How I make great decisions as a manager
Humans make around 35,000 decisions every day. But as managers, our decisions carry even more weight, because they impact the team too.
And I found myself over and over again, being asked for my opinion or decision or approval on something… But the answer wasn’t always obvious to me.
So during those moments when the right answer wasn’t immediately clear, it has always been crucial for me to have a reliable framework to guide me.
So here’s mine…
It’s a super simple question you can ask yourself the next time you have a decision to make that you’re not immediately sure of the answer.
This framework ensured all of my decisions were helping to build a healthy and fulfilled team around me.
When the decision comes to you, ask yourself:
Which answer comes from a place of love, and which from a place of fear?
Sounds a bit abstract right now, but let me give you a couple of examples of when I’ve used this to guide me in the past…
Example 1)
About 4 years back I decided I wanted to educate my full team on personal branding.
I wanted everyone in the team to get involved sharing their own stories online, for themselves and their career, and the organic visibility of the company.
For context it was 2020, software developers were like gold dust, and we had a GREAT one, they were also the most expensive people in the team to hire and pay.
So when our ONLY developer asked me at the time “Do you want me to get involved in personal branding too” my heart started pounding.
Everything inside me wanted to say “NO. We’re hiding you away in a cupboard and nobody else can know you’re here. You’re not invited to the personal branding session” (for fear of course, of him being headhunted)
And it was in that moment, I closed my eyes and said to myself ‘am I making that decision based on love, or fear’.
So I flipped it round in my head. What if I made this decision based on LOVE instead, what would the outcome be then?
The result? Of course we want him to get involved, it will give him a huge platform to build his career, and will show our business as having expert developers in the eyes of our customers.
It’s a leap of faith, but it’s making a decision based on the ultimate outcome of love for your team.
Years later, he’s still with the business, was known as a trusted face in our membership community, and is now our LEAD Engineer running a whole team of developers.
Oh, and I don’t doubt he’s been headhunted 10’s of times (and turned it down). All because of leaps of faith and decisions based on love like the one above.
Example 2)
This leans into the WFH/Office debate that we all love so much in this post-Covid world. A couple of years ago, we needed to decide which day to have our team in the office together in the week.
One of my team leaders said ‘can we bring everyone in on a Monday, because I feel like everyone really lazy after the weekend and just slacks off on a Monday if not.’
Huge ‘fear’ red flag here. My question back to him was ‘Do we have issues with performance in your team?’... To which the answer was no.
In that case, who cares if people are slacking off a bit on a Monday?
Since their performance is where it needs to be, maybe taking it a bit easy on Monday is actually healthy for them.
Let’s make this decision based on LOVE instead… We did a poll in the team, of which day worked best for everyone. Tuesday was the answer. We did Tuesday office days for over a year, and it was my fav day of the week.
Summary
Make decisions from a place of love, not fear this week.
Peace,
H