044: How making fewer decisions makes you a better manager

Most decisions that we have to make day to day, they're two-way doors. Meaning we make the call, we don't love it. That website copy, you know, the social media post, we can just change it. We can update it. We wanna be making sure most of these two-way door decisions, these can be delegated. And then out of the one-way door, the things that have a more lasting impact.

Figuring out, well, who do we need on our team so that we can make fewer of those?

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback, to delegating and more. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between.

Doesn't matter if you're a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let's go. Let's go, let's go. Welcome back to the show. Today we are talking about how making fewer decisions makes you a better manager. So all of this talk, I know we often talk about we wanna make quality decisions.

It's all about the quality, it's all about making better decisions. Yeah, I agree totally. For sure. And, and, and, and it also has to do with the quantity of decisions. Because if we are making every single decision every single day about every aspect of our business, we are disempowering our team members and we're creating more work for ourselves, it's like a lose lose altogether.

So today let's talk about how to reduce the quantity of decisions. Now, why is it so important to reduce the quantity of decisions? Well, when I talk about what are the big flags that we're micromanaging, making every single decision is literally one of the top three. Because if we are making every single decision in our business, it means a number of things.

First, that we are making it seem like we wanna make every single decision. Because if team members felt like they could make decisions, then they probably would be. That's a signal that our team members think that we want to be making every decision next. It might mean that we haven't made it safe for other people to make decisions.

Like they're worried if they get it wrong, there's gonna be some consequence. They're gonna be penalized, they're gonna be fired. They might, whatever it is. So when we're making all the decisions, it's a signal that we haven't made it safe for people to make mistakes. That means there's no psychological safety or, or there's psychological safety issue.

So we don't wanna have that last when we're making every single decision. We're not letting our team members be in power to step up as leaders to bring an ownership mindset, to feel autonomous around their work and like, okay, I had this idea, I'm gonna make this call. No, because they have to stop at every single step to get your buy-in.

Then that points to another issue that it slows things down. Really, really slowing your business. It makes you a bottleneck. It causes waiting between work, things to be finished between projects. And it relies on you to constantly be checking in. You are spending more time and your team members are spending more time waiting.

All of which, which if you kind of looked at the hourly rate for all of that is just sunk cost in waiting for decisions to be made or not having decisions being made on the right place. So this is actually why this is such a key piece of the ops playbook, because the ops playbook is all about optimizing the time things take across your business.

That's why we talk about work tracking. That's why we talk about onboarding. And decision making, making sure that the right people are making decisions at the right time to move the ball forward. Well, that is money that's either invested in the right place or being wasted by that idle time People are using up, waiting for you to make the calls when you have a million things to do.

So maybe you can't make the call at that right moment. This is why we wanna optimize decision making and essentially why we want you to be making fewer decisions. Now, how do we know which decisions to make? The first thing I like to do with business owners and managers and team leaders is to get a sense of, well, what are all the kinds of decisions that have to be made in a weekly basis or monthly or daily, whatever it is in your business or on your team, because we have to get our head around it in order to do something about it.

Pause this episode and sit down and think, okay, what are the different kinds of decisions that I'm making on a daily basis? Between strategy and priorities, approving copy, social media. It could be decisions big or small. You really just want to get a full picture around what all the decisions are. Maybe you're approving job descriptions.

Maybe you're p proving LinkedIn post. Maybe you're approving color swatches for the website. Update. Whatever it is. Write it down. Now that you have a list of what are all the kinds of decisions you want to circle, only ones that you, you, you alone can make. And if it's all of the decisions, you haven't done the exercise, right?

Because these aren't the ones that only you can make. These are the ones that only you can make today. But you wanna circle the ones that, in a ideal world, you have all the people in place so that only these ones are left with you. And I heard a metaphor recently that I really liked when it came to decision making.

Is this a one-way door or a two-way door? Most decisions that we have to make day-to-day, they're two-way doors. Meaning we make the call, we don't love it. That website copy, you know, the social media post, we can just change it. We can update it. We wanna be making sure most of these two-way door decisions, these can be delegated.

And then out of the one-way door, the things that have a more lasting impact, figuring out, well, who do we need on our team so that we can make fewer of those. Maybe you need an operations manager. Maybe you need a chief of staff. Maybe you need someone in that kind of line manager role so that you don't have to be in the weeds.

But we wanna be making fewer of these one-way door decisions because these are perfect opportunities for people to step up and demonstrate thought leadership, to be able to bring different perspectives, different ideas, into the decision making and to get you out of the weeds. So now that we've identified the kinds of decisions that we can be delegating, okay, hopefully it's at least 50% of the decisions I'm gonna challenge you to find at least half the decisions can be delegated.

