How to improve decision-making at work

Companies are full of people who know what to do...

But have no authority to take action.

Every day, decisions that could take minutes sit in someone's inbox for days.
Meanwhile, team members wait until they get the go-ahead to take action.

We've spent the last decade visiting more than 200 organizations that are doing work differently.

Decisions aren't limited to leaders at the top.

They're distributed to everyone and the whole team has autonomy:

1. Map decision-making
↳ Make an overview of who makes decisions

Customer needs a refund? → Give authority to customer support
Purchasing a new tool? → The elected team representative handles it.
Schedule needs updating? → Let the team decide what works best

Keep this overview visible afterwards

2. Change the language
↳ A practice Captain David Marquet used on the USS Santa Fe to promote initiative-taking.

Swap out passive phrases with active phrases.

"Can I get approval..." → "I intend to..."
"What should I do about..." → "My recommendation is..."
"What do you think we should..." → "I plan to..."
"Can I..." → "I will..."

3. Push authority down
↳ Move decisions down to the lowest capable level.

• Search for procedures that hold people back from making decisions themselves.
• Team leaders specify why they worry about delegating a decision
• Team members respond with why they can take responsibility for it

(Psst. If you want the full method on how to do this, check out our blog: https://lnkd.in/e5WHagjx)

4. Use pre-approval
↳ Set boundaries in advance and then let people act.

A few examples:

• Budget refunds up to $5,000
• Small issues get resolved in 24 hours
• Avoid decisions that affect more than 10% of revenue.

Leaders set the guardrails and employees take ownership within them.

5. Use the advice process
↳ One of the most radical approaches to distributed decision-making.

Anyone can decide anything as long as they get input from the people affected and those who have expertise in that area.

They have to listen. They don't have to agree.

Giving people authority to act on what they know is seen as radical in most companies.

That tells you everything about how broken the default is.

We’ve spent years documenting the organizations changing the norm. And we’re sharing their stories every week in our newsletter.


Work is broken. Let’s fix it.

Credits to Pim de Morree, make sure to follow!

https://tinyurl.com/uat95wdw