Leveraging Leadership

Strategies to Protect Leadership from Low-Value Choices and Mental Clutter

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 226

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This episode covers practical ways for a Chief of Staff to reduce decision fatigue for their principal and executive team, like removing low-value tasks from their plate and organizing clear, concise email options for faster decisions. Emily shares real examples, such as giving decision options in an “A, B, C” format and using thresholds for approvals, to keep leaders focused on high-impact choices. The discussion also highlights ways for Chiefs of Staff to streamline their own decision-making by automating data collection and tightening up decision frameworks.


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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:

00:55 Clearing the Principal's Plate
01:57 Email Communication Tips
05:08 Dialogue with Your Principal
06:27 Optimizing Executive Team Decisions
07:19 Setting Decision Thresholds
09:41 Automating Data for Decision Making
12:19 Making Binary Decisions
13:51 Final Takeaways on Decision Fatigue

emily-sander_3_10-01-2025_123007:

As chief of Staff, one of the most valuable things you can do is to protect your principal and your team from decision fatigue. So if your principal is spending an inordinate amount of time on low value choices, that's time and energy being stolen from strategic high level decisions that move the needle. So your job is to clear the decks and make sure they're spending the vast majority of their time, if not all of their time. In this high quality decision mode. All right. Let's talk about principles for a second. What can you remove from their plate entirely? What should they not even be touching? What should they not even be aware of? And there's obviously fine lines and nuances between, actually they should be informed about these types of things, but there should be no decision around it versus like, they don't even need to know about that. Why are we expending any of their energy and mental bandwidth on that? Just remove that thing entirely. So it could be remove a decision or just remove that thing entirely. It gets'em all riled up for no reason and the team has it, or whatever it is. So what can be removed from their plate altogether? Next, what decisions do they need to actually make and how can you tee them up most effectively? How can you present them? And I literally think of like a, like a tee. Like a tee ball. Like when you're baseball, you put the ball on the tee or maybe golf, or you put the ball again on the tee and you set it up so a person can swing away at it. That's your job As chief of staff, tee up this decision. For your principle, and that can be done in a myriad of ways. Here's a small example, but a, uh, it's a small but. Powerful example that I use with my principal is when I would send him emails, sometimes these emails would have a decision in them and I would briefly, very briefly recap the situation. And if he was already aware of this situation, I literally could put one word or like the phrase of like, you know, here's the context. Here's, here's what we're talking about. Here's the universe we're living in. Out of all the 47 things you have, uh, remember this strategic partner negotiation. And that could be like the opening if it was something that he wasn't as aware of, or maybe he needed a refresher or maybe there was some new information that came to light, or maybe this was a brand new topic, that opening could be a little bit longer and more in depth, but it was not. Pages and pages of scroll and scroll, and there is no paragraph breaks in this thing. It was a crisp, neat, concise, easy to consume and understand. Here's out of all the things you're doing, here's what I'm talking about, and here's the context that's relevant for you. A lot of people just throw in every single data point information, and he said this, and they said this, and here's this thing and here's the context and here's the exception, and here's this data point, and here's the source material. Here's the color. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Just strip out everything except for the bare essentials. What is relevant for this communication and this decision to be made? And then, and then, and he loved this by the way. I would put literally like options or next steps, A, B, C, D. Like a multiple choice question and answer. And so he could run through that and we got to such a point where we could, we had a mind meld going on. I could almost, with a hundred percent certainty, predict what questions he would ask, what information he would want. So I would put that in the top paragraph or top sentence, and then the different options we had going forward. And I would. Be talking to the teams. I would be thinking through that myself before he ever got to it, and I would put these options or next steps, option A, option B, option C. These could be words. These might be one sentence very short. It's like a multiple choice q and a, and sometimes he would literally reply to my email with b. I would know what to do with it. But that was teeing up a decision that was, by the way, an email, not a series of meetings, and we just, and he was decisive and I would execute that decision. Small note here, I would always have the option of other, so I wasn't trying to jam him, jam him into like, there's only these three or four or five options. There was always other where he would be like, do it this way, or think about it this way, or I need more information on this. So he might ask, like I read your. Little short paragraph up top. Uh, I'm curious about this. Did we ask him this? And so he might respond with that, and I would go get that reply on that email and he'd be like, okay, go with option C. So that's kind of a shorthand, but that's an example of teeing up a decision where they don't have to like go running around and have, you know, all these conversations. You've already done that and you've teed up the relevant information. You can do that in a whole bunch of different ways, but that's just an example of teeing up the relevant information for your principal to make a good decision. Okay. The next thing to do with your principle is have this conversation or have this dialogue Around. Look, part of my job is to make sure your decision making capital is being spent on the highest impact calls. On the highest impact decisions. There are so many decisions that only the CEO can make, and if you have a different kind of principle, only the CRO, the CTO, the CHRO, whatever it is, their decisions only they can make. Given their role. So they need to be focused on those types of things. They need to be focused on things that move the needle, not the minutia, not the distractions, get that off their plate, but have that conversation or an, an ongoing conversations about that and really make that part of, my job is to. Keep you here and playing in this space. And hopefully they're gonna be like, yeah, like that's where I wanna play as well. Tell me if I'm getting out of bounds and, and, and there can be banter and, and pushback around what that looks like. Actually, Emily, I need to be in those. Don't, don't box me out of that. I need to be in those discussions. Okay. Like, do you need to be in those or can I, Nope. I need to be in those. All right, cool. Have those discussions. But, but keep it, keep it so both of you are pointing at the same thing. I want you principle. In the best spot to be making these high impact calls Okay, next executive team. So running a similar process for your entire executive team as chief of staff. You can sit there and literally, I would go through the roster of my exec team and I would say, okay, what is she got on her plate? What does he have on his plate? What are items where our CFO is spending time on unnecessary approvals? She's sitting there and she's getting these pings and she's getting these slacks, and someone else can approve that, that level of that amount or that type of decision should be delegated to someone else who is actually closer to the information and is perfectly capable of making that decision and might be in better position to make that decision. So what unnecessary things or these like micro, micro decisions, micro calls are being. Put on all of your executive leadership team's plates, and can you remove those? How can you best remove those? The other kind of nuance thing here with the exec team is where are the thresholds? So for instance, I just mentioned the CFO. So a pretty straightforward threshold would be anything below this amount of money can be approved by VPs and this amount of money by directors and this amount of money by managers. Those were like clear T thresholds of decision making. You can apply that same principle to other types of decisions. Hey. With, um, tier one customers, our strategic enterprise customers, we're gonna need a senior account manager to make these types of decisions. Anything else a account executive can make or a solutions engineer can make, or whatever you might have those types of designations, it might be, look, if this is gonna impact these two initiatives, anything that impacts. The direction of these two initiatives and the direction we're going with these has to be run through the chief of staff, whatever it is, but make sure that those thresholds are as clear as possible. Are there always, or most likely gonna be some like, uh, it's just based on the scenario, case by case. Sure. And then make sure, like, let's, let's just have that conversation and hopefully it's just not a big deal. People have each other's back. Let's do a quick call. Let's do a quick slack just to touch base. Cool. Cool. But on everything that you can just have these general guidelines that people can go off of and hopefully they're not going to. Nitpick to the letter and to the minutiae of like, you didn't say it like this, so therefore I thought I could do it. Hopefully it's in the spirit of take the gist of this threshold. Take the spirit or the way that it is intended and you kind of can pick up what I'm like, yeah, yeah. For this kind of stuff. Emily, you want us to check in with you? Yes, exactly. For this kind of stuff. We got it. Yep. Just run with that. Cool. So have those types of discussions and expectation setting and rechecking in with people on those ongoing items. Okay. And finally, you wanna remove decision fatigue from yourself As chief of staff, that's a big, big deal. So you've got things flying from every direction across the business at you, and you've gotta make some decisions too. Again, you wanna be making high quality decisions in strategic areas. Your job is not to tally up as many decisions as you can make in a day. It's No, no, no, no. Where should I be placing my focus and placing intentionally, placing