Why Include Them Anyway? Leadership and Decision Making

Faced with an important decision managers can chose to actively include their teams in the decision making process, or not. Now most managers will tell you that they do actively involve their teams in helping them make decisions that affect their teams. I’ve found however, that most managers are not comfortable with truly “opening up” their decision making process. Why, you ask? After talking with hundreds of business and government executives, I’ve most often heard the following reasons from managers for not being comfortable with, as they say, “democratizing” the decision making process:

• “Decision making is my job. I am the leader and this is my responsibility.”
• “I’ve risen to my management position because of my good decision-making ability, so I don’t think that I necessarily need help with decision making.”
• “I don’t want to lose control of the decision.”

While these reasons are very real and perhaps reasonable in some situations, let me share with you the combined experience of those leaders whom I’ve worked with and who have actively engaged their teams in their decision making processes. First, however, let me describe what I mean by “actively engaging” team members in decision making. In short, actively engaging a team means working together to identify decision objectives and alternatives and collaboratively prioritizing those objectives and evaluating the alternatives. And by “collaboratively” I mean giving each stakeholder an explicit and measured voice in the process.

When leaders actively engage their teams as described here, the following occurs:

• Team members and their organizations more rapidly become aware of the leader’s objectives. The leader’s objectives are no longer a mystery to the team and accordingly, new business proposals start reflecting the leader’s objectives. Imagine that!
• The quality of decisions improves as the information, knowledge and experience of the team members becomes much more a part of the decision. The leader has invested in his or her team, so why not get a return on investment by leveraging the team’s collective expertise in helping the leader make decisions.
• The team’s buy-in to the decisions is unparalleled and the leader’s ability to guide his or her team and the organization through the changes associated with the decision is dramatically improved.

Folks, the days of command and control leadership in the workplace are over. True leaders, or truly effective leaders are those who set the vision, effectively communicate their vision and objectives, and who can empower their teams to achieve their objectives. At the end of the day the buck stops with the leader, and he or she is on the hook to make the right decision, but if you as the leader or if your manager chooses to “open up” the decision making process, be prepared to reap the rewards that true leadership brings.