008: Decisive | Chip and Dan Heath | Decide Like They're Watching | Jeffrey Scott Stanton

Decide Like They're Watching

Inspired by: Decisive  |  Chip and Dan Heath

It's the end of a long day. Something has gone completely wrong. A deal collapsed, an agent gave notice, a problem landed on your desk that needs an answer right now. You can feel the pull to decide — fast, certain, alone in your head. So you decide. And it feels like leadership. It feels like decisiveness. It feels like exactly what the moment called for. And then weeks later, you're living with it. And so is everyone else that decision touched.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

A decision is not a private act. That is the most important idea in this episode, and the one most leaders have never been told. Every choice you make is observed, interpreted, and reverse engineered by the people you lead. They take the decision you made and work it backwards to figure out what you actually value — not what you say you value, but what you protect when protecting it costs you something.

In this episode, Jeffrey Scott Stanton draws on Chip and Dan Heath's Decisive to examine the four traps that cause smart, experienced leaders to make predictably bad decisions — and the specific moves that get around each one. Narrow framing. Confirmation bias. Short-term emotion. Overconfidence. These are not signs of weakness. They are standard equipment in every human mind, including yours.

This is not a book report. It is a precise, applied examination of how decisions actually get made under pressure in a real estate brokerage — and what separates the leaders whose judgment their teams trust from the ones whose teams quietly hedge against every call they make.

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IN THIS EPISODE

• Why a decision is not a private act — and how your team reverse engineers every call you make to figure out what you actually value
• The four traps that cause smart, experienced leaders to make predictably bad decisions: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence
• The vanishing options test — what to ask when you're stuck between two options that both cost you something
• How to reality test your assumptions and why going looking for evidence that proves you wrong is the most important thing you can do before a high-stakes decision
• The 10-10-10 tool, the overnight rule, the pre-mortem, and the tripwire — four practical moves that work in a real estate brokerage
• Two stories: Karen, whose fast decision taught her team how to hold her hostage — and Paul, whose disciplined decision signaled more about his judgment than any hire could have
• What to do when there is no good option — how to make the least bad decision cleanly and stand behind it
• The one person every leader needs in their corner — and why finding them may be the most important decision-making move you make this year

TIMESTAMPS

Note: Timestamps are pulled from the recorded transcript.

• 00:00:00 — Cold Open
• 00:02:25 — Welcome and Series Introduction
• 00:04:12 — The Book Behind This Episode: Decisive — Chip and Dan Heath
• 00:05:13 — What a Decision Actually Is in a Leadership Context
• 00:06:35 — Your Team Reverse Engineers Every Decision You Make
• 00:08:03 — Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions — The Four Traps
• 00:10:09 — Trap 1 — Narrow Framing: The Binary That Isn't
• 00:11:07 — The Promotion Story — All Four Traps in One Conversation
• 00:13:38 — The Vanishing Options Test
• 00:17:00 — The Team Leader Who Found the Third Option
• 00:18:21 — Trap 2 — Confirmation Bias: Certainty Is Not Clarity
• 00:20:33 — Reality Testing and the 10-10-10 Tool
• 00:21:25 — The Overnight Rule
• 00:21:51 — Mid-Episode Sponsor Message — The CE Shop
• 00:22:33 — The Manager Who Almost Abandoned a Loyal Agent
• 00:24:32 — The Hook and Decision-Making — Connection to Episode 6
• 00:25:07 — Trap 3 — Overconfidence: Plan to Be Wrong
• 00:26:07 — The Pre-Mortem
• 00:27:56 — The Tripwire
• 00:30:00 — When There Is No Good Option — The Least Bad Decision
• 00:32:06 — Karen — The Decision That Taught Her Team to Hold Her Hostage
• 00:34:29 — Paul — The Decision That Signaled More Than Any Hire Could
• 00:38:10 — The Four Questions Every Leader Should Ask
• 00:39:00 — WRAP — Widen, Reality Test, Obtain Distance, Prepare to Be Wrong
• 00:42:37 — Find Your One Trusted Person
• 00:43:00 — Close

LINES FROM THIS EPISODE

• "Ending the discomfort is not the same thing as making the right decision."
• "Under pressure with no process, every leader defaults to the same thing — the fastest call that quiets the discomfort."
• "Your team does not just watch the decision. They reverse engineer it."
• "They will believe the decision over your speech every single time, because the decision is what's real."
• "Certainty is not the same as clarity. Under pressure they feel identical."
• "The version of you that decides at 9:00 PM after a hard day, and the version of you that decides at 9:00 AM after a restful night, is not the same decision-maker."
• "You are leaving instructions for the version of you who will be too invested to act."
• "The decision was private. What it signaled about his judgment was not."
• "You're not deciding whether you're right. You're deciding what happens if you're wrong."
• "The leaders people trust most are not the ones who make the easy calls. They are the ones who make the hard calls like adults and stand behind them."

