The decisive edge: 5 steps to improve organizational decision making
In a landscape where big and small decisions can have meaningful impacts on an organization’s strategic and cultural direction, building intentional and healthy decision-making habits is essential.
What makes for “healthy” habits is determined by the company’s growth stage and current needs. For mid-size companies, the balance between rapid growth and operational efficiency can be particularly challenging. Changing roles, evolving leadership expectations, and shifting customer demands put pressure on the organization to work in new ways, while also maintaining focus on the top and bottom line. Many senior leaders in this stage of evolutionary growth start noticing decision-making paralysis that causes delays, frustration, and stalled progress.
The bottom line is, as organizations transition into new stages of maturity, decision-making norms also need to transition. Unlocking performance often requires a decision rewiring to address new points of friction caused by changes to the complexity of the business and the ecosystem.
Why decisions matter now more than ever
Mid-size organizations face unique pressures that complicate decision-making:
- Rapid technological advancements requiring timely adaptation
- Evolving customer needs demanding quick, effective responses
- Increased market competition due to lower barriers to entry
- The necessity of providing personalized, integrated solutions
- Increasingly interdependent business models requiring more flexible decision-making
- A growing reliance on diverse perspectives and collaborative decision-making
These factors are reshaping the stakes for businesses, making high-quality, swift decision-making not just advantageous but essential for staying competitive.
Five key steps to elevating decision-making in your organization:
Our research and experience have found that there are five key steps to moving the needle on making better, faster decisions, that will enable you to move beyond the friction.
- Identify areas for change: Understand the current pain points and what’s at stake if nothing changes. This is about determining the scope and nature of the issue.
- Scope-wise, are the decision-making challenges isolated to a certain team, level, or function? Or is this a broader, integrated issue spanning intersection points of the organization?
- Regarding the nature of the issue, is there a knowledge/clarity gap that can be fixed with information or skill development? Or is it the challenge more nuanced and driven by patterns of behavior that have been engrained over time and now need to shift?
- Assess your current decision-making landscape: Diagnose the root cause by examining what decision-making looks like in practice today, finding the specific sticking points and digging into the drivers of the behavior. For example, are there certain processes in the way that no longer work for the company? Is there misalignment around what tradeoffs are acceptable? Are cross-functional teams operating from different truths because of mismatching data? This foundational clarity is key to moving forward.
- Define necessary shifts and tools: The findings of steps 1 and 2 lead to setting clear priorities on the few, targeted aspects of decision making that are most important to address now and then supporting the organization with tools to help make clear “how” to address them. For example, for a company with a matrix structure, this might mean moving from multiple decision-makers to a single, empowered decision sponsor.
- Make it tangible and actionable: Bring the conceptual to the practical. Create simulations and working sessions to help your team practice new decision-making processes in a safe environment. Do focused skill-building in the areas leaders most need to make decisions in new ways, such as decision framing, constructive debate, and influencing.
- Embed and reinforce new practices: Ensure that supporting processes and systems reinforce the behaviors you want to see. For example, review approval processes, accountability mechanisms, and after-action reviews and if needed, change them. Use regular feedback mechanisms to reinforce behaviors and adjust as necessary.
Decisions shape the future of your organization. And as a leader, you must recognize when the decision-making environment is out of alignment with the business direction or the culture that you want to create. From there, these steps need not be overly complex or burdensome. The key is to truly understand the core decision-making challenges - and what systemically needs to change given where the organization is now and where it’s going - before moving to solutions.
The steps you take today to improve decision-making will lead to a stronger, more resilient tomorrow for your organization.
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I work with senior leaders who spend a good portion of their time in meetings with other senior leaders.
You’d think that because these leaders are facing similar challenges, at similar levels, communicating and influencing would be somewhat effortless between them. After all, who understands the challenges of senior leaders better than another senior leader?
Therein lies the rub. It’s true that senior leaders share plenty in common with one another, including similar blind spots, which is why the same types of communications challenges often come up between them. Here are of the most common mistakes we see leaders make and how to rethink communicating with your colleagues at your next meeting.
Remember that you’re never there to just inform one another
Bringing a group of senior leaders together is an expensive proposition. It’s why if you’re asking your highest-paid people to meet, it should only be for a handful of reasons: To make a decision, agree on a path forward, address an urgent matter, debate an important idea, and so on. Bringing senior leaders together to simply inform one another, provide updates or discuss problems with no real resolution is low value for them and their organizations. If you want to inform, share a pre-read, or send along a dashboard link.
Focus on how to move from informing to action
To get at this, stop talking about what you’re working on and start shifting the conversation to produce more results to come out of the conversation. If you’re leading a discussion with other senior leaders, always decide what result you’re there to achieve ahead of time: A decision? Agreement on a plan of action? Alignment around a commitment? Then, determine how you’ll achieve the result in the time given. Don’t underestimate how much more impact and value you can immediately create with those two simple steps.
Own the fact that you are there to sell
Producing results is not a neutral activity, which is why if you’re leading a discussion with other senior executives, remember that you’re there to sell your colleagues on a course of action. Just because they are your peers doesn’t mean they want the same things—or that they are automatically on board with your agenda. It’s your job to persuade, to influence, to break through the noise and get this in-demand audience to care. Sharing compelling data and information may be a helpful starting point, but if you’re meeting with other senior leaders, those are table stakes. To win hearts and minds, do more to put your audience at the center and engage them on how your idea will help them win.
Make the audience the star of the movie
Think about your discussions with other senior leaders like movies, and if the star is you instead of them, you’ve lost the plot. To influence, help the audience see how they benefit in the future you’re describing. To do that, storytelling is key. Your executive peers can be the toughest audience a leader can face. It’s all the more important to paint a compelling picture of the future state. Describe the potential opportunity in realistic, credible terms, walk the audience through a path to achieving the future that feels doable. It may be tempting to boil the ocean or go heavy on the doom and gloom language (“we’re going to be out of business in five years if we don’t start now”), but a little goes a long way. Most of us don’t want to star in a depressing movie, so to influence, work on a compelling narrative that your audience wants to be part of.
Play to win
The biggest mistake I see senior executives make with one another in meetings? They play not to lose, instead of playing to win. In practice, this might look like keeping comments safe when sharing ideas, checking out or multitasking, keeping quiet, refusing to challenge each other in meetings, or not holding peers accountable to achieving results in discussions. The impact is that we miss the opportunity to have the types of high value, business-moving conversations that senior leaders can and should be having. To get at this, self-awareness is essential, and it may require you to do more to make sure your leadership voice can be heard. For many, this may require preparing differently, sharing ideas in a bolder way, or doing more to make sure the value of your ideas is obvious to the audience.
There may be no single action a company can take to improve its business more powerful than this: Enable your senior executive peers to engage in high value conversations with each other, more often, because when this happens, the benefits are far and wide. Decisions get made, alignment is strengthened, and that accelerates results for companies. Equally important, when senior executives show up differently for each other, they create new norms, elevate the culture, and set an even higher standard for performance.
How do mindsets impact your behavior in moments?
Your life is built by the moments that you experience daily. As you enter each moment, your brain triggers a mindset that offers a thought, belief, feeling, or attitude. This mindset influences how you will engage in the moment presented. In other words, your behavior is directly influenced by the mindset that you adopt in each moment.
Here’s an example. Imagine you are receiving unexpected critical feedback from a respected coworker after giving a presentation to a group of senior leaders. How you react to that feedback will be shaped by the mindset that you adopt in that moment. There are three mindsets that could be activated:
- I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable and no further improvement is needed.
- I believe my presentation was poor and I hope no-one noticed.
- I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable yet there is always room for improvement.
Now think about how you would behave during and after your feedback conversation while holding each respective mindset.
- Which mindset will lead you toward taking action on improving your ability to present?
- Which mindset will have a greater impact on your overall personal development?
- Which mindset will have a greater likelihood of driving results that advance your career in the long run?
The answer to these questions is obviously the third mindset. It is consistent with the “growth mindset,” in which you believe that mistakes are opportunities for growth. There are a number of universal mindsets that are powerful for everyone – a growth mindset is one of them.
But, each universal mindset also has its “shadow”or a negative mindset that is triggered in specific moments. In the example provided, it is the fear of not getting it right. This shadow gets triggered if the presentation was particularly important, if you were presenting to an audience you found tricky, or even if you are having a stressful day. To change how you show up in key moments, it’s critical to be self-aware and look out for when you exhibit both constructive mindsets and the shadows that prevent you from exhibiting them.
Humans are not just reactive in terms of the mindset that become active. Choosing the mindset that is activated in each moment is fully under your control. While emotions are powerful and can easily lead to embracing a less productive mindset, you have the executive functioning capability to override your initial primitive emotional reactions.
Everyone has experienced adopting less productive mindsets during stressful moments, but the choice is always under your control. It is just a matter of being able to manage which mindset is elicited even when negative emotions like anxiety or fear are running high.
How can you change your behavior in the moment?
Changing behavior is not easy. It takes a lot of work and people often fail. So much so that many believe humans are incapable of change. People often fail to change because too much focus is placed on behaviors rather than the main inhibitor of successful change - mindsets.
Here’s an example. Suppose you just took a course to develop your reflective listening skills. Reflective listening is a powerful tool that helps people combat their own unconscious biases to increase their awareness of what others are truly communicating.
Using this tool allows you to check your interpretation of what others are saying and give the person a chance to correct your understanding. When used appropriately, reflective listening helps build both trust and empathy by making a person truly feel heard.
After completing this skill-building course, you are empowered to use this new skill on the job to build better relations and work more effectively with your coworkers.
Two weeks after you completed the reflective listening course, a team member, Taj approaches you with some big personal news that will impact his ability to show up for work for an undetermined amount of time.
Taj is currently leading an important initiative that is very visible in the eyes of senior leaders. The news is stressful for you because losing Taj at this stage of the project will very disruptive and possibly derail the success of the project.