my energy to make decisions? I think you can proactively tee up things like context and data for yourself, so that might be okay. I always have to make a call on, I don't know this every month or this every week or whatever. It's okay. I always will wanna know this, this, and this. Can I automate that data from a system? So every time I have to make that decision, I always have that at hand. Can I, work with a team one time to stand up a automated poll that just gets like, I don't know, a Salesforce report sent to me, to my inbox every Friday morning. So I have it right there when I'm trying to make that decision. Can I automate or work with. Team members that I might have on my team or I'm working with collaboratively on can we tee up the trade-offs? So understanding as much big picture context as I can. Before as I'm making that decision. So it could be okay, like, let me use account managers again. The account managers are gonna have the closest information on the strategic book of business, and I want this type of information from last week when I'm making this decision. So I'm gonna ask them to either send me. Some anecdotal information on email and have it to me by Friday morning, or I'm going to say, Hey, can you just keep tabs on this kind of stuff? And as you're going through your regular cadence of weekly check-ins with your customers in this Salesforce field, can you make sure to put any notes. Along those lines. You're doing that. Anyway, you should be tracking this stuff anyway, but just make sure you have this slant on stuff.'cause I'm gonna be pulling from this field and I'm gonna be looking for that stuff to make these kinds of decisions on Friday mornings. So you collect all those data feeds and then you have the information you want or need. Right there you have some of the trade off information. Big picture. Okay. If we do this, that customer might be at risk. Okay, this one's looking better now. Okay, so maybe that's a different decision this week. And then you also have, if you want recommendations from people. So you can suck in recommendations, trade-offs from different per perspectives around the organization. And you can collect them and take them all together and say, okay. Big picture, cross department, connecting all the dots. I'm taking what other people are seeing in their specific areas and they're giving me their opinion and their recommendation, and now overall, I need to either make a decision on that or possibly make a recommendation to my principal based on that information. But teeing all that up for yourself and being aware of all of those elements, I think is a really good exercise for a chief of staff to go through. And another thing that goes along with that, actually really quick, the example that popped into my head is, can you make it binary, not open-ended. So can you make it Yes. No, go stop. Green red. Versus what do you think about this? Or what are your kind of recommendations and pros and cons and puts and takes here. So if you can make it like boom, boom, that also helps with decision fatigue.'cause part of it is quantity and volume. Yes. But part of, part of volume is like the weight of the thing, right? It's a weighty decision. That's a big decision. Okay. Are we gonna have to lay off people? How many are we gonna shut down this product line? Are we going to put all our chips on the table with budget on here, and hopefully in 18 months we have this thing stood up and ready to go and there's market fit. Like those are big, weighty decisions. So if you can say some of those. Why we as leaders and executive get paid the big bucks to make those big, weighty, meaty decisions. And part of it is getting the decisions that that don't have to be open-ended into a as tight a compartment as they can be. So you wanna make those like tight decisions, okay? Yes. No. If, and you can do this for all the, all the parties we talked about for your principal, can you make those tighter decisions for your exec team? Can you do that for yourself? Can you do that? So I would have a think about, there's the, the quantity of decisions, and then there's the weight and the heft of a decision. So think about those elements as well. Alright, so takeaways we've talked about. At the end of the day, reducing decision fatigue isn't about the, isn't just about the amount of decisions you make. It's about it's, it's about preventing the wrong people from making the wrong decisions or making sure the right people make the right decisions. You know what I mean? It's also around filtering, framing, and focusing. Boom, three F's, alliteration. Here we go. Filtering, framing, and focusing. Those were good. So we're gonna filter. Decisions based on who's making that, like what's the appropriate decision, what's relevant for them to make, what can only they do? We are framing that, so we're giving context, we're teeing it up, we're framing it in the most helpful and accurate manner, and we're focusing people and ourselves on what we should be focused on. So if you go through some of those, some of the elements and considerations we've talked about in this episode, I really think as chief of staff, one of your biggest value adds is helping your principal and your team with decision fatigue. Because if they can be making fewer higher quality decisions, the team, the company, the customers will just run better. All right, with that, I'll catch you next week on leveraging leadership.