BOOK AND RESOURCES

Book referenced in this episode:

• Decisive — Chip and Dan Heath | Available on Amazon

Research and concepts referenced:

• Chip and Dan Heath — the four villains of decision-making and the WRAP framework: Widen your options, Reality test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, Prepare to be wrong
• Narrow framing — the binary trap that closes before the thinking even begins
• Confirmation bias — how a preference hardens into certainty and stops the search for disconfirming evidence
• Short-term emotion — how the feeling of the moment makes the decision and calls itself logic
• Overconfidence — the normal human tendency to be far more certain about the future than the future justifies
• The vanishing options test — forcing the mind to generate options it had stopped looking for
• 10-10-10 — evaluating a decision at 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years to create distance from short-term emotion
• Pre-mortem — imagining the decision has already failed to surface the weaknesses you are motivated to ignore
• Tripwire — setting in advance the signal that tells you a decision is going wrong, while your judgment is still clear

Note: This episode is inspired by Chip and Dan Heath's framework, combined with behavioral research on decision-making and real-world leadership application. It is not a book summary.

CONNECT WITH JEFFREY

Jeffrey Scott Stanton is a coach, consultant, advisor, and speaker who has spent his career helping leaders and organizations perform at their highest level under pressure. As the former Executive Vice President of Learning and Development for Douglas Elliman Real Estate, he built and led development programs at scale across one of the largest residential real estate companies in the country.

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffreyscottstanton/
• Instagram: instagram.com/jeffreyscottstanton
• Website: jeffreyscottstanton.com
• Network: J Squared Podcast Productions — jsquaredpodcast.com

