Love and Leadership

How Great Leaders Make Smart Decisions

• Kristen Brun Sharkey and Mike Sharkey • Episode 18

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What if you could make better decisions with less stress? Kristen and Mike go deep into the science of decision-making, exploring why it's such a crucial leadership skill and sharing practical frameworks to help you decide with confidence. They reveal surprising research showing that leaders make around 35,000 decisions daily and that 85% of leaders have experienced decision distress in the past year. But there's hope - by understanding cognitive biases, using structured processes, and learning when to delegate decisions, you can dramatically improve your decision-making abilities. Whether you're struggling with decision fatigue or want to help your team make better choices, this episode offers concrete tools you can start using today.

Download your free PDF of the BRIEFED decision-making framework reviewed in the episode: llpod.link/decision

Highlights:

  • Why quick, authoritative decision-makers are often seen as more effective leaders
  • The optimal amount of information needed before making a decision (hint: it's not 100%)
  • How System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking affect our choices
  • Common cognitive biases that impact decision-making, including anchoring bias and sunk cost fallacy
  • Introduction to the BRIEFED decision-making framework for complex decisions
  • A practical matrix for knowing which decisions to make yourself vs delegate to your team
  • Why debriefing after important decisions is crucial (and often skipped)

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Related Episodes:

Podcast Website: www.loveandleadershippod.com
Instagram: @loveleaderpod

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Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristenbsharkey/
Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-s-364970111/

Learn more about Kristen's leadership coaching and facilitation services: http://www.emboldify.com

Kristen: Welcome to Love and Leadership, the podcast that helps you lead with both your head and your heart, plus a bit of humor. I'm Kristen Brun Sharkey, a leadership coach and facilitator.

Mike: And I'm Mike Sharkey, a senior living and hospitality executive. We're a couple of leadership nerds who also happen to be a couple.

Kristen: Join us each week as we share our unfiltered opinions, break down influential books, and interview inspiring guests.

Mike: Whether you're a seasoned executive or a rising star, we're here to help you level up your leadership game and amplify your impact.

Kristen: \ Hello and welcome back to Love and Leadership. I'm Kristen. 

Mike: And I'm Mike.

Kristen: and today we are going to be talking about decision making for leaders. But,

Mike: How did we decide on that?

Kristen: Oh my gosh,

Mike: was a

Kristen: That was a terrible joke.

Mike: Yeah, it was bad.

Kristen: Yeah, yeah, you can do better.

Mike: I don't know what made me decide to tell that joke.

Kristen: Oh God. Oh God. 

Mike: Is this this not the topic? And do I misunderstand the topic? Okay.

Kristen: Before we actually start talking about decision making, um, let's talk about our leadership moments and see how many bad jokes Mike will make 

Mike: I have no bad joke about that. My leadership moment is, the AGM from my old hotel texted me, two days ago to very excitedly and I'm like, okay, what's going on?

And then she sent me a picture of, her award, which was she won AGM of the year for her, entire company. And there's probably about a hundred hotels or so in her company. So yeah, super proud of her. And I keep trying to steal her and hire her, but she's, she has a lot of loyalty. But it got me thinking a lot of the people that I've worked with and tried to mentor or coach, they really tend to share their career achievements with me.

You know, and they'll text me out of the blue like three years later and be like, Hey, I'm a manager now. And I just, I think that's super cool. And it all, we're going to do it next week. But I started reading, It's Your Ship again. And I haven't read it in a while and it really got me to the whole theme of the book is, raising up others and supporting others and success through, the core of leadership is helping others succeed and grow.

And I just, I love that. I think it's beautiful. So it's kind of getting me back in touch with who I am as a leader, what I do, why I do it. And it's also the works the best too as a bonus. So that's my leadership moment. 

Kristen: Very cool. Um, mine is kind of bringing us back to The Coaching Habit, which I feel like we talked about a lot after we did it and then we haven't talked about as much in the last few episodes.

So now I'm bringing it back, but I just I'm always reflecting on it I've just been amazed by how much I coach on the skill of coaching in my practice and how much of a difference it makes across levels like I've I have an executive I'm coaching who is building up a new office with a tremendous amount of potential client work, but like the thing that's holding them back is scaling and hiring the right people and scaling effectively.

And like, he is in charge of that whole operation. And, even at that level, like coaching, makes such an impact because that's what's ultimately gonna allow him to scale, right? Is getting people ramped up and coaching them to be able to do things like make decisions, which will lead into today and all these other things so that he can build up this effective large scale operation.

So I just really enjoy talking about coaching with leaders.

Mike: I would like some of your coaching on coaching.

Kristen: I am happy to share my worksheet.

Mike: Worksheets.

Kristen: I love, I love a worksheet.

Mike: No, I will do your work. I will do the worksheets. 

Kristen: Okay. 

Mike: I, I, I, I'm still trying to get better as a coach. It has been better. I have really tried it's not like just a habit yet.

I haven't developed automaticity with my coaching habit, but I'm working on it.

Kristen: Yeah, I love it. Cool. So with that, as I said, coaching is one of the things that helps people with making decisions. So let's talk about decision making. See segue.

Mike: Segue. Okay. Yeah,

Kristen: Yep. Segue, the art of segues. So why is decision making so Um, I definitely have my own thoughts and research on this, but what do you think, Mike? 

Mike: Well, I mean, this is a whole like PhD course, right? It really is. But ultimately, one of the top qualities of a leader is the ability to decide, make decisions sometimes with incomplete information, oftentimes in chaos, and to do it in a way that is both confident andwill lead to a positive outcome or at least some outcome that you want and that's very hard and decision fatigue is very real too. And you know as a leader i'm always sometimes looking for an adult or adult who knows everything and can tell me like what to do? And you don't have that and I see that as a really difference between like some of the junior leaders. They don't want to decide or they haven't practiced just making a call And, yeah, I think Chester Nimitz, think it's Nimitz World War II, they were asking him about leadership and he said something like, when you're in command, command.

And as someone who is very thoughtful and data driven, I don't always like to just go like do this, you know, like Captain Picard from Star Trek, make it so, you know, but that quality is essential to leadership. And, yeah, everyone's gonna eventually really, look to you to make the final call and you have to believe in yourself and you have to, that's not easy.

Yeah. 

Kristen: Yeah. it's very hard. And yeah, you mentioned decision fatigue. I think part of the reason why it's so hard is, there's research by, I'm going to butcher their names, Sahakian and Labuzetta.

Mike: That sounds pretty good.

Kristen: I mean, who knows how accurate it is. But they've done studies on how many decisions an adult makes. And in the average day an adult makes about 35, 000 decisions in one day, which is crazy.

Mike: Which is why automaticity is so important.

Kristen: Your favorite. I mean, I do like that that word. 

Mike: It is so good. But it is you don't decide to brush your teeth. It just happens.

And if you don't develop those like,unconscious skills, it's exhausting.

Kristen: Yeah. For sure. Yeah. It's crazy. We make so many decisions and.. Decision distress, There's an Oracle study I can link to in the show notes, but,they talked about, like, the decision dilemma for leaders, and they showed that 85 percent of leaders have suffered from decision distress in the past year. And decision distress is basically feeling regret, doubt, or guilt about a decision made.

So that is, it's something the vast majority of leaders feel, and sometimes you can feel it very deeply. And it also has a huge impact on how you're perceived as a leader. I mean, research has shown that quick decision makers, like quick authoritative decision makers are seen as far more effective. 

Mike: Well, that's what I was kind of talking about.

Like that's a part of an archetype, right? Of, of leaders, but it's absolutely essential. You must, you must be able to make a decision. And it is often. You're often doing that with incomplete information. I do, I did look it up. It's what was John Gronski. He was a national guard general. In Iron Sharpened Leadership he said something like you should aim to make a decision when you have between 50 and 70 percent of the information that you would want. 

Kristen: want. Mm. 

Mike: Yeah, because if you're waiting for the hundred percent, and he's a military commander, so maybe business a little, but it's not like being first to the battlefield is sometimes the more important than having the best plan, not always, but sometimes.

And if you're waiting till you get 90 or a hundred percent of information, you are probably too late. You have exited the, the area or the time of most, efficacious action. 

Kristen: Yeah, I'd be interested in looking into like workplace studies onwhat they, I mean, I know they're out there. Um, I actually did a class on decision making for leaders as part of my Master's program. 

Mike: Well, and I remember a few episodes ago, you said having three options.it, something, I don't remember what the statistic was, but it was you were startlingly more likely to be successful if you had three rather than two things to choose between.

Kristen: And that was from The Coaching Habit.

Mike: That's from The Coaching Habit.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think he did the, I'm sure he

Kristen: No, he didn't do the research, but that's where we, that's where we talked about it from. Yeah. 

