we forget that each of us shows up with a different set of experiences in the workplace. And some organizations have clearly defined decision-making processes, such as consensus, voting, and single decision makers. You may even have some unwritten norms like talking in circles for months on end. This is a sign of indecision.
How do you make decisions as a team? Do you apply the same process for every decision? When can people make their own decisions without any input? These are all powerful questions to review in your team. Quite often I find that teams have unspoken confusion about how decisions are made and their roles in the process. It seems simple, right? But it’s not. Each of us makes hundreds of decisions on a daily basis, oftentimes unconsciously. How might our unconscious decision-making be affecting our team culture?
A worthy tool to review here is the ladder of inference, which reflects how each of us interprets data and filters it through our own experiential lenses. Originally created by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge, the ladder of inference helps decision makers to identify assumptions baked into individual conclusions. Take a moment to review the ladder of inference and walk through a belief you have. For this example, let’s use something like “my team is consistently late to meetings”. Maybe you’ve taken an action recently about this belief. Now walk your way backwards with this belief using the ladder of inference. What conclusions have you made? What assumptions informed your conclusions? What data are you using? And keep going from there. Some people like to start at the bottom of the ladder with data and go up from there. Either way, this tool can help you individually and your team as a group get to the data of a decision-making process and identify assumptions & beliefs that may hinder the process.
No matter what tool you use, having a discussion within your team about decision-making processes is a key intervention to building a healthy culture. Here are my “hot takes” on how to help your decision-making process:
1. Have a team discussion about your decision-making processes.
2. Slow down. Seriously, give your team more time to talk, even if it’s 5 minutes.
3. Take time to hear from as many stakeholders as possible.
4. Practice reflective listening so you fully understand what people are saying.
5. Ask for individual consent to the decision.
Discussions around decision-making processes brings clarity to the group and surfaces unknown tensions within the team. Having the discussion may not always be easy, but it is a way to build trust and confidence in your team right now. Don’t we all need that these days?
This is the third article in a four-part series on rebooting your leadership momentum. Come back next week to learn about sensemaking. Maybe you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Read this blog post on how to reclaim your energy in this ongoing pandemic.
Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash