The decisive edge: 5 steps to improve organizational decision making

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.

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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:

1. I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable and no further improvement is needed.
2. I believe my presentation was poor and I hope no-one noticed.
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

• Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
• Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
• Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
• Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
• Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
• Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
• Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
• Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.

Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.

It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”

Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.

We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?

To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”

For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.

This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.

To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.

The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.

romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.

As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.

As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .

Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.

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