The high cost of decision making on your career’s progression

By Toni Collis & Moira Lethbridge

As a leader you likely know that a huge part of your job is making decisions, and helping those around you to make decisions. The people you report to (even as a CEO, you likely report to a board) rely on you to help them make some pretty huge decisions, which all rely on you, your inputs and your decisions.?

You may have noticed that as you progress in your career that your emotional space for the small decisions in everyday life has diminished. Many of us put this down to getting older. But it’s not that simple. It’s actually because we take on more responsibilities, personally and professionally as we age. If you have kids you’ll see this first hand with the thousands of tiny decisions having children demands of you each day —?wearing you out before you even login to work in the morning. Feeling frazzled at the end of the day and snapping at your kids is often linked to one too many decisions being demanded of you. But even without children in the equation, as you take on more responsibility at work, learn more, become an expert in a field, and have more experience, you’ll be expected to make more decisions and be more capable of making them.

The problem comes when you reach decision exhaustion early in the day, and potentially day-after-day. Decision exhaustion goes hand in hand with its very own special brand of burnout too. The burnout with too many minutiae taking their toll on you.?

For many of the women who come and work with us who have rapidly progressed in their career, then hit a glass ceiling, and at the same time are experiencing, or on the cusp of burnout, the question becomes how can you become a great leader, make amazing decisions, but not reach decision exhaustion burnout? Sometimes we don’t even know that is the barrier, but all too often it is.?

The good news is, that decision exhaustion burnout is not inevitable. In fact, if you’ve hit the glass ceiling, you need to figure this hurdle out to break through the glass ceiling. Far too many of us assume that burnout is the other side of the glass ceiling and something to worry about once we get through it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth; the risk and reality of burnout are this side of the glass ceiling and are part of what is holding you back. The downside is that there are (unsurprisingly) unfair barriers in our way. As women we make the majority of household and family decisions. These range from child care arrangements to ‘is my kid sick enough to need the doctor?’ or ‘what do I need to buy for groceries this week?’. The decisions can seem small, but they rapidly ratchet up, even if you have a partner sharing the childcare — as women, for whatever reason, we seem far more likely to be the one making the day to day household operation decisions.?

Before you get depressed, the good news is that you can do something about it.?

1. Focus on self-care. Give yourself some grace around how you are feeling. If you are feeling close to, or at burnout, acknowledge that and be kind to yourself. Don’t make it wrong that you snapped at someone recently because you had reached your limit. Apologize but then reflect on the fact that you need to be kinder to yourself before you can change anything. Focusing on self care always has to come first because without it, personal kindness to your own mind is necessary to make the inevitable decisions you need to make to step away from this situation. (Yes more decisions are needed to do something about your decision exhaustion.)
2. Lean into not having to keep everyone happy (personally and professionally)As a recovering people pleaser ourselves we know how hard this is, but the layers and layers we add of decision making because we are people pleasers is immense. Even today Toni caught myself making decisions not just around what to have for dinner (decision 1), but whether to involve her husband and give him choices (decision 2), then when was a good time to ask him because he’s engrossed in work (decision 3 - completely ignoring the fact I have a job too and the high cost of this decision on my focus time!). The nested list of decisions went on. Immediately, you can start seeing how tiny decisions that we take to make those around us feel better actually add an immense weight on to us that no one else even sees or appreciates. So it is time to rein that in. Notice it first, then you can choose what to do about it. The first and most difficult task is noticing that you are doing this, when and how often.?
3. ?Emulate the CEO. A CEOs primary goal should be to let go of day-to-day operations so they can focus on strategic decision making. You might not be CEO, but you can still learn something important from this. Ultimately, you want to delegate as much as you can as a leader. If you have heard that you need to do your next job before you get given the promotion and wonder ‘how on earth can I do that AND do my current job?’, the key is to realize that you actually want to have more or less delegated your current role to your team and peers. Anything that is done more than once should become an automated decision that your team knows they can just act on. They need to be given parameters for when decisions need to be escalated to you, but ultimately, if it's within normal operating parameters your team should be able to follow a playbook that means you aren’t involved. This takes time to put in place, and is honed and refined over the years, but this is now your ultimate goal as a leader: make yourself redundant in the job you were hired for, so you can take on tasks with a bigger impact (and free up your decision making abilities to do precisely that).?

In summary, remember that you can’t keep making all of the decisions you are currently making if you want to progress to more leadership responsibilities. Your goal now should be to let go of the decisions that don’t need to be made by you (whether that is personal or professional), and figure out what does need to be done by you and focus on that alone.?

If you are ready to work on letting go of the wrong kind of decision making, join me and Moira Lethbridge on LinkedIn for a special three-part series on ‘Getting Ready for the End of Year ’, starting Tuesday September 27th, where we will dig into how to focus on the right kind of decisions and much more to ensure you end 2022 on a high. No need to sign up, just join us live here.?