How to Teach Decision-Making to Your Team
As a leader your team must understand what you want to be done – it is just as important for them to understand why you’re making the decision you are, which means occasionally having ‘why’ chats about the decisions that are being made.
Your role as a leader is to develop the team to be able to tackle new and more challenging work, which means you don’t want them to know just what you expect of them but also the why you’re making the decisions you are so that they can learn how to think about the work, not just what to think about the work.
Practice sharing how to think about the work. The goal is to develop each member of your team to be able to make similar decisions when the context changes. If you teach them what to do, you’re only teaching them something very contextual. In this specific circumstance, here’s the decision you should make. However, when you teach them how you think about it and why you’re making the decisions you are, you’re equipping them to be able to make decisions for themselves in other circumstances when the context is changed.
Action Steps – How to walk others through your thought process on a key decision.
- Frame up the decision that needs to be made.
- Share which variables you considered.
- Talk through the key reasons that made the decision you made. The key is explaining how and why each variable is critical in this situation.
Ultimately your goal is to teach your team how to think vs. tell them what to do. This takes time and the payback is magical!
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” – African Proverb