The Leadership Series is his masterclass on leadership delivered in podcast form — built for people who are currently leading, stepping into leadership, or building toward it. Each episode combines behavioral research, applied psychology, and real-world leadership experience into content that is as practical as it is substantive.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's the end of the long day. We've all been there. Something has just gone completely wrong. A deal collapsed, an agent gave notice, a problem landed on your desk that needs to be answered right then and there. At least so you think. People are waiting on you, and you can feel it. The pull to decide right now, right then and there, to act, to resolve the discomfort of not knowing by simply making a choice. So you decide, fast, certain, alone in your head. And it feels like leadership. It feels like decisiveness. It feels like exactly what the moment called for. And then, weeks later, you're living with it. And so is everyone else that decision touched. You find yourself replaying it, knowing the way you usually know that you are not actually thinking clearly when you made that decision or when you made that call. You were just done sitting in the uncertainty. So you ended it. And ending the discomfort is not the same thing as making the right decision. The problem was not that you're not intelligent, you're smart. You have done this a long time. The problem is that you had no process, and under pressure with no process, every leader defaults to the same thing: the fastest call that quiets the discomfort, which is the exact thing that produces the decisions we spend months regretting. And here's the thing somewhere in your team is someone who once watched you make a call badly. And ever since they check to see what kind of mood you're in or what you're doing before they bring anything real to you. You never saw it happen. You just have a person now who manages you instead of trusting you. And that is that's what a decision actually is. Not the private act of judgment. It's a signal that your team reads to size up whether your judgment is sound, whether the next call that actually affects them will be a good decision or a bad decision. And they're reading every single one of them.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world. This is the leadership series.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Welcome back to the Jeffrey Scott Stanton Podcast. This is the leadership series, eight episodes in. We've talked about influence, we've talked about vision, we've talked about communication, standards, trust, emotional control, and consistency. Today, we're talking about the thing that all those eventually come down to: the moment you have to decide. Leadership is not tested in planning. It's usually tested in the decisions, usually under pressure, usually with incomplete information, and usually when you give anything for just one more day to think about it, but you don't have that extra day. And for the people not yet leading a team, this one matters now. It matters the way you make decisions today in your own business, in your own life, and with your own clients. Because that is the way you will make them when everything is rotting on them. The process is the same. The only thing that changes is the stakes. If we have not met before, I am Jeffrey Scott Stanton. I am your coach, I'm a consultant, I'm an advisor, and a speaker. I'm a former executive vice president of learning development for Douglas Hellman Real Estate. My work is focused on behavioral strategy, learning design, performance enablement, and leadership development in high-paced, high-stakes sales environments like real estate. I built my entire career training teams, individual agents, and leaders to perform at their highest level. This series is built episode by episode, yet each episode does stand on its own. So if you're here for the first time, you may want to go back and start with episode one, or you can start right here. Before we go any further, I'd like to sincerely thank our family partners, Subi, the CE Shop, and Wise Agent. Their information is in the show notes, and this show would not be possible without them. Please thank them for being partners and their support. This episode, like most episodes in the leadership series, is inspired by a book. And today it's inspired by Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers spent years studying why people, intelligent people, experienced people, made predictably bad decisions and what actually separates good decisions from poor ones. What they found is the difference is almost never intelligence, it's the process. They identified four specific traps that distort decisions and a simple framework for getting around them. In the book, they call these four the villains of decision making. I'm gonna call them traps. But if you read decisive, it's the same idea. We're gonna take those four traps and look at what they do inside the decisions of a leader inside the real estate brokerage. The decisions a leader makes, the ones with real people on the other side of them. This is not a book report, it's the real application of these principles in real life. I want to start somewhere most leaders never think to look. Not about how to make a better decision. We'll get there. But what a decision actually is in a leadership context, because most leaders are wrong about it. And being wrong about it changes everything. Most leaders experience a decision as a private act. You gather what you know, you weigh it, and then you make a decision. You choose. It happens in your head, it feels internally all yours. It's not. A decision is the most visible thing a leader does. Every action, every choice you make is observed, interpreted, and remembered by the people you lead. When you kept the top producer or treated other people badly, your team didn't just watch you tolerate behavior. They watched you make a decision about what you actually value when value costs something. When you rush to hire someone because you were desperate for their production, your team didn't just meet a new colleague. They watched you decide under pressure. When you let someone go, if you have to let someone go in that hard moment, the people who remain don't lose a coworker. They just learned what happens when a leader is frustrated. And it's something that you think about for a second. Because here is the part most leaders miss entirely. Your team just doesn't watch the decision. They reverse engineer it. They take the choice you made and they work it backwards to figure out what you really value. Not what you say you value in your meanings, but what you actually protect when protecting is actually costing you something. You can talk about culture every week, every day, but the day you keep that producer who is poisoning that culture, your