How Decision-Making Affects a Culture of Healthy Accountability

What does decision-making have to do with company culture? Just ask a middle manager: How do decisions get made here? 

Here’s an example from a discovery interview with a Quality Manager: 

“Very few people are concerned with ‘accountability’ in our culture,” one manager shared in response to that question. “I’m afraid we have exactly the opposite. Our executive leadership decisions are so slow that people routinely take a wait-and-see approach to important changes. The executives don’t communicate a seriousness or a sense of urgency in how they make decisions.”

Confronting our bias

What I’ve seen over nearly four decades working with executive teams: Faster decision-making is not always better. There are both advantages and consequences with moving too quickly. It’s the same with moving too carefully and slowly.  It kills momentum and morale. 

Here’s a common paradox:

• Individually, executives have a bias for action. In general, that bias favors urgency over accuracy.
• Those same executives, when working with the executive team at the top, often drop their bias-for-action in favor of consensus-seeking; tap dancing when facing important decisions. Slow decision-making by executive teams is a major morale-buster. 

Inside-out or outside-in?

Slow and fuzzy decision-making is a symptom of executive teams who are not aligned. The longer they debate within their inner circle, the more entrenched they become in inside-out thinking. That’s what’s happening when we hear about turf battles. When decisions move too slowly, people stop taking ownership. They point fingers. And teams wait for permission to move promises forward. 

Outside-in thinking creates faster decision-making, because it’s customer centric. Outside-in thinking creates protective energy against our most credible threat, and a sense of urgency to stay ahead of our income-generating customers. 

If you want a culture of healthy accountability – people really need to know: Who decides, by when? The healthiest teams are constantly seeking a balance – speed with careful consideration. When teams demonstrate both discipline and flexibility, employees see and feel that as healthy.

Want to grow in your decision-making? First, find out where you are the bottleneck by asking your team: 

• Which decisions am I holding too tightly?
• When do you feel like you have enough clarity to act without waiting for me?
• What good could happen if decisions moved 25% faster?