The 3-Step Decision Making Framework I Teach My Team | Ep 248
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What's up guys, welcome back to Build. And today I want to talk about a topic that applies whether you are at $100,000 a year, $500,000 a year, a million, 5 million, 10 million, 50 million, it does not matter. And that is how to train your team to make faster, smarter decisions.

As a founder or CEO, your team's decision-making is actually your bottleneck. I think a lot of the times people think that it's their decision-making that's the bottleneck, but the reason it's not your decision-making is because the only reason you would be making so many decisions that you get decision fatigue or that you feel like it's all you're doing is because your team doesn't have the skill of making decisions.

And therefore you end up default making all these decisions because you're realizing that it's not getting done by the people below you and you without realizing it continue to make the decisions and not train your team. And I get this because I have been there. I remember when there was a point in time

in my first company, and we used Voxer as the platform that we spoke to each other on before we ended up transitioning to Slack. This was before Slack existed. And I remember talking to one of my mentors at the time, and I told her, I said, oh my gosh, every time I open up my Voxer, I literally have like 35 messages, and it's all just questions. It's just like, what's this? How do I do this? Do you want me to do this or this? Blah, blah. She taught me a really

cool concept that I wanted to share with you guys today. And so I hope that it is of value for you because the thing is, is that one of the biggest drags on a company's speed is not strategy. It's not even bad strategy. It's not even lack of resources or even hiring wrong people. It's actually just slow decision making. And most of the time, the slowness isn't because decisions are complex. In fact, it's because people actually just don't think. I know this sounds crazy.

I remember there was a time where I was speaking to one of my managers and she asked me a question and I said, "Before you ask me to answer that question, I need to ask you a question." She said, "Sure." I said, "Have you sat in silence staring at a wall and thought about this question for more than five minutes?"

And she answered completely honestly. She said, Layla, I actually haven't even done that for a minute. I just came and asked you. That is why companies move so slow because the leaders don't train the other leaders how to critically think before escalating that into a question. And so that is where I would like to propose something for all of you that listen, whether you're a leader, a founder, a CEO, or you just manage people in a company. And that is what I call the six inch putt rule.

Okay, so if you play golf, or if you don't play golf, this is still obvious, you know that a six-inch putt is like the easiest shot in the game. Okay, there's no hesitation. There's no overthinking. You just tap it in. You move on. In business, though, most decisions don't feel that simple at first. They're usually messy. They require thought. And most of the time, instead of breaking them down and thinking about them, your employees just outsource that thinking straight to you.

Hey, what should I do here? Hey, left or right? Hey, black or white? Hey, up or down? Hey, should I do this? Hey, what should I do with this person? Should I hire this person? Should I fire this person? Should I go this way? Should we do the strategy? How do we run this team? What's the meeting cadence? What's the... All day, every day. And then you become the bottleneck because they continue to delegate up to you. They delegate their decisions to you. And now you're the bottleneck.

And here's the thing, it happens at every level. Whether you're running a startup or $100 million company, in fact, the higher you go, the more people want you to think for them because they're like, oh, this company is too big for me to make decisions in, right? And so the thing is, is that there's excuses at every level as to why the decisions have to continue to go up and up and up.

But here's the problem. If you allow this, you are forever stuck making every decision yourself. And that feels awful. And I completely get it because here's the thing. At every point in my company's growth, I have gotten to a point, a sticking point where I realize that I'm making all the decisions and I have to go through and do this process all over again. It's not like you do this once and it goes away forever. You have to keep doing it based on the growth of your business. And honestly,

the faster that your business grows, sometimes the more that this continues to happen. It's like you won't be doing it. And then within eight months, you're doing it again. And you're like, what the hell? And it's like, well, you grew really fast. And there's new decisions that have more stakes. And you need to teach people that even these decisions with these high of stakes, they need to make for you. And the issue is, is that if you allow yourself to get stuck in this and get stuck in making every decision yourself, that is why so many founders end up wanting to quit. That's why they want to stop. Because

Everything feels slow. They feel like they make all the decisions and they feel like they're just constantly caught in the tactical instead of actually leading a team.

And I get what that feels like, because what it feels like is like, you know what your job is, you know what you should be, you know what your value is. Instead, you're answering questions that you're like, sometimes you're just literally trying not to pull your hair out because you're like, dude, come on. Like, I pay you how much money and you can't make this decision. Like, you know, all these things, you come to me for this, like what is going on?

And it took me years of going through this cycle in my last company to realize that it just always stems back to me. And so what I want to do is I want to walk you through exactly how to train your team to turn every decision into a six inch putt for you before that decision ever hits your desk, it ever hits your slack, it ever gets brought up to you.

Because I can tell you this is something that I constantly am doing with my team. I'm constantly retraining them on how to make decisions and what decisions should come to me versus what decisions shouldn't. And I know that if I do this properly, our company will move faster, not slower. So let's dive into step one. Step one is we have to make it clear thinking is not optional in your role.

