How to Use the Get Sh*t Done Wheel to Reinforce Collaborative & Respectful Decision Making

Certainly part of why Steve Jobs “always got it right” was that he was a genius. You can’t operationalize or imitate genius. But genius was only part of the story; there are plenty of geniuses with brilliant ideas who can’t turn them into anything tangible. More important than genius was the way, Steve led people at Apple to execute so flawlessly without telling them what to do.

This is something you can operationalize and imitate. To do it, though, you’ll have to push yourself and your team further out on the?Challenge Directly axis?of?Radical Candor?than will probably be immediately comfortable.

Expecting others to execute on a decision without being persuaded that it’s the right thing to do is a recipe for terrible results.

In fact, both Google and Apple achieved spectacular results without a purely autocratic style. This leads to important questions: how did everyone in the company decide what to do? How did strategy and goals get set? How did the cultures at these two companies, so strong and so different, develop?

How did tens of thousands of people come to understand the mission? It played out very differently at both companies — more orderly at Apple, more chaotic at Google — but at a high level, the process was the same.

The process, which I call the Get Sh*t Done (GSD) wheel, is relatively straightforward. But the?key, often ignored by people who think of themselves as Get Sh*t Done people, is to avoid the impulse to dive right in.

The Get Sh*t Done Wheel has 7 steps: Listen, Clarify, Debate, Decide, Persuade, Implement and Learn.

1. Listen

Your team should know what the company is trying to achieve, and they likely have some of the best ideas for what your team should be achieving. First, listen to their ideas in trying to figure out which goals your team should be pursuing.?If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fix things you as the boss never even knew were broken.?

It’s hard enough to get yourself to listen to your team members and let them know you are listening; getting them to listen to one another is even harder.?

The keys are:

1. Have a simple system for employees to use to generate ideas and voice complaints,

2. Make sure that at least some of the issues raised are quickly addressed, and

3. Regularly offer explanations as to why the other issues aren’t being addressed.?

This system should not merely empower anyone to point out things that could be better but also enable others to help fix those things or make changes. You have to agree to let them ask?you for some help and to champion the system enthusiastically.?

Define clear boundaries of how much time you can spend — and then make sure that time?is highly impactful.

(Learn more:?podcast,?blog)

2. Clarify

Once you have?created a culture of listening, the next step is to push yourself and?your direct reports?to understand and convey thoughts and ideas more clearly.

Trying to?solve a problem?that hasn’t been clearly defined is not likely to result in a good solution; debating a half-baked idea is likely to kill it.?

Remember, as the boss, you are the editor, not the author.?

New ideas are fragile and therefore easily squished. A critical role a manager can play is to augment the voice of their team by helping the team clarify their ideas and by clarifying the manager’s own understanding of the ideas.?

(Learn more: podcast?part 1,?part 2,?blog)

3. Debate

Allowing the team time and space to publicly debate ideas is a critical step. Guidelines for good debate include making the discussion about the ideas and not about egos. It’s about finding the best answer together, not about who won the debate.?

When Steve Jobs was a kid, his neighbor showed him a rock tumbler — a can that spun on a motor. The neighbor asked Steve to gather up some ordinary rocks from the yard. He took the stones, threw them into the can, added some grit, turned on the motor, and, over the racket, asked Steve to come back two days later.?

When Steve returned to the noisy clatter of the garage, the neighbor turned off the contraption and Steve was astounded to see how the ordinary rocks had become beautiful polished stones.?Steve would later say?that when a team debated, both the ideas and the people came out more beautiful — results well worth all the friction and noise.

Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.” Too many bosses think their role is to turn it off — to avoid all the friction by simply making a decision and sparing the team the pain of debate. It’s not. Debating takes time and requires emotional energy. But lack of debate saps a team of more time and emotional energy in the long run.

Of course, it’s also possible to leave the rock tumbler on too long, leaving nothing in the can but some dust.

(Learn more:?podcast,?blog)

4. Decide?

The best bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions, but it also results in better morale.?

In his book?A Primer on Decision Making, James March explains why it’s a bad thing when the most “senior” people in a hierarchy are always the deciders.

What he calls “garbage can decision-making” occurs when the people who happen to be around the table are the deciders rather than the people with the best information. Unfortunately, most cultures tend to favor either the most senior people or the people with the kinds of personalities that insist on sitting around the table.?

The bad decisions that result are among the biggest drivers of organizational mediocrity and employee dissatisfaction.

That is why kick-ass bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions, but it also results in better morale.

When collecting information for a decision, we are often tempted to ask people for their recommendations — “What do you think we should do?”— but as one executive I worked with at Apple explained to me, people tend to put their egos into recommendations in a way that can lead to politics and thus worse decisions. So she recommended seeking “facts, not recommendations.”

(Learn more:?podcast,?blog)

5. Persuade?

This isn’t easy, and it’s vital to get it right.?Persuasion?at this stage can feel unnecessary and make the decider resentful of people on the team who aren’t fully in agreement.?The decider has painstakingly gone through the listen, clarify, and debate steps and made a decision.

Why doesn’t everyone else get why it’s obvious we should do this — or at least be willing to fall in line??But expecting others to execute on a decision without being persuaded that it’s the right thing to do is a recipe for terrible results.

And don’t imagine that you can step in and simply tell everyone to get in line behind a decision, whether you have made it or somebody else has.?

(Learn more:?podcast,?blog)

6. Implement

As the boss, part of your job is to take a lot of the “collaboration tax” on yourself so that your team can spend more time?implementing.

The responsibilities you have as a boss take up a tremendous amount of time.?One of the hardest things about being a boss is balancing these responsibilities with the work you need to do personally in your area of expertise.?

Here are the four things I’ve learned about getting this balance right: Don’t waste your team’s time; keep the “dirt under your fingernails;” block time to implement and fight meeting proliferation.?

(Learn more:?podcast,?blog)

7. Learn

By the time you’ve reached learn — the last spot on the Get Sh*t Done Wheel — you and your team have put in a ton of work, you’ve achieved something, and you want it to be great. And it is human nature for us to become attached — often unreasonably attached — to projects we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into.

It’s obvious that good bosses learn from mistakes and successes alike and keep improving. And yet, denial is actually the more common reaction to imperfect execution than learning.?

It can take almost superhuman discipline to step back, acknowledge when our results could be a lot better or are simply no good, and learn from the experience.?

(Learn more:?podcast,?blog)

Remember, the GSD Wheel is designed to be cycled through quickly. Not skipping a step and not getting stuck on one is equally important. If you skip a step, you’ll waste time in the end.

If you allow any part of the process to drag out, working on your team will feel like paying a collaboration tax, not making a collaboration investment.

Create an obligation to dissent. If everyone agrees on an idea right away, that’s a red flag.

Don’t allow the wheel to grind your team to dust. There are times when people are just too tired, burnt out, or emotionally charged up to engage in productive debate. It’s crucial to be aware of these moments because they rarely lead to good outcomes.

Your job is to intervene and call a time-out. If you don’t, people will make a decision so that they can go home; or worse, a huge fight stemming from raw emotions will break out.

If you’ve gotten to know each person on your team well enough, you’ll be sufficiently aware of everyone’s emotions and energies so that you’ll know when it’s necessary to step in and pause the wheel until people are in a better frame of mind.

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Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight?some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I'll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected.