Tackling Hard Choices

Every leadership team is short on something: brainpower, time, or money. Usually all three.

Most of that shortage isn’t caused by bad decisions. It’s caused by decisions that never get made, and the resources that leak away while these decisions sit unresolved.

I recently looked back at the leadership teams I’ve helped plug these leaks. Most of the problems traced back to one or more of the 3 A’s.

Agonizing: When a problem or opportunity keeps popping into your head, and stays there without resolution, the odds are high that you are agonizing too much and acting too little.

Arguing: Debate among leadership team members can be healthy, especially when it causes facts to emerge. But when these conflicts start to circle and repeat, you create friction that slows you down and prolongs the resource leakage.

Tipoffs include the topic repeatedly coming up behind the scenes, such as in a one-on-one conversation where somebody says, “Yeah, I think that other manager is just thinking about it wrong.” Or, “I wish she could get it in her head that this is a no-brainer.”

The problem emerges when disagreements turn into arguments that lack facts, logic, and a system for resolving the tension.

Allowing: A failure to tackle hard decisions allows drift to continue. Drift = more leakage. Doing nothing can have a significant cost that is easy to ignore for an extended period of time.

These three A’s apply not only to problems you cannot solve; they also apply to opportunities you fail to pursue with sufficient vigor. Example: A chance to buy a business at a good price stalls because one executive wants a harder bargain, another fears the debt, and a third doubts the team can integrate it.

Everyone faces hard choices. Try checking the 3 A’s against yours, to make sure they aren’t creeping into your business.