team learns in one move that numbers matter more than words, and numbers matter more than this culture that you preach. They will believe the decision over your speech every single time, because the decision is what's real. The speech is just what they hope is real and what you hope is real. Your team is not just living with your decisions, they're reading them, and the conclusions they draw from those decisions often are going to last so much longer than the decisions itself. People forget the details, they forget the circumstances, they forget the context, the pressure that you under, all forgotten. But they remember what your leadership signaled. Every decision is a data point in an ongoing assessment that your team is running, whether they are aware of it or not. Is this person's judgment sound? Do they think clearly when it matters or do they react? That read on your judgment shapes how much weight your people give your calls moving forward. And it is built more than almost anything else on the decisions they watch you make. Back in episode five, we talked about how people read the small things leaders do. A decision is not a small thing, it's one of the most loudest signals you're ever going to send as a leader. And a high-stakes decision made well tells your team something about your judgment that a hundred good intentions cannot. And a decision made badly from ego, from panic, from fear, from narrow thinking tells something big too. Because your team is not just disappointed in a bad outcome, they're recalibrating what they expect from your judgment the next time it's going to count and the next time it affects them. So when we are talking about better decisions, we're not talking about a private skill that lives in your head. We're talking about the most public expression of your judgment as a leader that can exist. And it raises the obvious question if decisions matter this much, why do smart, experienced leaders make bad ones so often? Here's what most people believe about decision making. They believe good decisions come from intelligence, experience, and instinct. Smart people with a lot of reps and a good gut feeling make good calls. So when a decision goes wrong, the explanation is usually I should have known better, I missed something, I need more experience, I should have thought about it more. Now, research says that it's something much more uncomfortable. The reason smart, experienced leaders make bad decisions is not the lack of intelligence or experience. It is the human mind that comes with built-in flaws that intelligence does not fix. You cannot outsmart this. You can only build a process that catches them and helps you make better decisions. And leaders who do not have a process are at the mercy of four traps every single time they decide. The first is what's called narrow framing. We see our choices in far more limited terms than what they actually are. The second is confirmation bias. Once we lean towards an option, we collect evidence that supports that option and dismiss evidence that doesn't support that option. The third is short-term emotion. In the heat of that moment, your feelings make the decision and we call it logic. It's not. The fourth is overconfidence. We are far too sure about how the future will unfold when we make a decision. Those are the four traps. They're not signs of weakness, they are standard equipment in every human mind, including yours and including mine. Leaders who make good decisions are not the ones who are immune to these traps. There's no such people. No one is immune to them. The leaders who make good decisions are the ones who have built a process that catches the traps before the traps can cost them something or everything. Let me show you how all four of these fire as fast as can be at once. A broker I knew was losing his second in command, and one of his top producers came to him totally frustrated, hinting she might leave too. In that conversation, feeling the ground move underneath him. He offered her a team lead right there on the spot. Right there to keep her for no other reason besides to keep her. He made her responsible for a group of eight other agents. This is what happened in his head. He framed it as binary. Promote her now or lose her. That's narrow framing. He focused on how good of a producer she was and let that stand in for whether she can actually lead other people or not to completely different things. It's confirmation bias. He wanted to resolve a fear in that moment because making the offer felt better than sitting there with the worry that she'd walk next door. Short-term emotion. And he was certain she would grow into this position. No honest look at whether she had ever shown any interest in being a leader or adapting to leadership. That's overconfidence in your decision. Four traps, one conversation, one promotion he could not quietly or easily take back. Within a few months, it was clear she was a great producer, but struggling as a leader. Those two things have nothing to do with each other, producing and leading, two separate skill sets. The ages under her grew frustrated. She was short with them. She had no patience for developing anyone. And her own production slipped because she was stretched into a role that she really never wanted, but sounded good at the time. The whole team felt it. And now the broker was stuck with a harder decision created entirely by the first one. Walk back that promotion and team lead position he had announced to everyone and damage her standing in front of the entire team. Or leave a leader in place who was quietly making eight people worse. He did not lose everything, but he spent the next year untangling a title he had handed in a single anxious conversation to someone who shouldn't have gotten the title. Not because she was a bad agent, because he said yes fast, certain, and alone. Before he had done a single thing to find out whether she thought she should even lead. Let us walk through the traps that do the most damage and what you can actually do about them. The binary trap. Most bad decisions don't start with bad judgment, they start with a question that only had two answers. Listen to how leaders actually talk about decisions. Should I fire this agent or not? Should I confront this person or let it go? Should I take the listing or pass it up? Should I start this marketing campaign or not? Whether or not yes or no, this or that, the decision gets framed as a choice between two options before the thinking even begins. This is called narrow framing and is the most common starting point for a decision the leader's gonna regret. You know, we touched on the most famous version of this back in episode three. It was a fool's choice. Either I have this hard conversation and damage the relationship, or I protect the relationship and stay quiet. I told you then that that was false. That was false