Leadership Caffeine-Develop the Courage to Derail the Bad Decision Train
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management, Values
“In life, one bad decision often leads to other bad decisions.” These are the words of Andre Agassi, the former professional tennis player describing on 60 Minutes a cascading series of bad decisions that almost ruined his life.
While Andre’s story had a generally positive outcome; he struggled back from depression and drugs to regain tennis glory, find the love of his life and turn into a philanthropist that has raised over $100 million dollars for charity, many business professionals and businesses aren’t as fortunate.
Once the bad decision train starts rolling, we often respond by adding more coal to the fire. This is particularly true for senior leaders that perceive that they have the most to lose if they admit that they were wrong.
Consider:
- It’s common to deal with major project problems in new product development or technology infrastructure for firms to double-down and keep investing when all of the signs say, “pull the plug.”
- Once senior leadership allows a move away from goodness….something that crosses the ethics or values chasm, it can be like pulling the plug on a dam. Think Enron.
- Greed begets greed. AIG’s founder, Hank Greenberg in Business Week on his successor, Martin Sullivan: “I know for a fact that Sullivan told everyone, Just do everything you want, get as much business as you can and don’t worry about a goddam thing.” (See also my post from last year, “The Dollar Bill Auction and a Failure of Rational Judgment.”
- Momentary success creates a blind spot in the front-windshield. “Here’s to a future of more trucks and fewer cars,” toasted a Ford CEO in the earlier part of this decade. He got it half right!
- The gut reaction to a recession is to cut and then quit moving. Firms hunker down and wait for the storm to pass, when they should be moving faster to create in anticipation of the storm passing.
And don’t get me started on the nearly endless examples from history.
The “bad decision train” is difficult to stop or derail once it gets moving. It seems to take extraordinary courage to admit that you are wrong. A combination of ego and fear often prevail, driving us to go all-in when we should fold and walk away.
While the instinct to pursue bad decisions with more bad decisions might be difficult to overcome, it is critical that leaders fight this tendency by fostering a culture that encourages teams and individuals to challenge decisions, particularly when new facts and lessons learned begin to point towards a different direction.
The trick of course is to not err in the opposite direction, and create a culture that second-guesses every decision and results in people constantly rearranging the deck chairs in a never-ending stream of shifting priorities.
Ideas for Derailing the Bad Decision Train
- Carefully develop and communicate the assumptions that underlie major projects. Teach team members to constantly compare initial assumptions to the current marketplace realities and make it safe for them to push the alarm button.
- Recognize that as a leader, it is your job to foster a learning culture. Define what this means for you and your team and ensure that it is supported in actions, not just easy words. Learning includes recognizing mistakes and adapting behaviors.
- Recognize that your behavior sets the pattern for everyone. Shoot messengers and execute teams for making mistakes, and you will create a culture that never questions a decision regardless of how visibly wrong it truly is.
- Encourage dissenters..not toxic employees, but the courageous individuals willing to stand up and tell you that your baby is ugly.
- Manage the second-guessing by challenging teams with cold feet to go through the process of vetting original assumptions and developing alternatives. Hold them accountable to more than complaining. If an idea is wrong, fine. What’s the alternative?
- Accept the reality that you will need to make tough decisions that will fly in the face of prevailing emotions, including your own. This is your job.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The list of suggestions above is just a starting point. Admitting failure and moving on is harder for a variety of personal and sometimes job saving reasons than plowing ahead on a strategy of hope. It takes courage to lead effectively, and sometimes that courage calls for a retreat or a complete change of plans.
Are you courageous enough to derail the bad decision train?
Values in Action-Helping Your Son or Daughter Choose a College
For anyone who has lived through the process of supporting their son or daughter in the search for a college, it is a truly exciting, perplexing and tiring endeavor. It’s also an opportunity to watch values in action at the various institutions as well as with your own child as they wrestle with what is to them a monumental choice.
First, a word about my son. I have no qualms highlighting my parental pride as I’ve watched him arm-wrestle peer pressure to the ground during this process. Many of his friends are escaping across state lines to “Party U” and their exuberance over staying together and their encouragement for him to join the herd has reached the point where it now annoys him.
