EP 121 | How To Make Million Dollar Decisions

gonna I'm gonna have some sort of reaction. I'm going to fight hard for my point of view. I'm going to really try to get to the bottom of something, but I'm not going to use my emotion to make the decision. I'm going to use facts and data to make the decision. Think about two businesses that are in the exact same industry. Business a has somebody at the helm that is strategic, that is able to make fast decisions, that is able to move things along in a way

that helps scale and grow. Whereas business owner B has the same opportunity, is literally in the same industry, but doesn't have a framework for how to make decisions. And so they flounder while the other one is flourishing. Well, if you just knew what it took to make better decisions so that you could be more like business owner A,

it's going to help you grow your business. One of my recommendations would be, how are you expecting inside your environment that you're being presented with data, true factual data. Are we talking about five clients who gave this piece of feedback that would cause you to change your product, or are we talking about 50 clients? Five clients? You might not make the change. If it was a significant investment,

50 clients, you would likely make the change. So when somebody is giving you a piece of information, the way you actually implement this is you ask who or how many. You don't just take in data and then make decisions off of whatever somebody has chosen to give you. You have to have the framework as the leader of okay, I need to get specific so that I can properly

respond to what you're asking me. And if you don't have this already in your culture, this sounds like people coming to you making all of these statements about why we need to do things differently, why we need to keep things the same. Well, until you actually understand the data, it doesn't really matter what somebody is thinking, because you need to understand the exact numbers of people that is being impacted by whatever the decision is that you're making.

The next thing that is critical for making great decisions inside your business is setting up the responsibility structure correctly, the net net of your business. You have a responsibility of you are fully responsible for the bad customer engagement or the bad process, or losing money. You're totally responsible for all of those things, but there are other people around you who do have responsibility and should have responsibility.

So how have you communicated what they are specifically responsible for because as you're making a decision, it is so easy as a business owner to just take on all the problems because you know that you're ultimately responsible. If I know that Jenna or Sarah or Joe or Bob in their job description, I clearly laid out to them, hey, you're responsible for these things. You need to send this on Fridays. You need to hit this number. This metric needs to be handled. I'm super crystal clear on their

areas of responsibility, and then they don't do it. It would be a shame for me to say, oh, you know, I'm taking responsibility for the fact that you didn't do those things. No. That's ridiculous. Who is responsible? And more often than not, when you find that something is failing, a decision that you're making, a project that you're working on isn't going the way that you want it to. You might be caught up in all sorts of confusion in the decision making process, because you don't actually have

one person who is responsible. So we're not talking about shared responsibility here. We're not saying everybody in the department or everybody in the project has equal responsibility. One person has to be responsible for one specific thing. And the more you can get clear on who's responsible for what, you can empower them with their decision making to make better decisions, or to take accountability for the bad decisions that they made and coach them, give them feedback so

that they start making better decisions. I want to share with you my favorite question to ask that helps me make better decisions. And that question is what are you running into? You see, I've had many experiences where I will just bolt into somebody's office, start being accusatory of, you didn't do this, you didn't think about this. Why is this happening? How come you let this take place when in actuality there was logical reasons for all of those things? And yet I came in emotionally. I came

in really heated because I didn't really have context. And so when you ask somebody in the frame of what are you running into, you're not placing blame yet. You're not coming into the conversation with the ego of saying, like, I know you did something wrong because there's a potential that it wasn't on them. There's a potential that they

didn't know that it was their area of responsibility. Going back to the previous point, if they didn't know it was their area of responsibility, of course they're not going to be able to make that thing work, right. Maybe there's a personal situation going on in their lives that prevented them from following up. Maybe they were on PTO. I didn't know they were on PTO because the communication lines got switched. Maybe they did send the email. I

didn't see the email. There's so many different things that could happen where instead of being the type of leader that just comes in hot, you ask for enough context and then when you get the context, you get what they ran into. You can determine, okay, is that acceptable that they ran into that, that they got stopped along

the path of hitting the target? And okay, how do we handle that versus I'm not good with that as an excuse, but at least you're opening the door in a way that doesn't minimize your ability to be a really great leader. And this question is useful for me in one on ones. This question is useful for me in team meetings where somebody might not be able to articulate off the bat that they're running into an issue. They just keep talking about that there is an issue,

but they're not saying, okay, well, what am I running into? Oh, I'm actually running into the fact that Bob won't get back to me. And that's why this has hung up. So instead of me talking to this person, I could probably do a little bit of coaching on how they could better handle Bob. But then I'm just going to go straight to Bob and be like, Bob, why are you not getting Joe with the information that he needs? Because this is hanging the whole thing up, and it

makes decision making so much faster inside the environment. This is a non-negotiable. This is the one that you've been waiting for since the beginning of the video. The best way to make better decisions is to make lots of decisions very quickly. The more you add time into a decision. Should this person be the spokesperson for the event? Should we pay this person or should we pay this other

person and hire a different candidate? Every decision that you are supposed to be making inside your organization, think about it as I'm on a timer, I got to make this decision super quickly so that I can go to the next decision. And when you get in the process of making quick decisions rapidly, you're setting an example for your team that they shouldn't just be sitting on information for a week just because they think that it it should take a week to make the decision. You're also

showing that you can be wrong. If I'm able to make a decision really quickly and tell somebody a direction and then find out the next day, oh shit, that didn't work very well. We need to pivot. We need to do something different. The feedback mechanism is going to be much faster, because they're going to know that they can come back to me and be like, Natalie, this didn't work and be like, okay, great, what's the next decision?

So this is what I want you to do. I want you to find one area in your business today where you have held back on making a decision. For whatever reason, you just thought it should take more time. You wanted to sleep on it. You wanted to consider it or talk it over longer. I want you to not do all of those things and to make a faster decision today, right now. And bonus points for if you choose something that you know that you're a little.

take the hill. When I take on that responsibility. It actually makes me do what I need to do faster to figure out if my direction is the right direction versus the wrong direction, because I don't really want to be wrong. But if I'm willing to be wrong, okay, that means I have to throw down and understand this is the context around the decision. I feel strong about it. I'm going to make this decision quickly. If I'm wrong,

I'm wrong. That's okay. And the whole thing speeds up. See, businesses stagnate because decisions aren't made quickly and people just add time and opinion and emotion into something that should be very straightforward so that they can make more decisions, grow faster and scale faster.