Managers also make mistakes

They sure do! A manager, a coach, or a leader isn’t an almighty god as it is often made up to be. A manager is also a person, and as a person makes mistakes in their work as well as outside of it.

In this article, I want to break this myth by explaining some types of decisions a manager needs to face in daily work, their impacts on the team members and/or business, and also explain some reasons why a manager (and a person) makes mistakes. Finally, I will share some “hacks” to try to avoid those mistakes.

As a manager, every day I face challenges, questions, or changes that need a decision. In addition, these decisions may need to be made within seconds, while other ones can take more time. Sometimes they need to be done face-to-face, other times by a call or e-mail. At other times, you need to make decisions when something outside of your work life is affecting your mind or judgment and you might have to distance yourself from that in order to make the best decision.

Several internal or external factors can affect your judgment capacity to make the best decision without negative impact.?

In terms of the type of decisions, as an Engineering Manager for example, I have to decide if a certain feature can enter or not into the roadmap, decide a tactical/temporary or more long-term solution, agree or disagree with a certain software system architecture, timing and location to share some feedback, how to communicate a company decision to an audience, performance reviews, and lot more.

I mentioned some types of decisions in my area, but this can apply to all areas of management and leadership. For instance, a sports coach also has a similar type of decision-making: choosing the best athletes for a competition, replacing an athlete during a match if he doesn’t have a good performance, or giving a motivational speech before a game.

These decisions impact their subjects (even if it’s a good decision): a feature might or might not be delivered, customers might or might not use the product developed by the company, revenue decrease, a huge technical debt, miscommunication between peers, misjudgment in a performance review, lack of trust, etc…?

Taking into account all these factors in this big equation called decision, it’s very important to understand how our “decision system” a.k.a. brain works in order to take advantage of it. Making better decisions doesn’t imply that we will stop making mistakes… Of course not… But we’ll better understand this when we have more awareness of ourselves to understand if we’re acting by instinct instead of being logical/rational.

Our decision process is based on two different types of thinking systems (if you’re interested in this topic you can read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman):

• System 1 - Our intuitive and rapid/automatic decision-making: this is our brain’s system that allows us to have fast, automatic/intuitive, unconscious, and emotional responses to situations, challenges, or stimuli. This system requires a reduced amount of energy to operate and includes innate mental activities that we’re born with, fight or flight thinking, perception, recognition of objects/patterns, and orientation. For example, how we react when we’re afraid of a spider, solving 1+1, driving on an empty road, tying shoelaces, or identifying familiar objects, are examples of intuitive decision-making. This type of system is very efficient for routine and repetitive decisions that we’re usually facing recurrently.
• System 2 - Our deliberate and thoughtful decision-making: is the slow, deliberate, and logical/analytical system in our brain that allows us to solve more complex problems or challenges. This type of system is usually activated when we are doing something that doesn’t come naturally or by instinct and requires focused attention, critical thinking, and evaluation to move forward. However, this system consumes more energy, is slower, and is more prone to fatigue, so it’s not as efficient to use it for more routine or repetitive decisions. Examples of using this system are: preparing for an important meeting with stakeholders, trying to solve complex math equations, parking in a tight parking space, or thinking about the next three moves in a chess game.

Based on the above explanation regarding our decision process, there is a big factor that makes us prone to make mistakes every day. If we always use our second system, which allows us to make deliberate and thoughtful decisions, we need a lot of energy to make those decisions and, because of that, our body always prefers to use the lower-consumption mechanism to solve our issues.?

However, a fast and instinctive solution isn’t always the best decision, and with that, we can make mistakes. To avoid that it’s necessary to use techniques or processes that allow us to “enable” our second system if we need to make more deliberated decisions.

Coincidentally, during this week, I started a management/leadership executive program in which the first topic presented was related to this area (thanks for the lecture Misha Byrne ), and we had the opportunity to discuss with other managers some of these “hacks” to enforce a person to use this second system.?

Some of the hacks to encourage deliberate and critical decision-making:

• Share and discuss your challenge/decision with another peer or relative who doesn’t have any context of this topic. It’s also applicable to just talking with a rubber duck like some developers do when facing a complex code challenge. The process of verbalizing your challenge to another object enforces our brain to think in a more deliberate way and sometimes, even before explaining the topic, you already have a solution/decision;
• Instead of having a reactive response that can be more emotional, like for example replying to an e-mail or chat message, it’s a good approach to try to have a “rest break” to put on hold our first system and, after a calm period, to start to put our more thoughtful decision-making working. For example, walking around the office or house (if you’re working remotely), pausing to drink some water, listening to some music, meditation, or some physical exercise;
• In person-to-person challenge situations, a good approach to making better decisions, for instance, is to manage the silence: in a meeting, you don’t need to always have an immediate response, but you can think and deliberate what is the best answer. If you have a time of silence, you can make a better decision and you also allow the other peers to calm their intuitive and emotional systems as well as thinking more logically.

These are some examples, but the “rule of thumb” for this is to have ways to calm your “emotional being” and to put into action your “logical being” in order to make better decisions (but don’t forget that you can make mistakes even with that, it’s just a way to reduce them).?

Another “rule of thumb” when you make mistakes is to be as honest and transparent as possible about them. As a servant-leader, I recognize mistakes as a path and tool for personal as well as team growth and development, so if I want to cultivate this for my team members, as a leader, I should also recognize when I make a mistake and try to solve it.?

That way, I’ll grow as a person and show my team or organization the right way to solve our challenges: it is not by avoiding mistakes, but by showing what should be the correct approach to face them.

This will create better people, better teams, products, and organizations.

In conclusion, what do you think about this topic? Do you remember the last mistake that you made in your work? And in your personal life? Do you have any process or mechanism to enforce thinking in a deeper and more logical way about a certain decision?

Feel free to reply or contact me about these questions or other topics that you are interested in talking about or discussing in future newsletter posts.

Cheers,

Miguel Beatriz