This is a great test of character and while he has excellent grades and good test scores and has some options, he is looking at this decision from a very mature perspective. Oh, and just to add some real-world context for his decision, like most of us, he faces some parameters that complicate the decision-making process.
The Parameters:
- In the absence of a clear-cut academic or professional goal, we will support him for in-state tuition, or he can take it upon himself to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. He is also welcome to move out of state, work for a year and gain residency before starting college.
- If he chooses to complete his general education requirements at the community college, and if he has a clear academic and professional goal at the end of two years, we will support him for the institution of his choice.
- He must work during vacations to contribute to his books and living expenses.
- Four years only and Mom and Dad are done.
He’s in the process of working through the choices, and is considering two very different institutions and the community college route. We are trying hard to not hinder or complicate the process for him. If asked, we offer our thoughts, mostly in the form of questions. We’ve also suggested various frameworks for decision-making, but we are trying hard to not influence his choice. I know what I would do given the opportunity, but the extra 30 years of life experience tends to help simplify the choices. To an 18 hear-old, it seems like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Stay tuned.
The Values and Performance Commitment of the Institutions:
I have a hard time not letting my sensitivity to values and my quest for performance excellence interfere with my opinion about different academic institutions. In the case of universities, I believe that you learn a lot by how the organizations conduct themselves during student open house events.
The formula is pretty much the same everywhere you go. The visiting parents and prospective students meet in a big auditorium, watch a video or two, listen to the Director of Admissions and hear from a panel of over-achieving students. After a general session, you break out into a College Fair, take a campus tour that ends up with a visit to a typical dorm room (yikes!).
At noon, you grab a quick lunch and then hustle across campus to hear from the academic area that your son or daughter is most interested in. You ask questions, walk around a bit more, and cap off the visit by buying a t-shirt at the bookstore and then embarking on the long trip home.
The formula is OK, and you can learn a lot if you pay attention, ask questions and immerse yourself in the experience. If your son or daughter has strong interests in a particular area of study, these are great opportunities to compare schools. However, for the undecided masses, after you do this three or four times, they all tend to blend together.
Finding Gold in the Corn:
While all of the institutions that we’ve looked at have some great positives to offer, one stands out head and shoulders above the rest. Surprisingly (to me), it is Western Illinois University. This relatively small (by state school standards) institution in the middle of who knows where, IL, definitely has it going on.
Attend an open house at WIU, and you’ll meet and hear from University President, Al Goldfarb and the top executives. Most other organizations roll out the Director of Admissions, but at WIU, the entire management team thinks enough of you to attend, talk and mingle. Mr. Goldfarb stresses values, treats and talks to the students and parents like they are customers and goes so far to offer his personal e-mail address and an invitation to use it.
While one might be able to dismiss the President’s good sounding rhetoric, as you meet and talk with the executives of the institution, you hear the same messages about values and personal care and students as customers over and over again. The cynic in me thinks, “Hmmm, OK, Al runs a tight ship and has his managers singing out of the same song book.”
Start meeting with the instructors and administrators, and the same encouraging messages come through. People talk like they believe this stuff.
Fast forward a few months and bump into a group of purple-clad people in the airport and introduce yourself to realize that you are meeting Al’s entire management group on their way to California. Try as I might to penetrate their P.R. message defense, I can’t. These people are genuine in how they view the world. They are like the old Avis commercial…”They Try Harder,” because they have to.
Our oldest son decided to attend WIU a few years ago, and as we mingled in a room of hundreds at the new student orientation session the Summer before he started I was shocked when one of the university employees walked up to me, looked at my name badge and said, “Mr. Petty, you must be “son’s” father.”
It turns out this was his counselor. Talk about an impression. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe that I went through four years at a remarkable institution, the University of Illinois, and never met a counselor, much less someone that knew my Dad’s name.
At every turn, we’ve been impressed with this lesser known school in the cornfields of Macomb, IL. The other very good institutions just seem to fail in comparison. The passion, the customer-focus and the strong sense of values-based management come through loud and clear at WIU and are missing in the presentations of the other programs. At WIU, you begin to establish context for the people behind the bricks and mortar and at least for a parent, this is palpable.
Our youngest son may or may not attend WIU, the choice is his, but I do know a group of people focused on performance excellence when I see it. Kudos to the team at Western Illinois University. He could do much, much worse.
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