Making The Right Leadership Decisions: Part 2

Part 1: The Foundation set the stage for this Part 2 blog post. Dr. Lee Newman, Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences and professor at IE University and IE Business School, recently shared some findings in behavioral sciences that can impact career advancement with Ivy Exec members. Following is an excerpt of Dr. Newman’s recent webinar on this topic. (You can access the complete audio record of this presentation on Ivy Exec’s Blog: Here)

Decision making is one of the most important skills for managers and leaders, and can make (or break) a career. Ingrained, “default” behaviors can lead to intuitive business decisions that are inherently flawed.  But, we can “rewire” the way we think and behave – essentially training/retraining our “Mindware”, though the process is easier said than done…

Impediments to Good Decision Making:

1. Incomplete Thinking:

When we are under pressure in the workplace we often fall prey to incomplete thinking. There are often multiple cases that we don’t identify or reason through in a decision making situation. For example, we focus on star employees and make sure they are well compensated, but give little thought to the adequately performing employee who may be the team’s glue – the “unsung hero” — who suddenly decides to quit, leaving the team in total disarray.  These blind spots can sneak up and catch us. Incomplete thinking is a slippery slope.  More complete thinking doesn’t have to take much more time. A 30 second decision becomes a 1 minute decision, perhaps a 2 minute decision now takes 4 minutes, and a 2 hour decision may still take 2 hours, but they are a different and mentally more productive 2 hours.

2. Confirmation Bias:

You have your experience, your ways of thinking, your failures and successes in your own jobs, and all these things color the way you perceive the world. You do this unconsciously because it makes life easier. When we have an initial idea or preconceptions about a work situation, we often unconsciously search for data and analyze data in a way that is designed, without us knowing it, to produce the very results we want.  In psychology this is known as “confirmation bias.” We have a tendency to look for evidence and evaluate it in a way that confirms what we are thinking. We rarely “flip” our thinking and look for information designed to prove our ideas or proposals wrong. This bias drives where we choose to get information, how we ask questions, and how we evaluate information.  Again, it’s a slippery slope and we very often trip or fall, without even knowing it…

What To Do?

Ask the right question:  We need to rethink the way we think. Our thinking tends to be driven by the underlying question “how good is my thinking?”  We have an idea or proposal and we want to check whether it is a good one.   This often leads to confirmation bias.  Why?  When we ask “how good is my thinking?” or “how sure am I about this?” we tend to focus on getting information and evaluating it in a way that supports our current thinking.  Better leadership decisions come from allowing our thinking to be guided by a different question, “how complete is my thinking?”  When we think in terms of “completeness” it opens our thinking to new approaches, and focuses us more on the facts. We are more worried about whether the thinking is complete than if our current idea or proposal is right or wrong.  Asking the right question can help us avoid confirmation bias.

Give yourself “mental space”:  But does the quest for complete thinking lead to analysis paralysis? On the one end of the decision spectrum are the snap decision makers, and on the other end of the spectrum are the people who suffer from analysis paralysis and can’t make any decisions. Just taking a little more time — putting a little mental space (e.g., even 5 seconds) between the problems we are trying to solve and the decision — can make the difference between a less optimal decision and a better one. So, completeness does not have to lead to analysis paralysis. We need to change our thinking from the reflexive “blackberry-type” decisions (where we rattle off decisions via email while waiting to catch a flight), to more thoughtful decisions that are just a bit slower, a bit more effortful, and a bit more analytical — but not by much.

There are other techniques you might explore, as well:

1. Asking Flip Questions: It helps to step back and ask ourselves the flip question – the question that is the inverse of what we are seeking to answer. Asking the flip question can make a significant difference in the quality of our decisions.  For example, instead of only asking, “What would I need to see in this interview to think we should hire this job candidate?” you might first ask, “What would I need to see to think we should NOT hire this job candidate?”  Logically, these are identical questions.  Psychologically, they are quite different and can lead to fundamentally different interviews and decisions.

2. Pre-Mortem Analysis:  This approach (proposed and researched by Gary Klein [link]) is similar to a “worst case scenario analysis”, but psychologically places your team in the future, asking them to assume that the project you are launching has been an absolute failure. You then task your team to come up with every reason the project died.  Research shows that this approach generates more ideas than “traditional worst case scenario analysis.”

3. Forming an informal “Panel of Critics”:  With this approach you create a group of go-to people to provide feedback on your thinking. This group should be comprised of people who typically don’t agree with you and often rain on your parade. The people in this group can act as your sounding board to help you avoid slippery slopes in thinking and confirmation bias.  The key is that they are not the people who typically love your ideas and make you feel good about them.  Instead, they are often your harshest critics who most often respond to requests for input with  “I don’t like it, and here are three reasons why…”

4. Change how you brief your team: You can change the way you deliver briefs to your team.  Here’s how…

1. Try to give more neutral briefs that don’t introduce bias.
2. Try introducing competing briefs – splitting your team in two—with one half of the team briefed to kill the idea and the other half briefed to save it.  Make it fun.  Provide incentives for both teams to compete in their analysis and thinking.  And ensure that regardless of which direction you decide to pursue, both teams win if they have done great thinking on their assigned half of the brief.
3.  Delegate defining the brief – ask your team to define and address a problem. This requires having a team you trust.  By allowing the group to define the problem you can will get greater buy-in and deeper engagement from them.

Recommended Reading

1. Daniel Kahneman’s,  “Thinking Fast and Slow”
2. Charles Duhigg’s,  “Power of Habit”
3.  Roy Baumeister & John Tierney’s,  “Willpower”
4. Dan Ariely’s,  “Predictably Irrational”