Now, you wanna think about what expectations do you need to set in order to feel like, yeah, I can hand off these decisions. And this is actually a step zero before delegating, because sometimes we start delegating. We say like, Hey, here's, here's what I would do here, and go ahead, we're on with it. We set the expectations, but then we realized we didn't actually fully set them with ourselves.

When we set expectations around a decision that we wanna delegate, we have to think about what do I need to see as a leader to feel comfortable stepping away? When does this person need to check in? What kind of status do I wanna see? Let's say we wanna delegate an executive review to a team member to get some new exposure and visibility, and it's a great opportunity for them.

But we really wanna see that deck before they go to the meeting. Or we delegate an important client review, and we really want to do a prep call with that employee before they do it to make sure we're all on the same page, rather what they're gonna tell the client. If we wanna do that, we wanna figure that out upfront so that we can communicate that when we hand off this decision and then it doesn't later seem like we kind of changed our mind or the person didn't do it right and now we're jumping back in.

So once we figure out in our minds what we need to see in order to delegate, then we communicate that to the team member that we've identified can take on this decision. So we grab that team member, we say, I'm excited to be able to hand off this decision. I want you to step up as a leader. You've been asking for opportunity to step up and then this is a great one, right?

We really wanna frame it and what's in it for that person. And then we set that expectation. I'm handing off this executive review and. I wanted to, you know, set expectations around a couple things that I'm gonna need to check in on, just so that I have the right visibility. Let's do a pre-meeting before the executive review, I would just like to see the slide sign off and then run with it.

And afterwards, it'd be great if you can send me a quick two, two sentence recap on how the meeting went. Okay. That might feel heavy handed, but you know what feels more heavy handed? Checking with the person constantly after the meeting. Like, how'd it go? I haven't heard back from you. Let me see the deck.

Like that's where people feel disempowered. So even when it feels like, well, I feel like I should let go more, I wanna be letting go more. If there are things that we need to see and we need to know as that team leader, as that manager, as that business owner, we just gotta say it and then our team member will rise the occasion.

And then, because you've set expectations now, if you're not seeing that thing after you have something to come back to. So you can say, Hey, as we talked about before that exec review, I need to see the Dak. Um, next time. Can we make sure to prepare for that or before the client meeting? Hey, as we talked about, we need to go over talking points for the client meeting to make sure that everything's been covered.

Please make 15 minutes next time before the meeting. I will make sure to carve out time for that. So by setting clear expectations, now we have some groundwork laid. If we do have to give feedback because we have something to come back to. Last but not least, when you are letting go of decisions, you gotta let it go.

Okay. We gotta really, really let it go. If we want to be making fewer decisions, empowering our team members to make more decisions, we have to actually not secretly make that decision anyway. So once we've delegated it, once we've set those expectations, we let it go and we can check in after and say, how did it go?

We can have been looped in along the way by setting those expectations. But we have to take a step back. That's going to free us up. That's gonna actually give us more time to reinvest into our business. That's gonna actually let us focus on bigger, more one-way door important decisions. If we don't really let go, we're still doing the same thing.

Only we've actually disempowered someone by pretending they were gonna make a decision and then not trusting them to do it. So once we've delegated, the most important thing is to actually let go. This is going to be transformational for your team because the more decisions your team members get to make, the more they feel like owners.

I feel autonomy. I'm excited. I can, I can bring my creative ideas. I'm a leader in the space. My manager trusts me to make the calls. So this is such an important thing to be doing to increase engagement on your team and to be optimizing time because if your team member is waiting, For you to find that email and make that caller, make the time to have that meeting and they're sitting there idly.

That is time, money that can be reinvest in your business. And if you are having to stop what you're doing, working with clients and doing that high, high strategy visibility work and jump in to look at some social media copy, that hourly rate that you could be charging that's being invested in the wrong place.

So one of the biggest reasons that we need to be making fewer decisions, it's a bottom line perspective. We are actually losing money in our business on our teams by having to be too much in the weeds and making fewer decisions is one of the biggest ways to change this and turn this around. See you next time.

I know you're here because you want to be a better manager, but I also know it's often easier said than done. That's why I put together a scorecard of 20 things that you can do this month and every month to show up better for your team as a manager, from positive feedback to recognition, to honoring those working norms that we know we gotta do, but sometimes forget.

This scorecard serves as a checklist and accountability buddy, to remind you of all those things you gotta do to be a great manager. Download your copy today at liagarvin.com/scorecard. 

That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.