Following up on my June blog to save collaboration time by making meetings more efficient (or choosing not to attend meetings where your input isn’t helping you meet your individual and team goals), I want to address another point raised by Cross, Rebele, and Grant in “Collaboration Overload” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2016). In it they concluded that, in order to combat additional time spent in collaboration, “structural changes might be necessary so that decisions can be made at support staff or lower manager levels.”
Does your team or organization empower you as an individual to make decisions to move critical work forward? If your answer is YES, that’s awesome; don’t waste your time reading further.
If you answered NO, then I have several other questions I want you to consider so you can put a price tag on what the choice of insisting (all or most) decisions must be made at higher level managers is costing your organization.
- How many levels in the management chain need to be involved before a go/no-go decision can be made?
- How many collaborators across how many departments/teams need to be consulted?
- How much time does it take to get to the go/no-go decision? I’m not just talking about time spent in a one-hour meeting where the decision is made. Consider:
- What is the prep time?
- How much time is spent coordinating everyone’s schedules (or delaying because people are not available)?
- Does a document or presentation have to be created? How much time does that take? And how many people are involved in creating or approving that deliverable?
- What is the lapsed time from critical issue being raised to getting a decision?
- Did continued work on the project/deliverables stall or slow down dramatically while you were waiting for a resolution or decision?
- What is the cost of the above delays in opportunity?
- Is your team’s reputation going to suffer?
- What is the impact to your company’s brand because you now have dissatisfied customers?
- Will you strain the relationship with your outside vendors because they can’t move forward with new work due to your internal decision making hoops?
- Did you/your team/your organization miss a chance for a new project or did you have to delay a new project while you were working through the delays in decisions making on the current project?
- What risks or additional issues were introduced due to the delay?
- What is the short-term and long-term impact to stakeholders? Customers? Other parts of your organization? Outside partners or vendors?
- What are the unintended consequences to each of the above?
Do the math on the answers to the above questions. Time is indeed money. Multiply the hours spent and/or wasted by the average estimated salary of the individuals involved. There are also costs associated with missed opportunities and hits to brand or reputation. Check your own organization’s history for a hint on those costs.
In my experience, I find the reason there are so many hoops and upper level decision makers required is because upper level managers aren’t confident with the critical thinking and decision making skills of their staff. There is a straightforward solution to that concern: provide them a framework or tools to improve or build their critical thinking skills.
In my June blog, I listed several questions from one of the seven categories of questions I teach in Vervago’s Discover Your Best Thinking with Precision Q+A. The majority of the questions listed above are from two additional question categories: Clarification and Effects.
I strongly recommend this workshop to organizations to enable all team members to have confidence that their thinking (and that of their colleagues and collaborators) is solid and complete. It gives managers (at all levels) the confidence to allow decision making at support staff and lower management levels, and frees up their time to be more strategic and proactive for the organization’s future.