binary. And here's what I want to add now. That binary is not just a communication problem, it is a decision-making pattern that shows up everywhere in leadership. It's the two-option trap that is the default setting of the mind under pressure. And almost every time the two options you are staring at are not the only two options that exist, or not the only two choices that exist. And listen, here and here's why it's so hard to escape this trap. Binary feels like clarity. Two options, weigh them, pick one that feels decisive, and it is. So, under pressure, when you most want to look like you're in control and in command, the mind, your mind narrows it to two choices precisely because two choices feel like leadership. The irony of this is brutal. The thing that makes you feel decisive in the moment is the thing that produces the decision that you are gonna regret every single time. Real decisiveness is not picking fast between two options, it's refusing to accept that there are only two options. There's always more. The Heaths in their book or for tests that I find very useful option, it's called the vanishing options test. Imagine you cannot choose either one of those options currently in front of you. These are the two options. You can't choose either one, both are gone. Now, what would you do? The moment you ask that question, the mind is forced to generate options it had stopped looking for. Should I fire this agent or not? Becomes. What would I do if firing them and keeping them were both off the table? And suddenly there's another answer. Maybe it's a direct development conversation with a clear timeline, a change in their role, a change in their team, a defined uh trial structure with an explicit agreed-upon expectations, a different structure entirely than they were. None of these existed when the question was just whether or not whether or not to keep them. Let me make this real. A team leader I worked with for a while was certain that she had to let go of one of her agents. Absolutely, Jeff, I had to let them go. This agent was producing well, but creating friction with everyone around him. The decision had collapsed into these two choices or two options, or so she thought. Keep him and keep losing the people around him, or cut him and lose his production. She was generally stuck because both options cost her something that she couldn't afford. So when I asked her that vanishing question, if you cannot do either one of those two things, what would you do? She sat there with it. And then she said something she had not considered once in three months of agonizing thought about this. She could restructure how he worked so he almost had no collaborative touch points with the people he was alienating. Give him a lane he was actually good in and remove him from situations where he did damage. It wasn't a compromise, it was a third option. And this third option had been invisible the entire time because she had framed the decision as binary, a this or that. She kept the production, she stopped the bleeding, and the option had been there all along. She just could not say it from the inside. Whether or not should I do this or should I do that? The next time you hear yourself frame a decision as whether or not, just stop. That phrase is a signal that the trap has already closed. Ask what you would do if neither of those options were available. The answer is often the decision you are actually supposed to make. The next trap is the most dangerous one. Certainty. Because it does not feel like a trap. It feels like it creates clarity. And this is how it works. Once you have a preference, once part of you has already decided, your mind quietly shifts from evaluating to justifying. You start noticing the information that supports what you already want and discounting the information that doesn't. This is confirmation bias and pairs with something we spent an entire episode on, episode six. We talked about the hook. The moment emotion takes the wheel and a response runs automatically. Cognitive fusion, where thought becomes so fused with reality that it stops feeling like a thought and starts becoming the truth. That's exactly what happens in high-stake decisions. The emotion of the moment, the urgency, the frustration, the fear of losing something generates a preference. And that preference hardens into certainty. And that certainty feels like clarity, but it's not clarity. Certainty is not the same as clarity. And under pressure, they feel identical. This is the decision made the day you found out that an agent of yours was talking to a competitor. The decision made in the meeting where someone challenged you in front of the room. The decision made at night as a deal was falling apart and you needed to do something. The emotion was real, the pressure was real, and the decision came out of something that felt completely justified in the moment. But you looked at it very differently a week later. You know, there's two moves for this, two things you can do, and they work together. The first is to reality test your assumptions. Actively go looking for information that would prove you wrong. Not for information that confirms you, you're gonna find that automatically, but information that proves you wrong. Ask this what would have to be true for the opposite choice that you want to make to be the right one? If you cannot find a single piece of disconfirming evidence, it's not a sign you're right, it's a sign that you've stopped looking. It's confirmation bias. The second move is to obtain distance. You know, the Heaths in the book offer a simple tool called 101010. Before you make a decision, ask how will I feel about the decision in 10 minutes from now? How will I feel about this in 10 months from now? And how will I feel about this in 10 years from now? The short-term emotion is screaming right now, gets very quiet at the 10-month mark. And the decision that felt urgent and obvious that you had to do in the heat of the moment often looks reckless 10 months out. For any decision you can sleep on, sleep on it. There's an overnight rule, and the overnight rule exists because the version of you that decides at 9 p.m. after a hard day of work, and the version of you that decides at 9 a.m. after a restful night and some coffee is not the same decision maker. It's not the same decision. And the people affected by that decision deserve the second calmer one. