Background

In his seminal book High Output Management Andy Grove posits that the output of a manager is the sum of the output of everyone working in her organization. That is certainly a wonderful observation, but also somewhat abstract. As a manager what output do you tangibly produce? Well, at least a couple of things: Coaching, direction and input to your team members, presentations/documents, and several more, but maybe most importantly you produce decisions, either by making them or facilitating them.

Decisions are essentially all the forks in the road that determine your destiny as a company, arguably there’s nothing more important in your life as a leader than making the right ones.

Implicit Decisions and Decision Making

Some of the most important decisions are the implicit ones; the ones you make without consciously making them, chief among these are the decisions you don’t make. Not making a (pressing) decision is actually also a decision, you’re opting out of one or more of the – potentially attractive – alternatives to the status quo. Don’t be that leader!

Another implicit trap is not being conscious about how you make important decisions. Your method of decision making has a large impact on the quality of your decisions, and the organizational buy-in you get.

Decision Making Method

There are fundamentally 4 different ways to make decisions in a team-environment:

• Democratic. A group of people can make a decision by simply voting on the alternatives.

• Consensus. You choose the alternative that everyone agrees with

• Autocratic. The leader makes the decision

• Consultative. An appointed decision maker makes the decision after consulting key stakeholders, and carefully weighing their input.

Maybe this sounds a bit abstract, but luckily it’s quite simple in practice: 99% of business decisions should be made using the consultative method. This is the right compromise between on one side speed and decisiveness, and on the other side comprehending a broad set of viewpoints and ensuring organizational buy-in.

It is worth being conscious about this as a leader, as we instinctively often fall back to autocratic or consensus decision making. Neither method is optimal for good business decisions.

Decision Making Process

In terms of the specific process of decision making, here there are 5 different approaches, that depend on whether your team prefers to work synchronously (penchant for meetings) or asynchronously (penchant for written communication), and also on the impact of the decision:

• Informal Synchronous. This is a quick discussion between stakeholders without deep preparation. Ideal for small, quick decisions in teams working synchronously. Could happen in the hallway, or without formal preparation at a meeting.

• Formal Synchronous. This is the conventional approach, a formal proposal for a decision (i.e. a PowerPoint presentation) is presented at a meeting, and a decision is made in the meeting.

• Informal Asynchronous. This could be an e-mail thread outlining the decision asking for input, or a slack thread (which is of course semi-synchronous).

• Formal Asynchronous. This is a written process that undergoes a more rigorous structure, often using a document template that goes through a certain life cycle.

• Hybrid. This is a variant of the Formal Asynchronous model, where the process concludes at a meeting. For decisions with high impact a synchronous meeting is very often the best way to get optimal buy-in and decision quality. For synchronous teams who like to make decisions in meetings, this is an excellent approach to get higher decision quality by running an asynchronous preparation process that facilitates inclusion and reflection.

Unlike the method the process is less a case of one size fits all. Our recommended approach is outlined in the following chart:

The higher the impact the more formality is required. The only process we recommend ditching is Formal Synchronous, we believe the Hybrid process is superior.

Detailed Description of the Formal Async (and Hybrid) Process

How do you run a Formal Async decision process? We suggest using a collaborative document. For example our template.

The template is initially prepared by the proposer of the decision, with the following information:

• Decision maker (could be identical to the proposer)

• Deadline what’s the deadline for the decision

• Who needs to be consulted (aka “Consultees”). List of names for stakeholders who should be consulted for this decision

• Who needs to be informed. List of names/groups that need to be informed of the decision after it’s made (often this is the entire company)

• Meeting needed? Decide whether this will be a “pure” async process, or whether it concludes with a meeting (Hybrid process)

• Options. Describe a set of options to decide between (could be as simple as ‘Yes’ and ‘No’), now list pros and cons for each, and finally select one of your options as the proposer’s preferred. Of course the proposer might need to conduct data collection, analysis and consultation to various degrees, simply to prepare a good set of options

Now the document is passed to all consultees (should always include the decision maker as well). Who provide their input to the decision in the document. Even if the agree with the recommended option they should write this in the document.

In the async case the decision maker reviews the options and the consultee input and makes the decision. In the hybrid case the proposer calls a meeting with the decision maker and consultees to finalize the decision (or brings it as an agenda item to a running meeting, e.g. the Staff Meeting).

And finally the proposer informs everyone in the process and the list of people to be informed of the outcome. 

Implementing in Writeflow

Orchestrating consultee input and ensuing a timely conclusion of this process is often complicated in real life (the expression “herding cats” comes to mind). Writeflow was created to handle scenarios like this.

You can implement an async or hybrid process in Writeflow with a simple flow like this: