Is Your Team’s Decision-Making Process Eroding Trust?
There are few things that rot the foundation of workplace culture more than decision-making gone wrong. And I don’t even mean the decisions that were objectively not the greatest. I mean the process of getting to the decision, regardless of what the end decision was.
First, let’s look at the common ways in which decision-making goes awry.
Every decision involves the whole team. When everyone is involved in every decision, it takes too long to make a decision, which means more and more of the day-to-day ends up mired in lack of clarity, brewing frustration. Or decisions end up weakened. If the few experts on the issue are tea leaves and everyone else the water . . . .
There is no written process for emergency (or time-urgent) decision-making. Without a written process, it usually falls to the executive to make the quick decision alone, risking consequential decisions that might not actually be implementable, again resulting in frustration and resentment from those who have to implement the decision but had no say in making it.
No one knows for sure who needs to make the decision. Not everyone needs to (or should be) involved in every decision, and the executive shouldn’t be the final decision-maker every time. Yet, when there’s no clarity as to who is involved and who makes the last call depending on the decision type, the murkiness leads to haphazard decision-making and, you guessed it, resentment and frustration again.
Input and feedback are mishandled. Commonly, key people are left out of the decision-making process or pulled-in too late, they aren’t provided insight into why their input is required and how it will be used, they’re not informed in a timely manner when a decision might be going contrary to their input, and/or they never learn why a decision was made the way it was made and how that decision is meant to affect their individual workplans.
People make their own assumptions about how decision-making should work. They base these assumptions on implicit bias, good and bad examples experienced elsewhere, etc. Every individual employee’s assumptions are unique to them, making it impossible to create a cohesive team understanding of how decision-making should work at this organization.
So how do we fix those issues?
(Note that all of the solutions below assume a well-intentioned and capable executive, senior leadership team, and staff. Covering other cases where corruption, abuse, toxicity, persistent neglect of duties, etc. apply goes beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Ensure that decision-making is distributed and involves the right people.
When an organization is very small, with 1 - 3 employees, it makes sense to include the whole team in most decisions, because usually the whole team is directly affected and is meant to implement them. But when an organization has more employees, involving everyone slows down action unnecessarily, takes up time that people need for getting their other work done, sets up impossible expectations of every voice being at every table, and loses strategic focus in favor of watered-down consensus.
Conversely, when the executive has the last say on every decision, not only are the decisions vulnerable to one person’s blind spots and biases, but the executive has no time to focus on the executive job, the staff feel like they are being micromanaged, and the executive becomes the de facto scapegoat for every problem.
Try this instead:
(when your organization has more than about 1-5 employees) Make sure there at least 2 other people with high-level decision-making authority who report to the executive. They should each have the authority to:
hire, evaluate, lead, manage, and fire their own team;
build, manage, and spend their piece of the budget;
build and oversee implementation of their piece of the organization’s Annual Operational Plan and approve individual workplans on their team;
adjust strategies and tactics as needed (as long as in alignment with the Board-approved Strategic Plan);
appropriately delegate decision-making on their team (there are always decisions that entry-level staff can make without having to get approval).
That senior leadership team should meet regularly as a group, with the executive. This is where the transparency largely comes into play. These meetings should focus on wins, challenges, workplace culture, high-level strategy, etc. There should be no silos in this meetings — everything everyone does affects and could be helped by other teams — so cross-fertilization, idea sharing, and solution brainstorming should be regular parts of this meeting. The executive role here is to clear obstacles for the senior leaders, liaise with the Board on doing its part, and forge high-level external partnerships (including with donors) that will bring strategies to fruition. The senior leadership team should serve as a “loyal voice of opposition,” being direct and frank with the executive about challenges (included concerns their team has) and always bringing suggested solutions to the table. Collaboration within this team should translate to the rest of the staff . . . no one on the senior leadership team should be going back to their teams with “I did my best, but those other guys decided to do X, sorry.”
Get input from the right people, and get it twice. If a decision is going to directly affect the day-to-day work of an employee (or several), looking for feedback on a decision that is almost ready to go is pointless. The feedback can’t be used, the solicitation of it is therefore performative, and the decision has a high likelihood of failure. Instead:
Solicit input as far ahead of time as possible. Even better, present the problem and ask for their expert opinion on a solution. (If it’s particularly sensitive, and a large enough group of employees is involved, solicit input in the form of an anonymous survey).