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffrey Scott Stanton podcast, where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world. I want to take a moment to recognize. And thank one of our family partners, the C Shop. If you believe growth never stops, and I know you do because you're here listening to this, then investing in your education should feel like a step forward, not a chore. The CE Shop provides online real estate education designed to fit your schedule and keep your career moving. Pre-licensing, post-licensing, continuing education, all that is built so you can learn on your own terms at your own time. Visit theceshop.com. Link is in the show notes. Tell them J Squared Podcast Production sent you. I'll give you a version of this that I watched closely. A manager became convinced that one of her best agents was getting ready to leave for a competition. She had seen the signs. She said lower energy, few hours in the office, missed team meetings, missed appointments, and she heard that that competitor was running a heavy heavy recruiting campaign against her and her brokerage. She had already decided that this agent was halfway out the door. So she decided to pull back. Quietly start protecting the team against his departure. She felt certain. Certainty felt like clarity. Certainty felt like clarity earned from 20 years of her reading people. What she had not done was ask a single question that could have proved herself wrong. When someone finally pushed her into a reality test before she could pull back all of that from the agent, she had one conversation with him, one honest conversation. That agent told her during the conversation he was going through a family medical crisis and he had not told anyone about. The lower energy was from exhaustion. The missed meetings were hospital visits. He wasn't leaving. He was barely holding it together and needed support from them, from his team, from his brokerage, but was too proud to ask for it. If she had followed with her certainty and started pulling back and pulling back to business from him, she would have abandoned a loyal person exactly at the moment when he needed her, and very likely created the exact departure that she was so afraid of. The only thing that stood between her certainty and the outcome was someone asking, What if you're wrong? Certainty is not the same as clarity. She could not tell the difference until she actually went looking for it. Yep. There's one more thing that I need to name here because it connects back to episode six in a way that matters. It's the hook. The hook doesn't just produce bad reactions. It produces bad decisions that you cannot take back. It produces a reaction that usually can't be repaired, a decision to let someone go, to restructure a team, to walk away from a relationship. Those have consequences that outlive the emotions that produce them. Which means that the emotional regulation we talked about is not just about staying composed. It's about protecting the quality of the decision you make in moments when the stakes are highest and your judgment is the most compromised. The last trap is the quietest. Confidence. And in some ways, it is the most mature one to overcome because beating it requires something most leaders are never trained to do. Something all of us are never trained to do. Plan to be wrong. Here's the trap. When we make a decision, we commit fully to one version of how the future will unfold. We picture the hire working out, we picture the restructuring landing well, we picture the acquisition being phenomenal. We picture the difficult agent responding to a conversation a way we hope. And then we build no protection at all against possibly being wrong. This is overconfidence, not arrogance, just the normal human tendency to be far more certain about the future than the future actually justifies. The leaders who decide best do something counterintuitive. They make the decision and simply prepare to be wrong. Not because they lack confidence, not because they lack conviction, because they understand that conviction and humility are not opposites. You can fully commit to a decision while building in protection against the chance that it does not go the way you expect. Before finalizing any significant decision, imagine it is six months from now, and that decision failed badly. Then ask, what went wrong? This is different from listing risks. It's a mental trick. It gives you permission to see the weakness you are motivated to ignore when you are excited about a choice. Teams that run premortems actually catch problems that confident decision makers will miss every single time. I think about this manager who brought in this charismatic agent. Everyone loved on day one. Everyone loved them. He was so sure that it was going to be a great fit. He built no check system, no, nothing to catch it in case he was wrong. No review point, no nothing. No honest look at the early warning signs. And the early warning signs were there. The other agents felt it within weeks, but there was no nothing built into the calendar that forced anyone to say it out loud, that forced the leadership, the leader to look at it. So by the time it was undeniable, that one hire quietly pushed two of his steadiest people out the door. They didn't make noise either. They just started taking the listings elsewhere. He lost two people that he loved to keep a person he was too confident about. Not because he made a bad call in the hire, but because the call was made with no way to find out if he was wrong until the cost had already been paid. People left. The second is what we call a tripwire. When you make a decision, you also decide in advance what signal would tell you it's gonna go wrong or it's going wrong. And what you will see when you see it going wrong. If I bring this person in, the tripwire is if in 90 days they have not done these specific things, we have this specific conversation. That's the tripwire. Without a tripwire, a bad decision can run for years because there's no defined moment that forces you to look at it honestly. This is the status quo bias we talked about in previous episodes. It keeps running. The power of a tripwire is that you set it when your judgment is clear so it can protect you later when your judgment is not. The moment you're excited about this new hire is exactly the moment you cannot see how it might fail. So you don't rely on that future version of yourself to notice it. Decide now, while you're thinking clearly, what the warning sign will be and what will you do when it appears. You are leaving instructions for the version of you who will be too invested to act at the time. That is not pessimism. It's the most practical kind of self-awareness a team leader can build. And here's the reframe that makes this part easier. You're not deciding whether you're right. You're deciding what happens if you're wrong. Let me say that again. You're not deciding whether you're right. You're deciding what happens if you're wrong. The leader who decides from certainty has no plan for being wrong, which means when they are, and if they are, because everyone, everyone's wrong regular. It happens. The cost runs unchecked until it becomes undeniable. The leader who decides that they might be wrong has built in an early warning and the exit. Same conversation, completely, completely different