The 5-Step Framework for Better Leadership Choices | Ep 276
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What is up? Welcome back to Build. And today we want to talk about how to make hard decisions. I want to talk about this topic because coincidentally, yesterday I had somebody on my team ask me, you know, how do you make better decisions as the CEO of the company? How do you think about decisions? Last week when I was talking with our new president, we were talking through a decision and he said, what's your decision making framework for this? I talked about mine. He talked about his. And then this morning,

I was talking to a friend of mine who had a really big life decision to make. And I essentially realized that this person just didn't have the right framework for making decisions. And so I'll say this. I think that when I first started off in business, making decisions was not something that I was strong at. I think that oftentimes I knew what needed to be done or I had an idea in mind, but I had all this emotion or procrastination or frustration that

just energy around the decision that delayed me from making it sooner than later. And so I ended up delaying a lot of decisions. I ended up passing off a lot of decisions. I ended up honestly procrastinating a lot of them. I was really thinking about today because when I was talking with Alex, my partner and husband the other day, he said, well, I think you're one of your superpowers is actually making decisions. Like you make really good decisions and you're, you're very good at making decisions. And I feel really like when he said it, I was like,

Damn right, I am. It's taken me a decade to get here, but it is something that I feel I've actually been able to master. And I think it's because I've been able to break it down and put some small habits in place, as well as frameworks in place that helped me make a lot of really good decisions. And I will say this, like most of the time, when I can think back to the biggest decisions I've made and the smallest decisions I've made, I think that I use the same framework for all of them.

So I want to talk about decisions because what I've recognized in having, you know, I do a lot of coaching for CEOs and for people on my team. And what I recognize that a lot of people don't decide. They delay things, they procrastinate, they allow circumstances to change and decide for them. And so

And so they distract themselves often from this like big, overwhelming, looming decision. And then later come back to it and like, oh my God, I'm stuck. It's this thing. You probably all have a friend like that where it's like, maybe it's like, I don't know if I should be with this person. And it's like, they bring it up, they talk about it. It's a whole thing. And then they stuff it real far, deep, deep back down. And then it comes up again. Or maybe it's business and they know they need to let somebody go or they know they need to change

their business model. And the thought of it is overwhelming and it's not something they want to think about. And so they delay the decision. They stuff it really, really deep down. And then they come back later and they wonder why they're still stuck. And I will tell you right now, like your ability to make consistent decisions is what determines your ceiling in every area of life, because we want to make decisions that are aligned with our goals. And so if we're not doing that, it makes it really hard to ever make progress in life.

And so I want to bring this essentially like five principles that I wrote down that I literally practice on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis that have helped me so much in becoming a good decision maker. The first thing and like the most important thing, if I had to give you one nugget of this entire podcast is you expand the space between stimulus and response. OK, so the key to becoming a better decision maker is buying yourself time between your impulse and the action you take.

So most people, you know, they run their businesses like based off their emotions, right? So the moment an emotion arises, they act on that emotion. And so if a client turns, they panic and freak out. And so we've got to change the whole thing. If employee quits, they get super mad. They tell the team, we got buckled down here. We're just some fucking changes going on. If a team misses numbers, they spiral that person into shame. And they say, we need to change the whole sales process, right? And that is not leadership. That's reactivity. And

And I see this so often entrepreneurs, and it's actually something that I also will see in people who are teammates who are just really passionate, but they are impulsive to a degree. And I remember looking back, I would say it was probably two years after I started in business at myself one day when

when I was making a decision and realizing that something that would have sent me down a spiral two years prior now was something that I was able to sit in silence and really contemplate. And so it's really just because I do this one thing instead. I don't react. I pause.

And I don't just put in space. I will ask for space or create that space. And that pause right after an event occurs or a decision is prompted to me is where all of my leverage comes from. Because that's where I get to practice not reacting to something when I'm emotionally charged,

But instead asking myself this one question, I get myself out of the situation. I get myself typically by myself. I do my best thinking alone. I definitely am an internal processor. And then I ask myself this question, what do I want to have happen? What do I want to have happen? What's the outcome that I'm looking for? Right. And for me, it's like, what do I want to have happen? Well, I want this person to do X, Y and Z or I want my business to do X, Y and Z.

And then the next question I ask myself is this, what would I have to do to make that the most likely outcome? How would I respond right now? What would my response be to give me that outcome? And that is how I determine what I do in this situation. It's not by how I feel. It's not by the emotions that arise, but it's by asking myself those two questions.

What do I want to have happen? What would I have to do to make that most likely to happen? And then I behave based on that, not on the emotion that arises in the moment. And let me tell you, it's fucking hard. I'm not going to say it's easy, but I do find that there's like some little tricks that can make it a lot easier. Like,

For example, if I'm with a group of people, I'll say, listen, I'm going to circle back after this call and get to you guys with a decision. I just am like, I refuse to make a decision in front of 10 people staring at me on a Zoom screen or in a conference room. Right? That's one. Two is if I'm talking to a person, I might just say, hey, you know, I got to go jump on this call, so I'll be back soon. I might not have a call, to be honest with you, but I do know that I need to get some space so I can make a better decision. Or I will literally physically leave the area. If I'm feeling really emotionally challenged

elevated, then I'll say, you know what, I'm going to go take a walk and I'll come back to this after. And then I ask myself those two questions. And that pause is where I really gain all of my decision making power. And it's probably the number one best tool paired with those questions to help me make good decisions. Now, I'd say that the second principle that I have with making decisions, this thing I was talking to my team about yesterday, is that I try to make all my decisions ahead of time.

