How to Deal with Distractions While Making Crucial Decisions
You’re making a crucial decision and a few stakeholders want to air unrelated concerns or grievances.
Distractors bring up peripheral issues when crucial decisions are under consideration.
Distractions include:
#1. New opportunities.
You can’t move forward on all fronts at the same time.
When making crucial decisions someone usually says, “What about …?”
Suppose you’re moving into the medical sector and a sincere distractor asks, “What about manufacturing?”
Explore new opportunities early in the decision-making processes, but every crucial decision requires clarity and courage to close the door on other opportunities.
#2. Immaterial weaknesses.
Accountants call small discrepancies immaterial when doing audits. They aren’t worth the time and effort to deal with.
Sincere distractors bring up unrelated weaknesses at high stress times.
Small concerns easily distract decision-makers because the principle that bad is stronger than good comes into play.
Crucial decisions create high scrutiny. But some weaknesses aren’t relevant.
- Is success likely even though you have weaknesses? Move forward.
- Is improvement necessary in order to move forward? Make improvement.
General principle: Accept imperfection and move forward imperfectly.
#3. Personal agendas.
Crucial decisions have winners and losers. One departement moves front and center. Another department moves out of the spotlight.
Crucial decisions delight some and sting others.
When established leaders distract organizations from crucial decisions at the eleventh hour, ask,
- What are your concerns?
- How is this relevant to this decision?
- How can we make this less painful?
- How might you add value? (Assuming they want to make a contribution.)
- Is this a deal-breaker for you if we move forward?
Don’t let sincere distractors use ‘new’ opportunities, immaterial weaknesses, or personal agendas to divert focus from crucial decisions.
Your team, spouse, friends, or boss dilute success and limit potential when they create distractions.
How have you seen the decision-making process go badly?
What crucial decision-making tips and practices help leaders navigate this area?
WOW! Don’t let sincere distractors use ‘new’ opportunities, immaterial weaknesses, or personal agendas to divert focus from crucial decisions. These tactics were used by a few hoping to run out the clock on upper management once, five years running. Decision made, moved forward with explosive enthusiasm. The personal agenda of a few held up a whole organization FIVE YEARS until motives were revealed. Listening to concerns, addressing them, make adjustments if needed BUT once your homework is done and bases are covered, sometimes it’s just better to pull the trigger and move forward, If you are going to move closer to you goal. crucial decisions” are just that, they need to be made. Either way, a decision will be made to move forward or not.
Thanks Ron. You comment reminded me that things will go along smoothly until you actually try to change things. 🙂 Cheers and thanks for sharing your illustration.
“Right-sizing” distractions – constructive or otherwise – is a critical judgement piece for leaders..
In my experience the closer your workforce is connected to a mission (like a non-profit) the larger the potential for responses that I find disproportional.
… I always ask “have I communicated enough up to today/now?” It allows a response that helps me identify the core, it also moves from “you” to identifying issue, or even “me!”
Change is always bumpy.
Thanks Ken. So helpful.
In the nonprofit world people often have a high sense of ownership and give themselves permission to speak loudly. In the for profit world people might not speak up so loudly because they want to keep their jobs.
You’re approach of asking for feedback on your communication reflects humble leadership. Props to you for your approach. Perhaps the for profit leaders could take a lesson from your approach.
Cheers
In my profession, small discrepancies are never ignored. The presence of small discrepancies is taken as evidence for large, but as yet undiscovered discrepancies being present. “Accepting imperfection” is never an option.
Thanks Mitch. You’re approach makes sense to me when it comes to brain surgery, composition of medical products, machinery that runs at low tolerance.
It doesn’t seem to make sense when it comes to situations where ambiguity is high and uncontrollable factors are involved. For example, should we sell off part of the business or not? Should we take out a loan to expand or should we expand slowly.
In an imperfect world, waiting for perfection is the end of progress. Of course, I want my brain surgeon to practice on dead people before she drills a hole into my skull.
Thanks for jumping in.
Dan, organisations don’t seem capable of applying these two approaches sensibly/pragmatically. Organisations that don’t sweat small stuff seem to NEVER sweat small stuff – your minor issue will never gather any traction with them, whilst on the other hand, organisations like mine move at a glacial speed because analysis and decision-making moves slower than the situation, so you’re always behind!
Great topic, a lot to chew on.