How do you react when Taj is sharing the news? The perfect opportunity has arisen to use your new reflective listening skills, but will you? How you react depends on your mindset. There are two competing mindsets that could be elicited in this moment:
- At Taj’s level, you expect him to be able to juggle the personal and professional. You expect him to find a way to deliver his commitments regardless of what is happening outside of work.
- Taj may well need support in this difficult time. It is important to me to find the best way to help him regardless of current work demands.
If you have the first mindset when you enter the conversation with Taj, there is a low likelihood that you are going to engage in reflective listening due to your belief that a person must honor their work commitments first and foremost. Embracing this belief will lead you to set the precedent that Taj must figure out some way to fulfill his obligation.
Your ability to truly show your new reflective listening skill is blocked when you have the first mindset. It’s not because you don’t have the skill to demonstrate reflective listening behaviors, it’s because your mindset leads you down a path that shows a different set of behaviors.
Conversely, entering into the conversation with the second mindset primes you to show empathy towards Taj, which is the basis of reflective listening. The congruity between your mindset and behavior in this instance set you up to use your new skill without experiencing any internal discord.
This lack of dissonance between the mindset and behavior is important. When you enter a situation with a mindset to “experience and understand Taj’s world,” listening is natural. But sometimes these moments are triggers. For example, you may feel differently if Taj has a history of taking time off for personal reasons or you feel personal pressure to succeed on the project. In these situations, you are unlikely to have the mindset, “experience and understand others’ worlds” and may enter the situation expecting Taj to deliver, as in the first mindset.
What is holding people back from changing their behavior in moments?
True behavior change will not happen without making the proper mindset shifts. People often assume that skill development equals behavior change, meaning a person will demonstrate new behaviors if they develop a new skill. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Just because a person develops a new skill doesn’t mean they will demonstrate it if there isn’t harmony between their new behaviors and mindset in each situation they experience.
Yet it does take more than one instance of showing new behaviors in order to signify true change. Demonstrating the set of new behaviors in a single instance is not a case for change. It takes repetition for a person to build new habits to allow them to move away from instinctively using old behavioral patterns in similar moments.
Most individual development plans or programs being delivered in organizations today are primarily centered around skill-building. While the focus around skill development does teach people how to perform new behaviors, it doesn’t target the mindset shifts necessary to actually leverage those skills when the relevant moment appears.
Without a shift in mindset, you will continue to perform the behaviors aligned with your current mindset and never use your new skill even if you know how to perform it. A mindset shift needs to happen first to enable you to show your new set of behaviors.
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La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.
Ed è lì che si perde valore.
I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.
Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.
“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”
In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:
- Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
- Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
- Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
- Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
- Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso
Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.
Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.
A maioria das reuniões de vendas não fracassa.
Elas simplesmente não levam a uma decisão.
E é aí que o valor se perde.
Os clientes de hoje estão mais informados, mais seletivos e com menos tempo.
Eles não precisam de mais apresentações de produto.
Precisam de conversas que os ajudem a priorizar, decidir e avançar.
Ainda assim, 58% das reuniões de vendas não conseguem gerar valor real.
Não porque os vendedores não tenham capacidade, mas porque as conversas não são desenhadas para impulsionar decisões.
“Os clientes não agem sobre todas as necessidades que reconhecem.
Eles agem quando algo se torna prioridade.”
Neste breve material executivo, você vai descobrir:
- Por que a maioria das conversas informa… mas não gera ação
- O que realmente faz os clientes priorizarem e avançarem
- Como criar urgência sem prejudicar a confiança
- A mudança de apresentar soluções para viabilizar decisões
- O que diferencia conversas que estagnam daquelas que aceleram o progresso
Se suas equipes estão enfrentando negócios estagnados, decisões atrasadas ou um pipeline lento, este material vai ajudar você a entender o porquê — e o que fazer de diferente.
Baixe o material executivo e aprenda como desenhar conversas que realmente impulsionam decisões.
La mayoría de las reuniones de ventas no fracasan.
Simplemente no llevan a una decisión.
Y ahí es donde se pierde el valor.
Los clientes de hoy están más informados, son más selectivos y tienen menos tiempo.
No necesitan más presentaciones de producto.
Necesitan conversaciones que les ayuden a priorizar, decidir y avanzar.
Y, sin embargo, el 58% de las reuniones de ventas no logra generar un valor real.
No porque los vendedores carezcan de capacidad, sino porque las conversaciones no están diseñadas para impulsar decisiones.
“Los clientes no actúan sobre cada necesidad que reconocen.
Actúan cuando algo se convierte en una prioridad.”
En este breve informe ejecutivo descubrirás:
Por qué la mayoría de las conversaciones informan… pero no generan acción
- Qué es lo que realmente hace que los clientes prioricen y avancen
- Cómo crear urgencia sin dañar la confianza
- El cambio de presentar soluciones a facilitar decisiones
- Qué diferencia a las conversaciones que se estancan de las que aceleran el avance
Si tus equipos están experimentando acuerdos estancados, decisiones retrasadas o un pipeline lento, este informe te ayudará a entender por qué y qué hacer diferente.
Descarga el informe ejecutivo y aprende a diseñar conversaciones que realmente impulsen decisiones.