Explain why their input is valuable and how it will be used. Explain also that providing input doesn’t mean that the decision then exactly mirrors their input . . . they might not be entirely satisfied with the result . . . and that is because there are many considerations that come into play, not all of which are appropriate or ethical to share with every staff member.
Develop the solution, and ask for one more round of feedback, this time looking for redlines, remaining blind-spots, and any potential tripwires — be clear that you aren’t looking for perfection, tweaks, or “well, I would have done it this slightly different way”. You’ll need to practice this as a staff to get in the right habit; and the Executive can model it by not nitpicking and by acknowledging interesting solutions or tactics that they themselves might not have considered or tried.
Follow through. Don’t just decide and move on.
Inform everyone of the decision, how it will affect their workloads, the resources you have in place that will make it possible for them to implement the decision, and (as appropriate) why the decision was made the way it was.
Plan for a check-in a few months down the line with relevant staff to de-brief on how implementation is going, what further resources might be needed, what tactics need adjusting, etc.
Supervisors should model the trust they want their direct reports to have in them and bake feedback and teamwork into the culture. Distributed decision-making means that supervisors need to back-up the decisions that their direct reports make under their authority and workplan as if they made the decision themselves.
If a supervisor sees that there might be a tripwire their staff have missed or they suspect that a decision might fail, it should be brought up this way . . . . “I see that you’ve decided to do X; help me understand the reasoning behind it and how I can help.” If the answer still doesn’t calm the supervisor’s concerns, follow-up with “Is it possible that X could happen, and, if so, what is your plan to mitigate that, and is there anything you need from me?”.
If a supervisor suspects that their direct report might be reticent to bring up challenges until it is too late, the supervisor should just build-in “roadblock checks” to their regular 1:1s where it’s part of the usual agenda for the direct report to bring up roadblocks and suggested solutions, for the direct report to indicate where they could use their supervisor’s help, and for the two of them to set some milestone checks to make sure the solution is working.
Supervisors in general should depersonalize challenges. Frame challenges not as “so-and-so messed up” or “so-and-so has to fix this” but rather as shared, joint challenges where each plays a part in tackling it, together, as a team.
Ensure that entry-level staff also have decision-making authority. They shouldn’t have to run every decision they make past their direct supervisor. By making it clear what types of decisions they have the authority to make and then backing up those decisions, supervisors build trust amongst their team, and entry-level employees build trust in themselves and feel more professional fulfillment.
Create clear decision-making processes and policies.
For emergency and time-urgent decisions, create a “call tree” — who gets informed (even on off hours), how are they informed, whose input is vital and whose is a nice-to-have if possible, and who makes the final decision — all depending on which team is most directly impacted and on how severe the consequences are for making a poor decision (thus, you might need several call trees for several possible scenarios). The COVID-19 pandemic, increase in hate crimes and hate-based legislation, and the MAGA takeover of the U.S. federal government have all provided stark evidence of the need to have emergency decision-making plans in place.
Create a robust Pay Transparency Policy. Lack of clarity in roles and responsibilities and opacity in how pay and benefits are calculated serve as potentially the top two challenges that lead to disordered decision-making and depletion of trust. It can take a full year of solid work by the senior leadership team to create a robust policy and likely will involve enlisting the help of external HR experts. It can then take even longer to adjust salaries and titles to match the new system as you build your budget toward the goal. That said, if the projection is that it will take more than 3 years to get salaries to competitive levels, it’s time for the senior leadership team to work with the Board on de-scoping some strategic goals and thus thinning staffing until the budget allows for staffing up again at competitive wages and benefits. Communicating to staff that senior leadership is working with an external HR expert on a robust Pay Transparency Policy is key, as is being honest about the fact that it cannot happen overnight. The policy should include:
a list of the staff levels from intern on up to the executive (include even the levels in which you don’t currently have an employee);
a description of the responsibilities, decision-making authority, and reporting structure that is shared by everyone at each level (regardless of which team they are on);
the pay range for each level (we recommend targeting competitive for your area and for your budget as if you were a for-profit business, not trying to match usually falsely-depressed nonprofit wages; the lowest earner should never go below living wage for your area);
a description of how starting pay is calculated (we recommend this not be left open to negotiation, as that invites too much bias);
how and when cost of living increases are applied;
how and when performance-based raises and bonuses happen and how they are calculated;
the benefits to which each level is entitled; and
the promotion process;
note that how the above apply to the executive must be approved by the Board.
