How does losing focus effect your decision making?
As a leader, developing the ability to make key decisions in a timely manner is a key skill. As with anything it takes time, practice, and failure to imbed this thinking into the work you do within your teams. It is also a skill that requires ongoing reflection and learning.
The importance of decision making.
When building a high performing team, they will look to you for guidance and the path to follow. You need to model the behaviours that you want to see from your team – focus, decision making, teamwork, trust – the list goes on. In order for high performing teams to excel within a project, they require actionable decisions that set them on the path to success. As leaders you need to allow your team the opportunity to be successful and for that, they need a leader making decisions!
I am sure you have all experienced that leader that just doesn’t want to make a decision – everything needs to be escalated for approval. The impact of that – you get frustrated, unmotivated, distrusting teams.
When you have a leader that is willing to make timely decisions and deal with consequences you get – motivated, trusting, cohesive teams – high performing teams!
When you, as a leader model timely decision making, you are in essence supporting your team to make decisions. When they see you backing yourself and the team, it encourages them to do the same. While you may be leading the team, there are always going to be decisions that need to be made along the journey, and high performing teams are able to make those decisions without coming to you every 2 minutes!
When you model the leadership that you want to see from your team – you are developing the next generation of leaders.
What if I make the wrong decision?
This will happen and it will happen a lot! I remember a time, when I was in the Air Force and I was leading one part of an operations team, two of my peers were leading the other parts. On this particular day, one of my collogues had made a poor decision with one of their team members – it made this person feel small, unheard and like their opinion didn’t matter – it was also a decision that went against policy. The other one of my peers had handled the situation and provided guidance on where they had gone wrong – something which I was not aware of at the time.
My reaction to hearing what had occurred was not the leadership I wanted to model. I let my emotions get the better of me and allowed what should have been a simple conversation turn into a high level back and forth – with the team members in the next room hearing everything that was going on. My decision making in that moment was not acceptable! More importantly, it was not the behaviour I wanted to model for my team.
It happened and I had to own it! I had to apologise for my behaviour and reinforce to my team the importance of making the right decision under pressure, which sometimes meant taking a quick gap to assess your reaction. I lost focus of what was most important – yes one of my peers had made a poor decision but the important thing was that one of my other peers had dealt with issue – there was no need for my interjection.
The key here is how you deal with making the wrong decision.
You have choices:
- Make excuses
- Blame others
- Avoid making future decisions
Or:
- Take responsibility
- Learn from your mistake
- Get feedback from those impacted
- Model the behaviours that you want to see
Losing focus!
A loss of focus can hit you when you least it expect it. It can be as simple as getting a phone call in the middle of a meeting. We are all susceptible to loosing focus, especially when we are fully invested in the outcomes of what we are trying to achieve.
When I think back over my career in the Air Force a key example stands out to me. I had just posted into the School of Post Graduate Studies and I was overseeing the delivery of leadership training to junior aviators. The school conducted leadership and management training for both aviators and officers and just about every aviator in the Air Force would be at the school at one point in their career.
This was the top end of leadership in the Air Force, where Officers and Aviators went to become more effective leaders. This was a big task for each Commanding Officer that was selected for the role (they changed out every 2 years). At the start of my second year a new CO started with us, they said all the right things and had all the best intentions to take our leadership delivery to the next level – we bought into the change.
As the year went on, I started to notice that a lot of the changes were not on track or had been withdrawn all together – strange. During weekly CO meetings there was a change in the intent of the executives. They were definitely kicking goals, or so it would seem, but things were not progressing internally.
The CO had lost focus of their original intent – provide unwavering support to the course facilitators so that we could produce a consistent leadership package and graduate highly effective leaders back into the workforce.
Instead, the CO and the other executives focused more on the optics of how the unit looked from the outside – without dealing with the internal issues. We were operating with outdated equipment, outdated learning packages and too few facilitators. It had become a numbers game, getting as many students graduated as possible. The CO had lost focus and as a result was making poor decisions – decisions based around how the unit looked from the outside and not around fixing the internal issues.
How do you maintain your focus?
Maintaining your focus, especially during times of high stress is not easy, just ask anyone that has been in military combat. It takes practice, self-reflection, and constant learning.
- Ask your team for feedback on your decision making
- Create an environment of psychological safety, where your decisions can be challenged with the right intent
- Track your tasks and re-assess where you are prioritising
- Take a gap, when you can, to ensure you are making an effective decision
- Speak to your peers, supervisors or a coach to get a different perspective
There will be times when your team just needs a decision to be made so that they can move forward – the wrong decision is the decision that you fail to make. Very few decisions are final and you can always pivot to a new direction.
Maintain your focus. Model the leadership you want to see. Back your decisions.