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When should leaders ask for input, and when should they simply decide? Melanie Parish and Mel Rutherford explore the tricky balance between collaboration and decision-making, including when to consult others, when to trust your authority, and how unclear decision boundaries can create frustration and erode trust.

 

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Traps and Tricks: When to Ask, When to Decide

Hello, I’m Melanie Parish. I am one of the co-hosts of the Experimental Leader podcast. I’m an author. I’m a coach. I am a content creator, and it is great to be here with you today.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m an academic psychologist. I’m the author of *The Glass Clip: One Trans Man’s Leadership Odyssey* and I’m the co-host of the Experimental Leader podcast.

Well, today we are talking about traps and tricks, and I’ve got a good one. I’m excited to talk about this. So it is around decision making, and it is when to include the people around you, your team, in decision making, and when to make the decision yourself.

Right. Have you ever been involved in an exercise where your leader tells you there’s going to be this great. We’re going to do a survey, and then we’re going to do roundtables, and then we’re going to have discussions, and then we’re going to have the report. And before any of this starts, you already know what the report’s going to say.

Absolutely, and I think that it’s a trap for the leader because they know they’re supposed to be collaborative in some way, like they read some book around, you know, just servant leadership or something like, and they get it gets kind of muddy sometimes. Like you’re not sure, you don’t want to just tell everybody what to do, so you’re you’re kind of aware you should solicit ideas, but then you get yourself all tied up because all their you know you solicit ideas from your team, and they’re not what you wanted to do in the first place. And so I think that’s the that’s the big trap is that you you know you’re supposed to, but you don’t really want their input. So you ask for it, and then what do you do? And then you get yourself stuck.

So what’s the trick?

Well, I think the trick is to the trick is to think to yourself: What would you do if your team disagreed with you before you ask for their input. I also think there’s some a seasoned leader is able to say, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do, and and you can’t do that all the time. So there’s some there’s some real learning about when you want input And when and when you don’t, and I’m in my head right now. I’m like, I know that there’s differences, and so I’m going to try to talk about what I think those differences are. One is if you have an opinion about a bucket, like in your organization, there hold there’s a there’s a stakeholder who holds an area, and you think something should happen. I think making a decision in someone else’s bucket, even if they report to you, without soliciting input is problematic. That can be really disorienting for somebody who’s leading a project to have someone else tell them how the project’s going to go without a dialog. So, or if someone on their team is being let go to be in dialog, so that they’re in the know about that. What do they think about that? So that you get a chance to do that those things collaboratively. On the other hand, if something is completely within your purview, like hey, we need to do a reorg of our whole organization, you might not solicit input because you’re probably going ahead with that anyway, and to solicit input will have people feel like you didn’t listen to them when they took a risk.

Are there some decisions that are so routine or trivial that people wouldn’t want to be bothered?

Well, I mean, just like should we order post-it notes like really like repetitive tasks? Probably don’t belong in the decision-making soliciting input category. Repeat events probably not a lot. Or what you could say is how how do we want to go about this event, and to have a broad discussion about how decision making will happen, rather than having a discussion about each individual decision.

So I’m wondering what how does the leader know to include people. In the decision, and you’ve said, if you’re going to go ahead with it anyway, don’t even don’t even ask for input. What else? What other kinds of decisions might the leader just act on their own?

Well, I think sometimes things that are just a preference, they’re not good consensus decision-making. What kind? What color paint are we going to pick? What? Yeah, things that are just sort of what would you like? What kind of chairs are we going to buy? There’s a lot of different viewpoints. You can just create friction by having people find a hill they want to die on, and it doesn’t actually matter. A hiring decision is important to consider who is going to weigh in on that hiring decision. If someone isn’t the right person for that hiring decision, like if they’re on another team, for example, and they don’t like the person you’re considering, then maybe they shouldn’t have been asked in the first place. Because unless they’re going to work closely with that person, then you have to choose what you do with the information if someone weighs in and you aren’t going to take their input or their influence. What can you think of anything that comes to mind for you?

Well, yeah, I think there’s a line where. People would just feel like they were being bothered, and would want you as the executive to just you know make the decision and move us forward, and don’t don’t send every single decision to me. I don’t I don’t need to be involved.

I see this play out sometimes with early entrepreneurs who have a couple of their first staff members and they want to create like company values or something, and I think it’s I think it’s a Problematic construct, actually, but if if they involve the new employees, then they may lose their own voice in their own company, and so it. This could happen with a new team as well, if the it could happen in a startup, the founder has really clear values about how they want the company to run, and then they ask all the first round of staff, and then they don’t have the same values yet. It’s good to have the values early enough. It’s important to have them early, and there’s some figuring out of who gets to weigh in on those governing values early on, because you don’t have a synergy when you have them. They attract the people that believe in them.

Yeah, and so what you’ve just mentioned kind of points to differences across organizations where some work like I’m in academia where we have a faculty senate and and you know faculty members sit on the senate and we participate in collegial governance and we’re faculty is supposed to have a voice and we’re supposed to have power compared to a solopreneur who owns their business and has created this business for a reason and has the prerogative to make any decision they want? So across those two kinds of organizations involving involving people in your decision making might lead to very different outcomes.

Well, and I think even like if you if the leader of a department went to everyone and asked if they wanted to do something that was contrary to the published policy of the university, then they’re spinning their wheels. Like you can’t make those changes. So being very clear about what you’re hoping will happen, what’s possible is important in in a decision. I just think that sometimes people get themselves backed into a corner around decision making and making sure that you know who’s making the decision and why is a really important trick to keep yourself out of some of these traps that happen in leadership decision-making.

Interesting conversation.

It’s been great being with you today. Go experiment.

Go experiment.

 

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