Mike: And I try and. You have to be comfortable with like, you're going to make mistakes too.

You're going to, you're, because you're operating at 50 percent of information or 70 percent of information, you're going to make mistakes. Everybody's looking at you like, Oh, you made a mistake. Yep. Yep. Don't always make the right call.And how you like circle back and be like, Hey, I made the wrong call here.

Kristen: Yeah, and there is, there's a lot of things that make decision making hard. I mean, we've talked about a couple of them, but. Things like lack of process is a big one and we will talk about a process you can use in this episode. Cognitive bias we're also going to talk about, but also things like data overwhelm, perfectionism, conflict avoidance, stress, burnout, and among many other things. Like these can all go into making 

Mike: Well they stop you from making, sorry, they stop you from making decisions. Or they cognitively distort, your view of what the decision should be.

Yes. You know. 

Kristen: Well, let's talk about cognitive bias because that's the perfect lead in to that. So we've talked about, I forget which episode we mentioned this on, but I think we've talked about this a little bit. Daniel Kahneman's System 1 versus System 2 Thinking. This is from his book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

But we basically, we have these two systems of thinking. So System 1 is like our base automated level of thinking. It like, it's continuously scanning our environment, it's operating automatically, and involuntarily. So this is the, if you've ever driven home and then you don't remember getting there, that's your System One at play.

And then, System 2 is like our slow thinking, like System 1 is a fast, automatic. System 2 is our slow thinking. And that's only called upon when it's necessary to reason, compute, analyze, and solve problems. And it's much more reliable than System 1, because we're actually engaging like our conscious thought, and we're doing the analysis and calculating and solving problems, right? But it requires that conscious effort, time, and concentration. So we cannot think at that level all the time.

Mike: Okay. Yeah, it's effortful.

So here's something interesting. When I read the book, I thought my impression were these were two very different, like mental processes. There's literally like two different supercomputers in your brain. I posed this question to someone to a tech executive who's developing some very cool, AI tools and asked him, how you account for the, because I don't know that they're trying to have artificial intelligence mimic humanity exactly.

But I asked him, how he accounted for the differences in these two systems, right? Because I think it, it's easier in a way to get a computer right to think system two. It's very effortful. It's logical. And then I asked him, what about this System One thinking that we're, and he said that it was really just a matter of the number of times that something went through System Two processing.

And then at some point it becomes system one processing, which I found very interesting. And then I got a little scared about the rise of the machines, but, uh, Uh, So his, his idea was like, even these biases, the shortcuts, they're simply a matter of time for his machines to, to go through it enough times.

And I think it's not just like in your single life, right. that we've developed these, this, In the history of humanity, we've gone through those iterations for hundreds of thousands of years, and they've gone from System 2 to being System 1.

Not in our lifetimes, but, you know, in Sumeria or whatever, and back then they were still doing more System 2 thinking, and that's why things are I don't know. But I, it's an interesting thought experiment or problem, if you will. Sorry, I'm sorry for the digression,

Kristen: No, it is

Mike: it's interesting, right?

Kristen: And I think it makes sense from like, if you think about skill development, right?

Like when you are first learning a skill, it takes a lot of conscious effort and concentration and you have to be thinking about each step. And then it becomes muscle memory as those neural pathways are formed, right? So, I mean, it makes sense.

It's very interesting.

But yeah, anyway, so back to kind of how this leads into cognitive bias. So, in order to make judgments with this, massive amount of information that our brains are taking in, all the time, System 1 often uses heuristics, which are mental shortcuts, in order to simplify problems and variables and actually like make decisions very quickly.

And this is what actually leads to cognitive bias, which is a systematic error in thinking that affects how we process information, perceive others, and make decisions. And there are 180 plus different types of cognitive bias. If you actually go to the Wikipedia page for this, you can spend a lot of time digging into all of these different ones.

But I wanted to go through just a few examples. These are some of the most common ones you're likely to have heard of. So anchoring bias.

This is relying too heavily on the first piece of information that you receive. Because we, our brains place more weight on the first piece of information and then we use it to consider everything else relevant to it.

And I actually learned about this when I was studying marketing in college because it is used very heavily in the marketing world. But one example of this is if you go into a store and the price tag for something is $500 and then same thing, you go into a store and the first thing you actually see is that the price tag is $1,000 but it was scratched out and it's been replaced with $500, instantly, you perceive that as being more valuable even though it's the same price, right? Because it's like, oh, well this is actually worth $1,000 and now it's on sale. So, this shows up in many different ways. If you look out for the marketing, you will see it all the time.