Have senior leadership workshop decision-making processes with their teams for decisions that are unique to their team, ensuring that each person on the team has at least some decision-making authority (meaning that they can make the call without getting approval first). Bring those to the senior leadership meeting and work-out any differences between teams’ processes that might cause confusion (you don’t want there to be massive differences that create very different cultures on different teams).
Run Post-Mortems on decisions that seem to have caused angst, confusion, frustration, etc.
Don’t run away from those events or try to just move-on. Don’t dwell on or marinate in them either. Rather, structure a post-mortem analysis and discussion with clear intended outcomes and action items going forward — including how to apply lessons-learned to current and potential future challenges or similar upcoming decisions.
De-personalize the situation in these discussions. The aim isn’t to find fault or point the finger of blame. The aim is to take the issue as a shared challenge that needed a different solution from the whole team and needs to not be repeated. Avoid “Gary should have done this,” or “Rhys shouldn’t have done that.” Instead, look for process failures, missing policies or loopholes in existing ones, etc. Use position titles when discussing and point out that it doesn’t matter who is or was in the position because you’re looking for solutions that will stand the test of time and are independent of who is on the staff. Supervisors should make themselves vulnerable first by opening with “here’s where I think someone in my position could have improved the outcome.”
Get Leadership and Management Training for the Whole Staff
Leadership and Management Training is an oft-undervalued, yet incredibly useful, tool for:
maintaining trust amongst the staff,
smoothing decision-making,
preventing burnout,
allowing each staff member to focus on their own job, and
providing professional fulfillment.
Beyond providing new or strengthened skills, training accomplishes the above partly by dispelling myths and correcting misconceptions — as just some examples:
workplaces shouldn’t be like family (which leads to cliques, exclusion, and culture-fit instead of culture-add) — they should be like sports teams
it isn’t a manager’s job to ensure that they are friends with their direct reports — it’s to provide strategic direction, set expectations, set a healthy team culture, and clear obstacles as appropriate and possible.
no, your manager doesn’t know everything on your plate (even if they put it there) and cannot intuit when you’re overloaded — you need to advocate for yourself
your manager cannot help if you don’t tell them when you’re running into a problem — painting a rosy picture won’t help anyone — you need to be honest and timely about informing your manager about roadblocks.
no, your manager doesn’t have to solve every problem — every time you bring up a problem, also bring a suggested solution — you are the specific expert at what you do, not your manager
no, it is not your manager’s role to fix interpersonal disputes between you and someone else — you need to own and nurture your relationships (again, harassment cases, etc. aside)
even when your input was considered, not every decision will go the way you hoped — it doesn’t mean it was the “wrong” decision — it often means that you don’t have the whole picture (not because you were personally left out but because there were pieces at play that wouldn’t be ethical or appropriate for someone in your staff position to know)
transparency and trust are paramount, but that does not mean that every person should be involved in every part of the sausage-making — put another way, everything cannot be up for vote by everyone on the staff, and some pieces at play aren’t everyone’s business.
one person’s micromanagement is another person’s support — everyone requires different management from their supervisor — different from everyone else and different for themselves at different times in their life.
perfection shouldn’t be expected of anyone, including the executive — putting empathy at the forefront, extending grace upward and downward, and giving each other the benefit of the doubt are mission-critical.
Every single one of those common misconceptions directly affects whether decision-making goes smoothly and whether it builds or erodes team trust.
Training common to the whole team (not just those who have direct reports) alleviates clunky decision-making and damaged trust by:
level-setting expectations,
providing insights in managing both up and down,
forging leadership skills in every employee at every level,
getting past conflict aversion and people-pleasing and toward trust-building candor, empathy, and extension of grace
giving and receiving feedback in a way that strengthens trust, professional skills, and project outcomes
clarifying roles and responsibilities,
learning how to lean on each other to shore up blind spots and harness individual talents; and
providing a shared vocabulary and playbook, which eases communications, collaboration, and relationships.
It’s never too late to make it better.
Oftentimes, you don’t find out that you’ve got holes in your decision-making processes until something breaks, be it a program, a fundraising campaign, or intra-team trust. It’ll be ok, and it’s normal. This happens to every organization, even when they’ve got a lot of the above in place. Rather than pinpointing blame or trying to forget about it, use that experience as an opportunity to come together as a team and fix the breaks in the system. You’ll find that your team culture comes out much stronger than it would if you’d scapegoated someone, pushed everything under rug, or just tried to move on with no plan. Have the tough conversations (and get coaching or training in how to do that) — you’ll be grateful that you did.