Okay, but here's the thing. If you don't set the expectation, your team just defaults to asking instead of thinking. That is just human nature. They go to the person who is at the top of the food chain and they say, great, now you go do the thinking. I brought you the problem. I brought you the issue. I brought you what's going on. Now you go do the thinking.

And so you need to establish with the people that report to you, if you haven't done this in the most obvious manner, I swear like this is a lot of the times where it goes wrong at all is because people don't think that you want them to make decisions. They think because you've been continuing to make the decisions and not push them back to them, that it must be because you want them to, because you don't trust them, because you need to be making these decisions.

And so instead, you need to establish, hey, I don't need to make every decision. I actually want you to make the decisions. And here's the point at which I want you to bring them to me. Hey, if you bring me a decision, I expect you to do all the work to make it an easy six inch pup for me. Hey, if you bring me a decision, not fully fleshed out, not in a memo format, not written up with pros and cons, not with your recommendation or suggestion, I'm going to send it back to you and ask that you do that.

Now this does two things. One, it forces people to stop defaulting to you as their first step. Two, it empowers them to think for themselves because they know that you expect it of them. And here's the thing, at first nobody's gonna like this because thinking is harder than outsourcing thinking. And thinking is harder than delegating your thinking to your boss. But long term, they're gonna be grateful for it. And long term, this is the only way that's gonna get you out of the weeds and build a team that can actually move fast without your input.

Otherwise, you're going to grow resentful and they're going to grow resentful of you. Because at some point, they're going to say, why do I have to keep asking this motherfucker for decisions? And at some point, you're going to say, dude, I'm so sick of you looping me into everything. So that's the first thing. You've got to be clear about expectations because if you're not telling people that this is actually something you expect of them, then you can't expect them to do it. I know it sounds so simple, but if you've been making the decisions this long, you've trained them that you make the decision. And so we have to untrain them. And the first way we do that is by telling them.

Now, the second thing we want to do is we want to give them the framework. Okay, so we want to give them the framework for fast, smart decisions, how to create a six inch putt. And that is what I want to share with you guys during the rest of this podcast. Because if you want your team to think better, you have to teach them your framework for how to think. And so if you don't have one, I want to use mine, I want to share mine with you, because this is the same framework that I share with my team. Okay, the first piece to this framework is get the right information.

Most of the time, people escalate decisions because they don't even know what problem they're solving. Before bringing a decision to you, they have to be able to answer three questions. What is the problem we're solving? What is the goal of solving this problem? And what are the key facts that somebody would need to know to solve it effectively? Okay, they have to be able to answer those questions. Half the time when people write this out, they realize, oh shit, I don't even need to escalate this because you know what? I don't even know what problem I'm solving. I don't know what the goal is and I don't even have all the key facts yet.

So that's the first piece, get the right information. We have to know what problem we're trying to solve. We have to know what the outcome we want is, like what do we want to have happen? And we have to have the key facts and pieces of information that would make it relevant to be able to solve the problem. The second piece is we want to consider our options. Bad decision makers thinking yes, no answers. Good decision makers thinking trade-offs.

So, before somebody escalates a decision to you, they need to ask a few questions. One, what are two to three possible good solutions? So, you don't want people coming to you with like, here's my, here's the only solution I have and then here's two shitty ones that I wrote down just to make you feel better. It's like, no, that's not the point. The point is you want to come up with two to three solutions that are all compelling and all feel like, you know what, that could actually work.

Then you want to ask yourself, okay, what are the pros and cons of each? It sounds so simple, but it's, I mean, like most people just don't take the time to write these things out. It's like, okay, what are the pros and cons of each decision? Let's write it out. Let's see it out on a board. And then after you've written down the pros and cons, the question is, what's the most logical decision? Which one is the most obvious answer, right? And this is just based on the pros and cons.

Now, if they can't do this, they're not thinking. They're just delegating up. So you need to make sure they get the right information and then they consider the options. They come up with multiple options. Good options, not shitty options. Now, after you've done that, what are you going to do? Right? And I'm just walking you guys through. This is how I make decisions inside training my team. The next thing is you want to identify the risks. Okay? Every choice has a downside. That's just the nature of choice in general. There's an upside, there's a downside. What you want to ask yourself is,

If I pick this solution, what will go wrong? Because with every new solution comes new problems. So you want to know what are the problems that come with this solution. The second thing you want to ask yourself is what's the worst case scenario, right? So it's like, how wrong could it actually go? Is it going to go like so wrong that it could like ruin the business? It could lose key clients. We could have people quit. Or is it like, no, it could ever go that wrong. And it's actually fairly easy to reverse. And like, I think we're going to be okay no matter what happens.

