Depending on your company’s size, you may have between three to ten initiatives that will determine your organization’s future. Each of them requires pivotal leader decisions, which if not managed aggressively, can easily result in one to six months of delays to getting results…all due to inadequate decision coordination. Common causes of decision-making delay include insufficient information, unavailable decision-makers, competing priorities, or lack of perceived urgency.
To better understand the potential impact of delayed decisions, follow a simple story of a multi-billion dollar company with a strategic project designed to deliver an annual pretax profit of $30M. A critical Leadership Team decision was scheduled for late-October to approve spending and approach. In mid-October one of the leaders announced the decision would have to be postponed for three weeks due to a peer’s vacation.
The effortlessness of postponing the decision is astounding when you recognize two things:
- The “value of time” on the project is greater than $2M per month; $625k/week or…$1.8M of lost opportunity for the three week delay!
- There were many ways the vacationing exec, who scheduled the vacation during the critical decision period, could be asked to connect by voice and/or video to participate.
To be clear…we love and support vacations. But we must advocate for increased executive effectiveness using a muscular decision-making regimen.
Another devastating example of decision-making delay occurs when initiating projects. The banter and time lapses as leaders assign staff, collect input, discuss options and “spool up a project”, drains project team energy and sends the message that the effort is without urgency.
This is where your 18/24 Vision Roadmap comes into play. Create an Executive Team Decision Calendar establishing decision events for ongoing and start-up projects. This speeds up kick-offs and sends a strong message to the employees, investors and partners about “executive alignment and urgency”. You might even find the company establishes a rhythm around these powerful decision forums.
Enlightened leaders should:
- Have Clear Status: All Execs should know the current status of each initiative, as well as the important decisions coming up in the next 60 days.
- Establish Rolling Meeting Agendas: Agendas for standing leader forums should be pre-populated with decisions for critical efforts…think of it as a rolling 12 month decision-making calendar.
- Formalize Decision Forums: Norms and technologies for “standing and ad-hoc” decision-making forums should be established and used. One client announced “call at 4!”…and every exec within earshot knew to get on the “LT Hotline” for a quick decision.
- Proactively Plan Info Collection: For each decision, know the required info and build the collection tasks into the respective project plans.
Once your team agrees to aggressively pursue a future vision, you’ll quickly see what an ally the 18/24 Roadmap is and what antagonists weak decision-making and apathy are.