Making Hard Decisions

One of your most important jobs as a leader is to make the tough calls.?

You’re the one person in the organization or on your team that everyone else looks to for calm and direction in difficult situations.

That’s both the risk and the reward of leadership.

In my career, I’ve had to make some really difficult decisions. Some were easier to make than others. Often these decisions have challenged what I thought, felt, and believed. And some still stick with me to this day.?

Decisions like…

1. Should we hire this person or fire that person
2. Rebuilding, rebranding, and relaunching a dormant business
3. Completely re-imagining and developing a new corporate culture for an organization
4. Overseeing large-scale change initiatives that involved completely changing roles and responsibilities for 50+ employees
5. Leading corporate restructurings, including overseeing life-altering layoffs for many people
6. Deciding to fire a client and lose significant revenue because our values and theirs were not in alignment
7. Terminating our most productive employee because of his toxic behaviors
8. Addressing a toxic leader as a subordinate, and putting my job and livelihood at risk
9. Launching a new product or service line and putting my reputation on the line to do it
10. Completely overhauling a company’s business and revenue model

In most of these instances I was not prepared or even qualified to make these decisions. I’d never done many of these things before taking them on, so it’s not like I had experience or expertise at them. And left to my own devices, I might have been paralyzed by fear, or unable to move forward out of concern for screwing something up.?

A lot of these decisions kept me up many nights. Some I still feel guilty about to this day. But they were decisions that had to be made. Just as I’m sure you make decisions every day that challenge you, but that ultimately need your action.

Here’s how I process through these kinds of difficult decisions, and how I prepare myself to deal with both the personal and emotional aspects of making the hard calls.

1. I talk them out with trusted advisors and partners
2. I ask my wife to poke holes in my thinking, because I trust her, and I know she’s not invested in the business outcomes – so she brings an entirely different perspective
3. I journal to help clarify my thinking, and to challenge assumptions
4. I invite key leaders that I trust into the conversation and ask them to challenge my thinking
5. I pray that my decisions will do more good than harm
6. I lean on stories like those told in historian Nancy Koehn’s book, Forged In Crisis

How do you process your most difficult experiences and decisions that need to be made? What’s your go-to approach to make sure that you see an issue from multiple perspectives before you make the tough decisions??

Onward & Upward

Andrew

P.S. Have an idea for a collaboration or project you want to work on with me? Find a time on my calendar and let’s discuss!