4 Approaches to Build Great Decision Making Skills in Teams Quickly
Building great decision making skills in teams is brilliant for you personally as a leader or manager. To grow the size of your team and business, you need your team members to make decisions without reference to you. To increase your team’s performance, you need your team members to make better decisions every single day. You can’t be everywhere at once, and if you try to be, you will end up burnt out and struggling to hit targets.
A team is going to be most effective and most productive when every team member is making the right level of decisions for their decision making skills. If you spend a minute to think about all the different decisions you make each day at work, you will realise that a lot of decisions you make are really easy, some more taxing and some are really difficult.
4 Approaches to Build Great Decision Making Skills Quickly in Teams
- Make team members feel psychologically safe to make decisions
- Give them the right decisions to make
- Teach, coach and create responsibility
- Keep them practicing their decisions making skills
The less time you spend on the really easy decisions, the more time you have for the more challenging decisions. More time spent deciding usually means better decisions. Better decisions means better performance at all levels – personal, team, and business.
Building great decisions making skills in your team means creating more time for everyone to spend making the difficult decisions. When you build decisions making skills in your team, you are leveraging your skills across everyone in your team, multiplying the value creation by a lot more than one person could ever achieve on their own.
A Lot More Personal Benefits
Some of the additional personal benefits you gain by building decision making skills in your team:
- Less stress as you are not spread as thinly
- You spend more time on more difficult problems thus improving your own decision making skills
- You develop your team – which increases team performance, retention, motivation and their willingness to work harder
- You have a more motivated and loyal team who appreciate you more which in turn makes it much nicer to be at work
- Your career progresses faster because you and your team create more value than your peers
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For any of you that are worried about damaging your own job security if you develop your team to take over part of what you do today, don’t be. I have worked in many top companies, been promoted 13 times to board level of large companies and I coach a lot of successful senior managers and directors. Developing the skills and performance of your team is one of the highest value activities a manager or leader can do. Increasing the performance of your team INCREASES your job security and your desirability to other companies looking for successful managers.
Lets cover the first approach to build great decision making skills quickly in teams
make team members feel safe psychologically safe to make decisions
We have all seen or even worked in teams where the leader punishes team members for making bad decisions. The first thing that happens, is everyone stops making decisions and asks the manager to make all the decisions. This might boost the manager’s ego but it destroys team performance.
For team members to feel psychologically safe, you have to create the right environment and be very careful of what reactions and behaviours you display in front of the team.
Give each of your team members permission to make certain decisions on their own. A great public example of giving permission was The Ritz-Carlton Hotel that enabled each employee a specific monetary amount to spend per guest per incident to resolve problems when they occurred.
Tell each team member what they can make decisions on, what they need to get approval for and which to pass straight to their manager. Creating clear frameworks and communicating these to the team are great for creating safety.
Encourage your staff to make the decisions you have given them permission for. Work very hard to not make those specific decisions for them. Just as important is when they make poor decisions or ones that are not as good as the ones you would have made … is to calmly educate them in private. Do your best to not show frustration, anger or any other negative emotion. Don’t punish them or make their lives more difficult in response. Remember, the path to success is built on failure.
Provide a positive and psycologically safe environment to encourages your team to make decisions.
The second approach to build great decision making skills in teams is to give them the right decisions to make
Not all decisions are the same. You can break down decisions into separate categories. A useful quadrant to use is on the vertical axis the decision type moves from Simple or Low Impact to Complex or High Impact. On the horizontal axis decisions move from “regularly make these decisions” to “completely new decisions” i.e. ones not made by any employee before.
In the bottom left quadrant you have simple or low impact decisions that are made regularly in the business. These are great to delegate to team members so they keep practicing their decision making skills. As you move upwards to the more complex or high impact decisions that are made regularly, these are great development opportunities for your high performers or yourself.
On the bottom right quadrant are the Simple or Low Impact decisions that are new. These are great development for managers to take on their own. As the new decisions become more complex or high impact, more people should get involved in the decision making process to improve the quality of the decisions made. These are great development opportunities for managers and leaders alike.
Always match the type of decision making to the team member’s skills while considering the impact and the risk profile to the company.
Asking others to help with the decision making process increases the chances of making better decisions quicker and it provides protection to the decision makers, in case a poor choice is made.
Always match the type of decision to the situation and person.
This takes us into the third approach to build great decision making skills in teams
3 – teach, coach and create responsibility
Developing decision making skills in a team is a journey. Every team member starts at different skill levels and confidence. Adapt how you develop great decision making skills to each person and the situation.
The three main stages of development in my view are:
- Teaching
- Coaching
- Reviewing
I will touch on each quickly.
The teaching stage is sharing the steps to decision making. For example a process might be
- Define the decision needed
- Understand the impacts
- Analyse the options
- Choose the best option
- Seek approval to implement the decision
Help your team members to get good and confident doing each of the decision making steps. Share your own examples with them or even talk through how you are approaching making current decisions. Teach your team how to make good considered decisions.
The second stage is to help coach your team members while they are making decisions. In this stage you are asking questions, challenging and getting your team members thinking. Do not make a decision for them. Guide them to making good decisions instead.
The third stage is letting them make the decisions on their own without your help. You then review the decision with them and either approve it or moving back into coaching mode to move them to a better decision.
Always flex your development approach to the person and situation you have in front of you.
keep your team members practicing their decision making skills – The fourth approach to build great decision making skills in teams
Decision making is a skill and like any skill you need to practice it maintain and improve that skill.
Here are 5 ways you can get your team members practicing their decision making skills:
- Give them responsibility to make a specific range of decisions relating to their area of expertise or job role and ask them to make these decisions each day
- Cross train team members, and ask them to make decisions on the new area they are learning about. The expert team member can teach them and then coach them through making these decisions. You are building three types of skills in this process.
- Include specific team members in initiatives, projects and other ad hoc activities or workstreams so they are facing different situations and decisions to make
- Ask the higher performing team members to help you with decisions that you are facing.
- Run group decision making workshops. Set the group a problem and ask the group to make the decisions to get to and implement at solution. You act as the facilitator.
When team members are increasing their expertise and confidence in making decisions, your role becomes more and more focused on keeping team members making the right types of decisions to maintain and increase their decision making skills.
Keep your team practicing making a growing range of decisions to keep building their decision making skills.
In summary
Do put the 4 approaches to build great decisions making skills in your team into practice. Being a successful manager means working hard to improve how well team members do their job. These efforts lead directly to improved team performance which benefits you personally.
I view developing skills in team members as a high value activity. As a manager you have an amazing opportunity to leverage your skills across the whole team, creating a lot more value than one person could achieve on their own. I have also gained back many times the time and effort I have invested in developing team members and their decision making skills.
The four ways to build great decisions making skills in teams are:
- Make team members feel psychologically safe to make decisions
- Give them the right decisions to make
- Teach, coach and create responsibility
- Keep them practicing their decisions making skills
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If you have any questions on “4 Approaches to Build Great Decision Making Skills Quickly in Teams”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I love building decision making skills and confidence in my teams. The better my team is at making decisions, the higher performing they typically are AND the more time I have to concentrate on the really tricky value adding work or decisions. This pushes my career forward and all of the team members careers too. A brilliant win-win.
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