exposure. Before I go any further, I have to be honest about something the framework can make too clean. Sometimes you do everything right. You widen the options, you reality test, you distance, you prepare to be wrong, and every single option in front of you still costs you something real. There's no good answer to that. The only answer is the least bad one. And nobody warns you how often in leadership, that's what decision looks like. A lot of times you just need to make the least bad decision. You have to let go of that loyal agent who's no longer producing, who's been with you for years, who you genuinely about. There's no version of that decision that does not hurt someone you who trusted you, someone you like, someone who liked you. You have to make the decision and choice between two good people for an opportunity, knowing that the one you don't choose may walk. You have to reinforce a standard that costs you your highest producer. Widening your options doesn't make that decision less painless. It just makes sure you're choosing the least bad option for the right reason instead of avoiding the pain and calling it patients and not deciding at all. Now, here's the thing I want you to hear about these decisions. When there is no good option, the goal is not to find the choice that feels good. There isn't one. The goal is to make the hard call cleanly, own it honestly, and treat the people affected with respect the entire way through it. Your team is not watching to see whether you can find the painless answer. They know there isn't one when stuff like this happens. They're watching to see whether you can make the hard decision without flinching, without hiding from it, without pretending it didn't cost anyone anything. That's going to give its own kind of signal. Maybe the most important one you can give. Because the leaders people trust most are not the ones who make the easy calls. They are ones who make the hard calls like adults and stand behind those decisions. So when I tell you these next two stories, don't hear them as proof that a process always produces a happy ending. It doesn't. It produces a decision you can stand behind. Sometimes that's all you're gonna get. And sometimes that just needs to be enough. Yep. Before I tell you about a decision that went right, I want to tell you about one that didn't go so right. Because contrast is the whole lesson here. A team leader, I'll call Karen. She built something good. Eight agents, a real culture. People genuinely, generally liked working for her. Then one of his strongest producers came to her privately and gave her the ultimatum. He wanted a bigger split of his commission, and he wanted it by the end of the week, or he was leaving and taking his volume with him. Karen felt the floor move underneath her. Losing him felt catastrophic. Sitting in her office that afternoon, with the fear running hot, she decided to give him what he asked for. She did it fast because the fear made waiting feel unbearable. She did it certainly because the moment kept him feeling like the only thing that mattered. And she did it alone, without asking anyone what that may set in motion by doing this for him. Here's what she did not widen out far enough to see. The other seven agents, they found out. They always find out. And what they learned was that, hey, I can get more from Karen was to threaten a leave. Within six months, she had two more ultimatums on her desk. And the decision that felt like she was saving her team was the decision that taught her team how to hold her hostage. She had solved her own problem. The fear in that room the afternoon is the problem she solved instead of the real one, which was the kind of culture she was building and the behavior that she was rewarding. Karen was not a weak leader either. She was a smart one, having a scared moment with no process to protect her from it. She decided it cost her. Now, let me show you another version of this. A leader, we'll call Paul. Paul ran a growing team. He had an opportunity to land in his lap that on paper looked like the best decision he could make all year. A high-producing agent from another brokerage wanted to come over and bring a small team with him to join. The numbers were significant. It was good timing. And Paul wanted it, wanted it barely enough that he had without quite realizing it, already decided to do it. The only thing left was to confirm what he believed. Everything in him was in that certainty trap. He was gathering information, but he was gathering information that supported his decision, the production history, the market reputation, the growth it would unlock. Every data point that confirmed the decision he already made, he absorbed. Every small hesitation, every vague answer about whether they were really leaving to come there, a couple of pointed questions he chose not to ask that he set aside. He wasn't evaluating those. He was justifying his decision because it felt like certainty. What slowed him down was a conversation he had with someone he trusted. And they asked him this simple question. Not should you do this? The question was, what would have to be true for this to be the worst decision you make this year? That's a great question. What would have to be true for this to be the worst decision you make this year? Paul didn't have an answer already, which told him something. He never once seriously considered the downside. So he sat with it. And when he generally looked at the things he had been setting aside, this pattern started to line up. The vague reason for leaving, the team that followed this person from brokerage to brokerage a little too often. The reputation was strong in production, but quiet on everything else. So Paul did two things. He reality tested. He made a couple calls he had been avoiding. He called the people who had worked with his agent before. And the picture that came back was the real one. The production was real. So was the pattern of leaving a team worse than what they found it, leaving the brokerage worse than what they found it. So he set a tripwire. He didn't abandon the opportunity. He reconstructed the offer with a defined trial structure and specific, explicit expectations with the real review point at the 90-day mark and a clear understanding of what would happen if these expectations were not met. The agent, they didn't take the restructured offer. They wanted the diversion with no accountability built in. And when that wasn't available, they moved on to a different brokerage. Paul did not get the production he wanted. But here's what he told me later. And this is the part that matters. The thing he was most grateful for was not that he had dodged a bad hire, though he did. It was that his existing team watched the whole thing. They had seen him want something so badly, slow down, ask hard questions, and make a disciplined call instead of a