Mike: We're going to do, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss at some point. He references this a lot and uses it to his

Kristen: Oh, nice. Yeah,

Mike: Yeah. He uses it as a weapon of war for

Kristen: It's definitely, yeah, negotiation is a place where this

Mike: It matters a lot. The first person to throw out a number, has set the, arena.

Yeah. 

Kristen: Yes. Yeah, I think we'll do that in probably early January,so that'll be a good one.Confirmation bias, this shows up, oh my god, in so many places. But this is focusing only on information that confirms your existing beliefs. So if you think of this as like a Venn diagram, so you have in one, one of the circles is like objective facts and information.

And then the other circle is, everything that, like, you believe. What you're gonna notice is, the intersection of those, right? You're gonna see the portion of the objective facts that supports your beliefs, like, where that overlap is. And our brains are just designed to do this, right?

Mike: And we're being actively manipulated extensively at this point with social media.

Kristen: Oh, yeah, and when this shows up, I mean, yeah, I've said before, no matter how you feel about the election outcome, I think it's very clear. You can see this in so many places

Mike: Well, they show you ads that of things that you already believe

Kristen: Yeah, everything's related back to that. So I mean, all of, honestly, politics is like such a playground for cognitive bias everywhere. If you can approach it from a more analytical standpoint and not get too emotional about 

Mike: Well and the next one is sunk cost fallacy and immediately I think we have a real sunk cost fallacy bias going on with the uh style and form of government that we are subjected to at this point. It's certainly not working. 

But sunk cost fallacy, definitely we, we are sunk cost fallacy with the, the style of government that we have. We're like the Constitution is it's written in stone. No, it's not written in stone. It actually contains, ways to amend it. And, the Founding Fathers wanted us to change it and adapt to modern times.

And, you know, they were writing with quill pens and using,candles or whatever to write by. So, yeah, things need to be updated, but we're so down that rabbit hole. A

Kristen: And sunk cost fallacies shows up in so many places. This is like the idea of favoring choices that you've already invested time and resources in.

Mike: Relationships, I think, have a lot of sunk cost fallacies. 

Kristen: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I've said before, there is some point, like if you've been dating somebody for a long time, there is some point where it is, easier to just get married than it is to break up, right?

Mike: It's, really hard.

Kristen: Yeah, definitely. It shows up in business in many ways. Investments, poor investments. You see this all over.

Mike: Gambling. Gambling isn't it? is like an entire paradigm of sunk cost fallacy.

Now, these are really interesting. I'm gonna, I'm googling Wikipedia right now.

Kristen: Nice, yeah, I would love to actually at some point it'd be good to do an episode just on cognitive biases.

Mike: We should get an expert on cognitive bias on here. 

Kristen: Yeah, that would be interesting. I mean, I love this stuff. I nerd out on it so hard. It's fascinating.

Mike: Well, okay, so let's talk about, for a second, these cognitive biases are perceived a little bit negatively, and I don't think they necessarily are.

They're evolutionary adaptations, right? So they serve a purpose, and just because something has a bias doesn't mean it's wrong, you know? Like, going back to, sorry, Jocko, like, he has a bias for action.

Right, but a leader should have a bias for action, not all the time,and you should be aware of your bias for action, but we're always going to have some biases.

We're always going to have some trends.

Kristen: I think that's really the key, right? Cognitive biases are only negative if you don't have awareness of them. And if you just act upon them without taking the time to, like, consider, okay, where is this coming from? Why do I feel like this way? Understanding the way your brain works and knowing where you're being influenced by bias that may not actually be the right choice for the situation.

This comes up a lot in, DEI. I'm hoping, I think, I'm hoping we're going to have a really good episode on that, hopefully in the new year,with a guest. So I, yeah, this shows up in many places. It does have a negative connotation. I think the biggest thing is awareness. 

This is just how our brains operate, but if you have awareness of it, then it's, you can even use it to your advantage

You 

Mike: should be able to use it for your advantage and not just like weaponizing and in other people, but yeah, 

Kristen: Yeah, for sure. 

Mike: it's like a, it's like a power up in Mario brothers or something.

It should make you go from a to be faster when it's appropriate to do so. 

Kristen: Yeah. So cognitive bias has a big play in decision making. I think of this like triangle of things that are happening in your brain before you actually start to give that system to thinking towards a decision.