We just want to understand to what extent is this a risk to the business or a threat? And then the last question is, once we've identified what the worst threat or risk is to the businesses, could we live with that? Would the business survive? Would that be okay? Is that something that we're willing to accept? Are we willing to accept worst case scenario? Or are we saying, Layla, fuck no. This thing could kill my business. I definitely don't want to do that. Now, once you have...

gotten the right information, considered the options, identified the risks about the options, they're not going to bring it to you. Okay. They're not going to do that yet. They are going to ask a colleague before asking you. Okay. So before escalating it to your boss, right? You want to tell them, hey, I want you to run this by your peers. And this is not because you don't trust them, but it's because it forces them to test their thinking before it makes its way up to you.

And the reality is, is that teams are strong because they have different perspectives from different people. And so most likely, if they have one to two people review it before it gets its way to you, it's probably going to be much better than it would otherwise, because their colleague might see like a major hole in their logic and they're going to fix that before you have to fix it.

And then here's the thing. If they don't see a hole, it's probably turned into a six-inch putt decision that they can make on their own and they can just present to you. It makes it easy. So either way, if people have no feedback, it's like, great, so you've done the work and you're doing really good here. And if they have a lot of feedback, then it's like, great, now they've saved you the time because now you're not having to go do all that work to figure out the hole in their hypothesis of how to solve this problem. And that brings me to the last piece, which

which is they're going to ask them to make a recommendation, not an ask. This is the most important part. Okay, if someone still brings it to you, because now they still feel like they want your final approval, they should never come to you with, hey, what should I do? Instead, they should say, here's the situation. Here are the options.

Here is what I intend to do moving forward. Does that work for you? You're teaching them to take ownership. You're teaching them to empower themselves, to speak as a leader, to think and to move the ball forward. And like how empowering does it feel if you like ask somebody for permission to do something?

It doesn't feel very empowering at all. But if you say, this is what I intend to do. And unless you object, I'm going to move forward with this plan. Like that feels good communicating to someone. That feels empowering. That feels like, you know what? I have a lot of respect for myself. This is,

process is how you build a thinking muscle in your team. Okay, so what you want to do is once you have established with people that you need them to make decisions, then you give them this framework, which is getting the right information, considering the options, identifying the risks, asking a colleague before they bring it to you, and then having them make a recommendation to you rather than an ask.

That is how you build that muscle in your team. Now, all of this works really well unless you do not complete the last piece, which is enforce it every single time. You cannot just say this once and expect people to stick to it. You have to hold the line. Most of the times when this doesn't work on a team, quote, doesn't work, it's because the leader continues to answer questions when they come to their plate. They continue to do the behavior that they told everyone they're not going to do.

And then they blame their team and say, well, why do they keep asking me? Well, because it's easier and because you keep answering. You have to, if somebody brings you an open-ended question, send it back to them. If somebody hasn't done the work to make it a six-inch putt, make them do it. And if they keep escalating things to you that they need to be handling, remind them of the process, reteach them.

Now, I do want to acknowledge something, which is like, I understand that at first this does slow things down because you're teaching people a new process. You're teaching people to do things on their own. You're teaching people to think. And so, yes, when they haven't done it before, it's going to in the short term slow things down. But in the long term, it's going to speed everything up.

Because your team is going to make decisions faster. They're not going to go to you because you're not the bottleneck. And they develop real leadership skills. Decision-making is a fundamental of leadership. If people on your team cannot make decisions, they're not real leaders. They're just executing your vision. They're like highly paid doers. And I don't think you want that on your team because the company is going to move at the speed of its decision-making. And the decision-making is based on how well the leaders in your company can make decisions.

Because the reality is this, if you have to make every decision in your company, especially the ones that have no high dollar amount tied to them and they are not hard to reverse and they are not impacting the future trajectory of the business, you're going to get so distracted answering and deciding all of these things that are trivial and don't matter that you're not going to focus on building the company and growing it. And I don't know how many times I say this, but like, if you're not growing the company, who's growing the company?

It's like so obvious, but it's like, we don't do this. We don't sit down and say, you know what? I'm not growing my company. I'm actually just sitting here putting out fucking fires all day. Instead we tolerate it and we're like, oh, it's okay. They need my help. Oh, they asked. It was like, you know, they said they didn't know. Fuck that. People can learn. And it's up to us to make sure that we're teaching them. It's up to us to make sure we're empowering them. Just remember, every wasted decision cycle costs time, money, and momentum, right?

And if you want your business to scale, you need leaders at every single level, not just people who wait for permission or highly paid doers. And the only way to do that is to train your team to think. Train your team to bring you only six inch putts. Even better is they go tap it in on their own. They don't even have to bring it to you. But at a minimum, they need to bring you six inch putts.

So not just asking, not just executing, but actually thinking for themselves. So to recap, we want to set the expectation. We want to teach them the six inch putt framework and we want to enforce it until it becomes second nature. And I promise you, if you do this, your future self will thank you.