I call this run the fire drill before the fire, right? And so why do we run a fire drill before a fire occurs? Because we want to know what do we do in those situations, right? And we want to know that we just train ourselves that if we hear the fire drill, we evacuate the building. It's just training a muscle. And so if you're constantly surprised in your business, it's probably because you didn't prepare for the obvious stuff.

Right. You didn't think about what happens when people quit. What happens when a product doesn't launch as we want to? What happens when your partner lets you down? That stuff's not bad luck and it doesn't mean you have a bad business. It's just normal. Right. But if you don't think about those things and how you want to handle them ahead of time, then we essentially just react in the moment and we switch between execution mode and thinking mode, which most people are not that great at. And so we want to make pre-decisions before the chaos hits.

So for example, if you have a manager and they miss target two quarters in a row, we don't like meet to quote talk about it. We should already know what that means for us. What do we do in this situation? What's the trigger? And we've already detailed the process. There's a trigger. And then we say, okay, when this trigger occurs, here's what I'm going to do. And that makes it not personal. It makes it not emotional. It's just operational. At that point, you've created a system. And the biggest reason I found this to be helpful is because you don't want to make

big decisions in the middle of big emotions, right? So you want to decide when you're calm. I think that was like the biggest nugget I ever got was, I actually think it was, Alex was talking with a coach many years ago. And that person said to him,

Only make decisions when you're neutral, in a neutral state. And I took that and was like, wow, that's a really great one because I don't want to make a decision when I'm too excited. I don't want to make a decision when I'm too deflated. I want to make a decision when I'm feeling neutral and I'm feeling good. I'm feeling level.

And so as many decisions that you can make ahead of time when you're in that state, I think you all know what that is, right? It's like you got a good night of sleep. You're well rested. Like you've got your coffee in for the day. Maybe you had some eat. Nothing has gone wrong yet for the day. And that's probably when you're in your best state of mind. That's a great time to make decisions ahead. When you're making those decisions ahead of time, it brings me to the third principle, which is

If you want consistent results, then you need consistent decisions. And if you want consistent decisions, you need frameworks that give you that. So here's how I know my company's growing, right? My team doesn't ask me what to do. They ask me if the framework still applies. Okay, so we've got decision trees. We have SOPs. There's escalation protocols. There's hiring templates. There's pricing models. There's compensation tiers, right?

Okay, those frameworks are not bureaucracy. Okay, they are freedom. Because once the thinking is built into the system, the team and people can operate without you. And the reality is, if the business can't run without you, because you haven't put decision making frameworks in place, it's not a business. It's just a really high paying job that's very stressful and relies on you. And so if your team is constantly asking you questions to how to make these decisions, you don't need to get mad at them, you just need to put systems in place. Systems create freedom.

And a lot of people say, oh, I think I just need to be more disciplined. I just need to be better. I just need to work more. No, I think that discipline comes from having systems. So what you really want is a good set of systems in place that's going to help allow you to do this. Now, once you have those systems in place, that brings me to my fourth principle. And this is where a lot of people fail, is that they don't track and reflect on their decisions. So they put a framework in place. They

carry out the framework, but then they don't audit it to say, did it lead to the outcome I want? Right? Did what I want to have happen, happen? And so they make decisions, but they don't review them, right? They maybe, maybe they measure the output, but they don't put judgment on the output. And maybe they track their tasks, but they don't look at the patterns and take a thousand foot view of what's going on. And so here's the thing, you can't improve what you don't reflect on. So you have to run decision audits on these systems.

What did I decide? Why did I decide it? What happened because of it? Would I change anything next time? Did it yield the outcome I want? If you want to compound at scale, then you have to learn faster than the problems evolve. And the only way I found to do this is to constantly be auditing my decisions that I've made and asking myself if there's a flaw in the system. Do I need to change a framework? And I cannot do that unless I do an audit. So I do something at the end of my day every day, which I call like a look back.

I look back at my calendar for the prior half of the day, or I'd say like upwards, right? So say it's like 7 p.m. I'm looking at everything that happened prior to 7 p.m. And then I ask myself, okay, what decisions did I make? And were these the right decisions? Did this lead to the outcome I want? Do I need to change anything in how I make decisions? It's just constant reflection. And the thing is, is that if you're not building that loop, then you often are leading blind or you're making decisions that are, I would say, based on outdated frameworks.

Which brings me to the last principle, which is aligning our environment with the decisions that we want to make. Hey, all in all, if you are really struggling to change your behavior, you got to change your environment, right? We are all the products of our environment and so are our companies and so are many times our personalities. So if your team, for example, is reactive, if they're inconsistent, if they're confused, look at the environment you've put them in, right? Look at their calendars. Look at the work that they're doing. Look at the way they're organized, right?

Right. We want to create an environment where good decisions are normal. We want to reward logic, not drama. We want to train people to have good judgment. And we want to write down how we think. Right. Not just what we do. And we don't want to just word vomit all over people. And then when someone messes up or makes a poor decision, we don't want to ask, hey, why did you do that? We would ask, what system?

made that decision likely, and how do we fix that? And so we really want to think about designing an environment that makes it easy to make good decisions. We want it to be easier, not harder, to make good decisions in our business.

So for some of you, you've got to look at your calendar. Are you making it easy to make good decisions? Like if you're on 15 calls a day, do you think that you have the mental bandwidth to make a good decision? Maybe one that you have a really good system in place for, but if something that you didn't anticipate comes up, maybe not. And so the reality is this. If you want to make great decisions, you just need these five things. Okay, the first one is space. Then we need to make decisions ahead of time.

We need to have frameworks for making decisions. We need time to reflect and audit. And then we need to change our environment. And that's the playbook. That's really it. Now, if I were you and you're like listening to this, you're like, I'm actually pretty shitty at making decisions. I would say, great, then just start with one. Start with the space. Because I think that's probably the easiest one that you can implement right now.