You have, cognitive bias. You also have the inner judge, which I'm not going to get into too much here. We've talked about it pretty heavily in like Imposter Syndrome and I think Leadership Presence as well But but that's basically the part of your brain that is based on survival and it's trying to keep you from taking risks because it wants to keep you alive and the risks that you take today are not necessarily going to get you killed like they would have in our earlier versions of humanity, right?

And then the other piece is your actual intuition. And if you don't have a lot of awareness of these things happening, it can be really difficult to differentiate these things from one, one another. So building up that awareness. And understanding, like, where those impulses are coming from is super powerful in your own personal decision making, both in how it shows up as a leader and also just in your life.

Mike: I mean,intuition, right? that's what I, when I asked the AI leader about that's what I was trying to get at a little bit. I don't think system one thinking is the same as intuition.

Kristen: No.

Mike: And I think that, science on intuition is probably woefully incomplete.And they're, now they're talking about like when you say your gut and now they're finding all sorts of like,gut brain connections.

And there's so many subtle things that are going on in the body that, that Western science has not totally figured out yet. And why would they, they've been at it for not that long, you know, a couple hundred years. Right. How long does it take to figure out the mysteries of the universe? I don't know, but longer than that.

And I think it's a really good, as someone who's not been good at trusting my intuition,probably because my inner judge was so strong, right? And can you tell the difference between your inner judge and your intuition? That's the hard work right there, right? Tell me if I'm wrong wrong about, but those are hard to isolate. 

Kristen: It's hard. It takes a lot of awareness and honestly, awareness combined with trial and error. It's like observing what happens yeah, it's, it's not

Mike: easy.

Kristen: Like none of this is easy.

Mike: I learned by the by not listening to my intuition and then encountering something. I felt something didn't listen and then something negative happened.

And I was like, okay, that was actually my intuition. So like, I remember one time I was driving and I had the intuition to get off. It was like a kind of a small highway and I was like, I should get off here. I was like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to just go my normal route. it's easier. I don't want to pay the toll in Houston.

And literally 10 seconds later I got pulled over.

Kristen: Oh.

Mike: And I was like, okay, how did I know that? I don't know. But like, okay, I should have listened and I wouldn't have got the, whatever, $200 speeding ticket. Uh, I don't speed, don't speed. 

Kristen: Oh no, 

Mike: no, never. No, never drive safely. Under the speed limit.

Kristen: Yes. Yeah.I think if you, just for quick decisions, like the decisions you're making as you go throughout the day, or think just decisions that need to happen really quickly. I think just by tuning your awareness of those three areas, your intuition, your cognitive bias, and your inner judge, you can make better decisions.

much more effective decisions by just doing that over time. But for more complex decision making, I think the other thing that is really important is to use a process because research shows that leaders who follow a systematic process when it comes to making complex decisions are more satisfied with the outcomes of their decisions. So I'm going to spend a good chunk, of the rest of this episode kind of talking through the decision making process that I use. This is actually pulling in some elements from improv and mindfulness as well, because it comes from my own like body of work.

So um, so yeah, so this process, I call it the BRIEFED decision making framework because the seven steps spell out briefed as with many frameworks that I, I love a framework as we've talked about.

But, um, but if you, by the way, if you are like me, a visual person, I have a PDF that, that is just like a one page PDF you can print even, Or you can see this laid out if you want to look at that. The link is in the show notes. You can also just go to llpod.link/decision to download it if you want to follow along.

So the steps are blueprint, research, ideation, evaluation, finalization, execution, and debrief. So, starting off with Blueprint. This is where you're establishing a clear foundation and direction for the decision making process. There's two really important parts of this.

There's the, first of all, figuring out, like, what decision are you actually making? What are the real challenges that you're solving? Because, often, this is not actually what you think it is at the beginning of the process. And, when you actually start exploring the decision, you realize that it's it's different.

The problem you're solving is different from what you initially thought. So taking the time to really identify what is the decision we're making and defining the objectives and goals for the decision making process. I think especially if this is a decision you're making on your own, because really this process can be used for decisions you're making individually.

It could be also used for team decisions. But if you're making on your own, especially like using awareness tools, from improv and mindfulness to help you really examine, like, what are you trying to accomplish with this decision. The second one is research. So gathering necessary information and insights to inform the decision.

And this is an area for really using like active listening techniques to understand different stakeholder perspectives. If you're working with a team, like assigning different roles for collecting that research to different people as part of this. And then once you've done the research, the next step is ideation.

