Leveraging Leadership

Stop the Bottleneck: Keep Things Moving By Spreading Decisions Around

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 188

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This episode covers how bottlenecks form when every decision goes through the CEO and shows how a Chief of Staff can help move decision-making power to the leadership team and even frontline managers. Emily explains how shifting decisions after a reorg, giving authority to those closer to the information, and using a process of transitioning decisions from the CEO to others can speed things up. She also shares a real-life example about cruise ship captains making rerouting calls during a hurricane to show the power of putting decisions in the hands of those closest to the action.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

00:52 Role of the Chief of Staff in Decision Distribution
02:00 Empowering the Leadership Team
04:22 Decentralizing Decisions to the Front Lines
06:49 Case Study: Cruise Line Decision Making
07:57 Creating an Effective Decision-Making System

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if every decision flows through your CEO, your company has a bottleneck. That's not a strategy. Part of your job as chief of staff is to take a look at the organization as a whole and say, Where do decision making rights live? Who is making calls on what? Many, many times things get bottlenecked with the CEO and everything has to be run through them. Oh, we have to talk to the CEO first. Oh, let's pause. Let's wait to hear back. Let's make sure it's okay before we move forward. Delay, delay, delay. Then all sorts of subsequent problems happen. One of your cool jobs as chief of staff is going, okay, where did these decision rights live and where should they live? it's like, look, three months ago, this is where that decision should have lived. It was spot on. we did a reorg. Now we have, roles shifting around, so people are just naturally closer to this information. Or hey, we've had leaders who have grown in their capability and maybe before they weren't quite ready to make that call, but now they are. So all these different factors come into play and your job is to dynamically and continually and, and, and keep up with the evolution of, okay, now we can move this over here. Now it makes sense to move this to this person over here, so many of the times its CEO, has a whole bunch of decisions. Those should be distributed to the lt, to the leadership team, and it's going okay. Among the decisions the CEO has, which ones belong there?'cause a lot of them do belong there. And a lot of them is like, Nope, we need, we need the final call to come from the CEO O. And that's just how it is on this particular decision. Many, many decisions can live with the LT and don't ever have to hit the CEO's desk. That is a magical time. That is a magical thing when you're like, RLT is perfectly capable to make this call. And certain individuals might be equipped to make that call and it doesn't even have to. Use time and energy and mental capacity and bandwidth from the CEO. It lives with lt. And sometimes these take conversations and sometimes they take a brief transition period where it's like, Hey, CEO, you used to make this call. We're gonna move this to the CCOO with counsel from the entire lt. and maybe the first one or two times it's a C-O-O Takes point on that decision. Gathers input from the lt, makes a recommendation saying, here's the recommendation, we're gonna move forward with this. By next Friday, barring any major objections, CEO either says, good to go or says nothing, and therefore the decision and action steps proceed. You do that once or twice, and then if there's like a, actually I would make sure you're thinking about this, this, and this, too. CEOO goes, oh, That's good to know. So COO. Then the next time they take point on that decision, gather input from the LT, and then makes the recommendation back up to the CEO With the feedback incorporated from the last time the CEO said, think of this, this, and this. CEO goes, yep, you're good to go. They do that cycle one more time. CEO says, yep, you're good to go. And now the COO and the LT have that decision and it doesn't even hit the CEO's desk anymore. I've seen this happen and it can be very effective. The other way this could happen is, the chief of staff and or the LT just take a decision, right? If it's like, look, the CEO one might not even notice if that decision is not on their plate anymore. two, it needs to move. So sometimes it's like they might not want to give it up, but it needs to move someplace else, and you just do that and then it's just the way it is. That's absolutely a scenario as well. So as chief of staff, apply judgment here and discern which, which case calls for which action and which workflow. But there's usually decisions that can come off of the CEO's plate and if you have a strong C-Suite team, then you have lots of options to distribute that decision making power. I would also, just to throw in here. Have one person be the end all be all like shot color or tiebreaker. So it might be kind of a racy concept. You talk about the racy methodology where this one person makes a decision, but these people are consulted and or these people or stakeholders have to be informed. If a decision is made about the onboarding process, there's lots of stakeholders that at the very least, need to be informed of that change.'cause it affects the handoffs and the transitions and their workflows for their various departments, et cetera, et cetera. So just having kind of an eye and ear for that as well. I. So CEO to leadership team, I would also encourage you to look at is the leadership team holding onto too many decisions? Do you have very capable VPs, directors, managers, who are closer to the front lines, which is a huge advantage, right? So My. Personal opinion is getting decisions closer to the front lines where people are closer to the actual information and closer to the environment and kind of what's happening and what the effect and different impacts of a decision would be, the better. So if you can think about your organization and say, how do I move decisions closest to the the front lines? I think that's a huge advantage. Few points you have to balance with that. some decisions should naturally live with the director versus the manager, or the VP versus the director or the C-suite, et cetera. sometimes people, you can give'em context of the big picture, and that's very helpful and you should, but some people, they can't quite connect the dots or integrate that, or it doesn't make sense to them. Or they're not quite sure how that affects their day-to-day. So give them enough context, give'em the context they can handle to help them do their job. But some decisions, some larger decisions are just like, I'm not equipped to, to handle that or think about that in the role that I have today. And so some decisions need to live. With the VP or the C-Suite member. But I've had CSRs who, like you, give them information, they're on front lines with the customer and they understand the context of their decisions and they can make better decisions and more informed decisions on the fly. If you give'em that decision making power, like look on a call I trust you to make this call or that call on the fly when you're talking to a customer. So think about getting decisions closer to the front lines. Quick story about this. So I was on a cruise several, few years ago now. It was during Hurricane Fiona. So Hurricane Fiona was like spinning up and it was definitely coming in our direction. And we learned that our particular cruise line made decisions differently than most cruise lines. Most cruise lines corporate. Corporate headquarters made the call of if to pull back their ships or to reroute their ships. And that's a big deal for cruise lines.'cause cruise lines are like, you're going to like these destinations and these set ports, and that's why people sign up for that cruise and they wanna go there. So to reroute a ship is a huge deal and it has lots of economic factors, et cetera, et cetera. Our cruise line gave that decision to the captain of the ship. And when I heard that, I was relieved because I was like, that makes sense to me, because the captain is closer to the storm. They're trained on how to steer a ship and how to keep that safe. They know the puts and takes and the pros and cons and the nuances and all the different things. So that was a huge relief to me, and that's my general philosophy for running a business and, distributing decision making rights across the business as well. Okay. So with all that said, as a chief of staff, if you wanna step back and say, okay, today, where do decisions live? And then today, where should decisions live? What's the most appropriate? What's the most relevant? what is the best way to move those decisions? Is it a conversation, is it a round of iterations, or is it just like this is now here? Done. It's just the way it is. which is a valid option by the way. And at the end of the day, the bottom line here is how do I create a system where the decisions flow to the right people at the right time? That sounds tri. It sounds simple, but if you get decisions to the right people at the right time who can make the best call, you're giving yourself the highest probability of success of the team success, of the company success. and when you do this well, your team builds trust. Your team is faster, and your team is stronger. So this is a cool lens to look at as chief of staff, where do decision making rights live. All right, and with that, I'll catch you next time on leveraging leadership.