Breaking the Bottleneck: How to Stop Being the Decision-Making Log Jam

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to the Leaders Kit Bag, your go to podcast for practical leadership insights in just six minutes. In each episode, we tackle real challenges faced by leaders and managers, offering actionable tools and strategies you can take away and immediately apply. And because leadership doesn't happen in a studio, the these episodes are mostly recorded outside on the move. They're raw, unscripted and straight to the point. So wherever you are, let's dive in and sharpen your leadership skills six minutes at a time. If every decision in your team or organization has to go through you, then you've got a major problem. Those leaders who insist on approving every every move create log jams in their organizations that slow progress and stall growth. They also find themselves disempowering and demotivating their team. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. How we as leaders can unlock that decision making logjam that exists in so many situations. So how do we break this decision making logjam? Individuals and teams can waste a huge amount of time waiting for approval from us as the leader. And this wasted time, these delays can result in losing out on a sale, missing a funding opportunity, or not being able to seize a fleeting opportunity that exists. And why does it happen? The cause of this is often the leader's ego. It's the leader's fear about losing control that forces them to want to make every decision themselves and approve every move that our team might make. David Marquette, the author of Turn that Ship around, got it absolutely spot on when he said as leaders we need to move away from the notion that it is our job to seize control and attract followers. Instead, we should focus on giving up control and creating more leaders. That's how we can overcome and release the decision making log jam that I see time and time again in my work as an executive coach and leadership trainer. And when we do that, when we relinquish control and start to create more leaders, it gives us more time and mental bandwidth to focus on the tasks and activities that we should be focusing on as a leader. Because the reality is in any team, we've all got our part to play and our part as a leader is being the leader, not making and approving every single decision. So as always, how do we do it? Well, I've got two tactics that will help you release control. Hand over some decision making authority to those in your team without losing control. The first one is to use some sort of decision rights tool such as Susan Scott's Decision Tree. It's one of the most powerful, simple, effective tools I've come across in recent years. You can find more about that via the blog I recently wrote. There's a link to it accompanying this episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. The second way of releasing or allowing other people to make some of these decisions without losing control is to use the military concept of Mission command. This is something I learned in the British army that absolutely does translate and work in the corporate setting. And interestingly, the Mission Command approach to delegation is the polar opposite to that which I normally see in many organizations. Very simply, mission command is about telling people what needs to be achieved and what good looks like. It's about telling them why they are doing it, where it fits into the bigger picture. Ultimately what you are trying to achieve by asking them to complete this task and then you give them some boundaries within which to work. In the business world those boundaries are normally time, budget or levels of approval. And after that we get out of their way and let them work out how to do it themselves. But we mustn't be the Seagull manager where we fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everybody and disappear. It's not a fire and forget approach. It's about giving the freedom and the autonomy to work out the how for themselves, but being there to offer guidance and support should they need it. Now if you think about how many of us delegate in the workplace, we tell people what to do and how to do it because we've already thought about it or we think we know best and that is massively disempowering. And if they don't know why they are doing it, they don't know what to do if the situation changes. So quick recap. Mission Command tell people what needs to be achieved and what good looks like. Tell them why they're doing it, what you are ultimately trying to achieve and where it fits into the bigger picture. And finally give them some boundaries within which to work and then get out of their way. That's it for today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. Thank you as always. I hope it's been useful. Look after yourself, look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.