And this is where we really get into what we were talking about the insight, and I can't remember who did the research off the top of my head, but it was, it was covered in The Coaching Habit where if you generate more than two solutions, your outcome is going to be much better for

Mike: Yeah, that's amazing that it only takes one extra idea to, you know, can we get an independent party or third party like something? Sorry to go politics, but like, you 

Kristen: Yeah, it's November 2024. 

Mike: Well, you know,I think, I don't know enough about like Chinese cosmology and the I Ching, but it breaks the yin yang.

The duality, the right, wrong, us, them, yes, no, three things become the myriad, right? So you just introducing a third thing in there. It's like you probably open up a channel of thought in a, even our neuron, right? Positive, negative charged particles, electricity is, so breaking out of that level.

Kristen: Mm hmm. 

Mike: It's so fascinating.

Kristen: In fact, another cognitive bias is, or distortion, right? It's we tend to, 

Mike: Right, wrong,

Kristen: Black and white thinking, we do, yeah, we tend to think of things in terms of duality versus in reality there is often a third solution that is better.So yeah, the ideation process is really important. This is like generative or divergent thinking.

Where you're actually like coming up with new ideas versus convergent thinking or analytical thinking where you're narrowing them down. Both of those are really important parts of the decision making process. I always recommend doing sessions, like I actually often call them Spark Sessions instead of brainstorming sessions, because I think, brainstorming has a lot of connotations, and we've all been a part of really bad brainstorming sessions, to be honest.

But that's basically generating ideas and using like, yes and improv rules. So, where there's no, there's no critiquing of ideas during this session, that's a separate process. So, like, you're agreeing and adding your own contribution, basically. It's really effective for this generation of ideas. And then.

Mike: you can do this, it made me realize when you said that, that is, this is something you can do as a group. Yeah.

Kristen: No, absolutely. This process, you can do a version of this yourself, but it's very much, designed to be done as a group. Uh, because all of this stuff works really well as a group. And then,

step four is evaluation. So you're critically assessing the viability, the potential impact of each of those potential solutions. Part of this, that's really important, is actually developing clear objective criteria. So, like, what is going to make an effective decision, and actually thinking through that.

We often skip that part, um, and I think this, this shows up in, like, biases with hiring often and because often it's just like, I think almost most of the interviewing processes I have been a part of. We have not really gone through the process of setting out, what is the criteria for somebody who would be successful in this role?

And bias is way more likely to come into play when you don't have that established, but it applies for a lot of other decisions well.

And then doing like different exercises, like perspective taking exercises, role playing, like scenario planning to really kind of look at, okay, for each of these potential solutions, like what is the potential outcome? So that you understand that.

You made me realize there's a book I want to do, I can't remember the name of the book. It's the CEO of PG&E and it's aboutwinning or success or like strategy. And one of the first things there, their thing is like that it's like, where will we play? How will we win? What does success look like?

Was this written before all of the wildfire stuff?

Mike: What, 

No, no, no, no, no, no, uh, Procter and Gamble. I'm sorry, PG, Procter Gamble.

Kristen: Oh, P&G.

P&G. Okay. I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot. No, you're not. You're very very smart. 

Mike: Wow. 

But it's an actually really interesting book because it makes, it takes strategy down to the process that you're, you know, like iterative, strategic process. Andthe evaluation, finalization, and execution really made me think of that. And they're, like, before they do anything, they go through this, step by step strategic process, and they're like, five questions.

It's like, where will we play? How will we win? So are we playing in the luxury market? Are we playing in the discount market? Are we playing in the consumer goods? Are we playing, what arena are we playing in? And how are we going to win there? What does success look like? And it's, it's pretty interesting. 

But anyway, sorry, please go on.

Kristen: Sothe next step, step five is finalization. So this is once you've, really evaluated each of the options, choosing the final solution.

So actually weighing all that criteria that you identified previously and choosing in potential outcomes and choosing the best solution and then creating a detailed plan for the implementation of it. So, this is where you really get into action plans, looking at like timelines, communications, resources, etc.

Everything you need to determine for that. And then step six, execution. This is where you actually implement the solution and monitor it. So you put the action plan into, to place, and then you're also part of this that's really important is regularly monitoring progress against the established milestones and objectives that you figured out at the first step of this. And then finally, the last step is debrief. So this is something I find is often skipped in decision making, but it's 

Mike: Well, we're so busy. We're so busy. Like it's so hard to start a process like this once you put it in place And it's like a checklist you'll do it but if you're just kind of freewheeling it. It's hard to like hit every box, tick every, you know?

