Make HARD Decisions FASTER (with Eric Pliner)

The first is that you have to make difficult decisions with intent. You can't leave them to default because like I said before, not making a decision is a decision and it's probably one that's not going to work out well for you in the end. You've got to be able to make it with intent and quickly. And so to make that faster and to make those decisions with integrity and with insight, start thinking now about what matters to you, your morality, what you believe about right and wrong, and get clear about that by reflecting deeply on where it comes from. Number two, start paying attention to a wider range of voices. As we're seeing with companies like Starbucks and Amazon right now, if you're not listening to your employees, you will find that they will begin organizing and the rise of labor again in a new way and of union organizing is a function in part of companies not listening to their workers about what they need. Start listening to as many people as you can who have different points of view from you. Number two, understand your ethical context by gathering that subjective human data from the people around you. And then number three, know what your role is. Who are your stakeholders and what are their expectations of you? What do you do when different stakeholder groups have different expectations that come into conflict? One says you must take care of your people, the other says you must spend less. Now what do you do? Well, how are you going to reconcile those? You're going to understand what your ethical context is, what's helpful or harmful for the business, and what you believe about right and wrong. Those three dimensions form a triangle. When any two sides come into conflict, look to the third to help you to make the choice. I like to say there are four V's in how people think about their relationship to your decisions. People believe that either you're off making decisions on your own and you don't care about what they think and in that case you're going to get a bit of rebellion from them at some point.