My experience of traditional, hierarchical organizations has been that senior executives pass down an edict, and that’s the decision - you simply follow it. What I’ve also seen through time and in my own career is that a collaborative, inclusive leadership and decision-making style is more successful. It gets you more diversity of thinking and experience, more well-rounded ideas and better decisions.
Proof that the world has changed is that my entry-level hires approach decisions entirely differently than my tenured employees. When you marry those two approaches, you get a great middle ground: youthful exuberance with no barriers, plus tenured experience and performance, with some scars. That’s really where open organizational thinking and decision-making become highly valuable.
There comes a point, of course, when you can’t have a full democracy where every person and every idea and opinion gets fully vetted and reviewed before you make a decision. I find that once I solicit enough ideas to form a breadth and diversity of knowledge on an issue, I have what I need to make a decision. The dividend is when I present my recommendation, I’ve synthesized many people’s ideas into my own, so when people look at that recommendation they see their own idea reflected, which increases the likelihood that they’re going to support it.
How inclusive you want to be in your decision-making depends on your leadership style. How do you motivate people? How do you influence them? Through loyalty and advocacy, or dictatorship and top-down, authoritative threatening? If your leadership style is authoritative and dictatorial, odds are you’re less likely to have open decision-making and involve people in your overall recommendation.
Your opinions are not your own
In my experience, if you operate more from a motivational, influence-based perspective, you draw people in, you draw their ideas in, you draw their energy in, and you use it. I always say to my wife, my opinions are not mine. They are the aggregation of multiple smart people’s opinions whom I asked for input. Then I synthesized it, consolidated it, and made it my own. I find this makes for more successful outcomes because I’ve pulled in other people’s ideas, quite often people that are more experienced, smarter than me, and that have different viewpoints than me. Ultimately I make a decision with their input and it helps me get them on board, but it also helps me make better decisions.
Has my style evolved? Definitely. I used to feel that I needed to get all ten executives on the same page before we could move forward, which meant a lot of one-on-ones. Today I don’t spend my time running around the office making sure everybody has bought into the recommendation. I make sure the key stakeholders are aware, and I solicit them. But they’re also confident that my recommendation is more inclusive than just my opinions.
We’ve changed as an organization as well. That has allowed us to make good decisions based on diverse information, but do it faster. I’m not spending unnecessary cycles, and I’m not wasting people’s time going over something that’s not relevant to them, or something that’s so clear today they might ask, “Why are you even talking to me about this?”
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Paul Brady's responsibilities at Arbella span infrastructure, application development and IT core services. Paul previously spent 10+ years at Liberty Mutual where he was the Senior Director of IT. He has particular expertise in the design and delivery of cost-effective, high-performing information technology organizations accountable for providing applications and infrastructure to support business strategies.