Kristen: Yeah, for sure. Yeah,, so if you're putting a process in place for decision making, do not skip the last step. Which is where you're actually going to look at the decision and evaluate the effectiveness of it and also the effectiveness of the process.

Maybe for your particular company or team, you want to change some specifics about this process, right? So holding a formal, particularly if it's a more complex decision, what we're going to be doing this full process for, like holding a formal session to analyze the outcomes, gather feedback, evaluate the success, and then especially identify what the lessons learned from it were and figure out how to apply those so that you can improve future decision making processes.

Do not skip that part because that is just going to make you really influence your future decisions, not just this one.

Mike: We'll talk about that next week in It's Your Ship. He stole that from the Army. They always do an after action report and he's like, sometimes the Army even has a good idea. It's rare.

And so, you know, uh, but yeah, and I don't do that. I mean, it just got some blue

Kristen: hard. You have to have a process for it. Otherwise, it will not happen. For sure. Yeah, the last thing I wanted to share as part of this episode is there's a an article in the MIT Sloan Review, which, by the way, I mention the Harvard Business Review a lot. It is probably my number one resource for like leadership articles and research and so forth.

But very close is the MIT Sloan Review, which I hear a lot less of. So if you're looking for more resources for research on leadership and various other business topics, highly recommend. It's all based on research from MIT, obviously.And there's an article that was published there that I really liked for like, how do you as a leader empower your team to make the decisions that they can make and know when to involve you and when not to involve you.

And this is a really cool framework that she includes in this article. The article is called Effective Leaders Decide About Decision Making by Nancy Duarte. This will also be in the show notes, but there is basically a matrix. There's two different parts of it. There's urgency, so like determining the urgency of the decision and then determining the stakes of the decision.

And so for something that is high stakes and high urgency, that would be like escalate immediately. So these are like the high risk, high reward areas that immediate action, right? And then high stakes, low urgency would be propose for approval. So that's where the, you know, your direct report can bring a proposal to you, but this is stuff that doesn't have high urgency, but it's probably things that are different from what you agreed upon as a strategy or budget and you need to revisit it. And then things that are low stakes, high urgency.

So these are maybe issues that a leader might just want to watch unfold without necessarily needing to be directly involved in it, or things that, like, could turn into higher stakes issues. These are, like, inform on progress, so the direct report is periodically updating the leader on movement on it. And then finally, 

low stakes low urgency is decide without me. And these are things that she says, like for somebody who is leading a team, a department who reports into you, the majority of the things on their list should fall into this category.

Mike: This is the Eisenhower matrix. is, yeah, 

Kristen: It is like a version of it, but

Mike: it This is, this is the grid that I have.

It's a prioritization matrix. And one of the boxes that it's low value and low effort or something like that, it's delay, ignore, or delegate that a task can wind up in.

Kristen: I think it's a little bit different though, because the Eisenhower matrix is deciding what actions you are or are not doing. There are plenty of things that are low stakes and low urgency that are still important. Particularly from like the perspective of a leader, right?

So this is stuff that like fits within. Somebody's leading a team like letting them really own the hiring of it,like the small issues that come up and just the various decisions that need to be made on a day to day basis for their team and department. That doesn't mean those are not don't need to get done.

But for you as the leader, you want your team member to be able to be empowered to make decisions on it without having to involve you unless it becomes higher stakes or higher urgency. 

Mike: I love this list. I'm going to really think about this.

Kristen: Yeah, it's great, right? And it's a, she recommends actually taking this, going through this and specific activities that fall into those with your team and then having them do it for their teams too. It's a really awesome tool. So I recommend checking out that article if you want to do more of this kind of stuff. Otherwise that is everything I have for this. Any, anything else you want to comment on for decision-making? 

Mike: I've decided not to add any, no, um,

Kristen: Oh my god..

Mike: mean, sure, it's kind of startling when you break everything down and you're like, you make 35, 000 decisions a day. And I think as a leader, the delegation as much as possible is it the most important skill you can have? I think. Maybe it's a bias, but like we were talking about the what got you here.

One of the things that I've suffered from is absolutely wanting to add value to everything and feeling like as the person in charge, when people come to me, I have to have all the answers because that's my job and they will look down on me if I don't. But, you will experience such decision fatigue that you will, you know, you will cry in your Cheerios and also you will not train your people to make their own decisions. At some point I started to remember my first job, in hotels at the Box House Hotel in Brooklyn, super cute little boutique. Go check it out. It's under the Pulaski bridge.And I was new to hotels, but I wasn't new to working. And, you know, at five o'clock everybody in the office, the owner and the man, everybody went home and they're like, here's the hotel. Good luck. And you know what? Me and my counterpart, who was amazing. We figured it out, and once in a while we had to call somebody and maybe they answered, maybe they didn't, and somehow we not only survived but thrived, and we looked for solutions, we relied on our own, cognitive resources, we found ways, and if you ignore that development for your team, or for yourself,you're missing, you're not on the path. You're not on the path forward. So, it's okay not to decide too. And say like, this is actually in your area. I'm gonna let you make that decision and, you know. Go back to Kino. he used to say the only time I have to be involved is if it involves safety, security, or severe financial loss.

And we'll talk about that in It's Your Ship Too. He says, the only time I need to be, absolutely have to be consulted if it could kill somebody. If it could waste a massive amount of tax payers money. Or might seriously damage the ship. Other than that,it's your ship. Do your thing. Sothat's my, yeah.

But it's hard. it's hard to decide not to decide.

Kristen: Yeah, no, very powerful though. And especially if you need to get work off your plate or you're scaling an enterprise like I was talking about with the client and my leadership 

Mike: And well I think one of the main things you have to decide on a consistent basis is people come to you with what seems to be extremely high urgency things all the time.

And you have to decide how high the stakes actually are. They may feel and act like the stakes are, could not be higher. And you have to step back and be like, actually, I can let that burn for awhile because there are things that are far more high and they don't have the perspective to see that. So people are going to come to you with a lot of emotion.

A lot of emotion and, you know, solve this problem, solve this problem. No, actually that's not the problem that's going to make or break our situation right now. So I'm going to choose not to, and people don't like that. They don't like that and they will look at you askance and they will think less of you as a leader.

And they'll be like, this person doesn't get it. he doesn't know what we're going to do. Maybe. Or maybe like I see a different threat that is or a different opportunity that is so high stakes that I'm going to ignore something that seems to be super urgent but is a lower. So evaluating that, that is a core principle of leadership for me.

And it's hard, and that's why the farther you go up the chain of command when you're the CEO, you have a very a, a dishwasher calling in sick might sound like a serious meltdown because you, you're gonna have a really bad dinner at your restaurant. But the CEO knows that's not actually a driver of the business.

So he's not taking your call to, to, to figure that out. You'll figure it out or you won't, and it'll be bad, but it's not making or breaking like, you know, TGI Fridays . Right. Like, so. Yeah.

Kristen: why it''s so important if you're, if you want to implement that matrix of, like what decisions to pull you in and what not to do.

It's super important to actually go through the actions that, from the past and as they come up and talk about what fits into what box and why.

What is the actual urgency? What is the actual stakes of it? Rather than if you just show them the matrix, it's probably not going to be that helpful for you. You have to go through the actual process of identifying the activities that fit into each. 



Mike: I love this. I wanna do more of this. We should get some people who have actually done like a lot of decision making research. 

Kristen: Yeah,Um, so yeah, so with that, we are going to bring this episode to a close. As I mentioned, if you want to just get the PDF of the BRIEFED decision making framework that I walked through, you can get the link in the show notes, or you can just go directly to llpod.link/decision and otherwise, thank you guys so much for listening. 

Bye 

Mike: Thank you. I love this episode.

Kristen: Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Kristen. You did, your research on this is, impressive.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And I appreciate you,doing all the legwork of putting this together and I'm just sharing my experience. So thank you for everything.

I love you.

Aww.

Kristen: You're amazing.

Oh, you're amazing too. This is very smushy.

Mike: Okay. Where was the cat? We had no cat appearances.

Kristen: Oh yeah, no cats.

Well, she's boycotting.All right.

Mike: Thank you everyone. Bye everyone.

Kristen: The Love and Leadership Podcast is produced and co-hosted by me, Kristen Brun Sharkey and co-hosted by Mike Sharkey. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We can't stress enough just how much these reviews help. You can follow us on LinkedIn under Kristen Brun Sharkey and Michael Sharkey, and on Instagram as loveleaderpod.

You can also find more information on our website, loveandleadershippod.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you again next week. 


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Kristen Brun Sharkey

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Mike Sharkey

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