desperate one. It told his team more about how he would handle the decisions that affected them than any producer he could have brought in. The decision was private. What it signaled about his judgment was not. The process and the signal. Four traps are predictable, which is good news because anything that's predictable can be planned for. You know, the Heaths in their book organize responses into four moves. And you do need to memorize them as framework, which you need to understand what they protect you from. Before any decision that actually matters, you ask yourself the few honest questions. Am I only seeing two options here? Or have I stopped looking for others? Am I actually weighing these options or have I already decided and I'm collecting reasons to do it? Is this the pressure of the moment talking? Or would I make the same call after a good night's sleep? And if I turned out to be all wrong about all this, what's it going to cost me? And have I left myself any way to catch it earlier if I am wrong? That's the whole thing. Four questions. You don't need to memorize them as a framework. You need to be the kind of leader who actually stops and asks them when everything in you wants to decide and move on. They give a name for these four moves. It may help you remember it. They call it W-R-A-P or RAP. W, widen your options. R, reality test your assumptions. A obtain distance before you make the decision. B, prepare for the worst. Widen reality test, obtain distance, prepare to be wrong. Four moves for one of each of the four traps. But don't let the acronym fool you into thinking it's just about memorizing the system. The leader who decides, well, are not the ones who recite wrapping their heads over and over again. They are the ones that have built the habit of not trusting that fast, certain, alone version of themselves. And the four moves are how they slow that version down long enough to think and make a better decision. Here's what I want you to take from this episode more than any framework. A decision-making process is not just a tool for getting to better outcomes, though it does that. It is also visible. When you widen your options instead of reacting, when your team sees this, when you go looking for the reasons you might be wrong, they see it. When you slow down on that decision that does not need to be made right then and there, they see it. The process is private. What it signals about your judgment is absolutely public. And over time, that is what determines whether people you lead follow your calls, follow your decisions with confidence, or quietly hedge against those decisions. The leader who decides best under pressure are not the ones who are always right. No one is always right. They are the ones who decide they might be wrong, who hold conviction and humility at the same time, whose process is steady enough that even under pressure, the judgment holds. There's a decision right now. One decision. One decision you are facing right now. You knew which one before I even finished that sentence. Maybe it's a person. Maybe it's an opportunity. Maybe it's something you've been avoiding because both those options in front of you are going to cost you something. Take that decision and run it through the move. Just one. If it feels binary, ask the vanishing option question. What would I do if neither one of these are available? If it feels certain, go find one piece of evidence that would prove you're wrong and actually sit with it and think about it. If it feels emotionally charged, apply the 10-10-10 or simply give it the night. And if it is significant, if it's a significant decision, build in a tripwire. Decide now what the signal would have to be to tell you what's wrong in the future. Build it in. One decision, one move, one time this week. Because the process only becomes real when you use it on something that actually matters. And the thing that actually matters is always that specific decision sitting in front of you right now. You can feel the pressure to decide fast and alone, but as a true leader, you choose not to. And then one additional thing, separate from any single decision, build yourself a permanent habit. Find yourself that one person, someone who will ask you the question. Someone you can go to that you trust that will ask you the question, what would have to be true for this to be the worst decision you make this year? And someone who will tell you the honest answer, even when you don't want it. Every leader who decides well under pressure has someone like this. It's not a yes person, not someone who tells you what you want to hear. It's someone whose job is in your decision-making process to ask you that question to slow you down long enough to see what you're missing. And if you don't have that person, getting one is probably the most important decision-making process that you'll make this year. Because the process we talked about today is hard to run on just yourself. It's much easier to run when you have one trusted person like me who's willing to run it with you. If you don't have that person, I can be that person for you. Certainty is not something you have, it's something you build. Leaders who make consistently good decisions under pressure are not smarter than the ones who do not. They're not more experienced. They have a process that protects them from the predictable ways the human mind fails exactly when the stakes are high. And every time they use that process, the decision gets better. Not guaranteed, not guaranteed right, but better. More options considered, fewer blind spots, less driven by emotion of the moment, and more by what actually matters. And over a career, the difference compounds into a leader who is simply harder to knock off course. And that is what the process buys you. Not certainty, better odds, better odds on decisions that matter the most, when it'll be easier just to get them wrong and just make the decision in the moment. Thank you for spending this time with me. In episode nine, we're going to be talking about the shift from producer to leader, that identity change that almost anyone in this industry has to make at some point and no one prepares for. If you'd like to stay connected, please follow me on social media for updates, future episodes, and additional leadership insights. If this episode was of value to you, please leave a review or share it with someone who is facing a hard decision right now and making that decision the way most people decide, fast, certain, and alone, because there is a better way and it's learnable. And thank you to our family partners, SUBI, the CE Shop and Wise Agent. Their information is in the show notes. Please reach out to them directly as they are all leaders in their own field. And remember, you're not deciding if you're right. You're deciding what happens if you're wrong. I'm Jeffrey Scott Stanton, lead with intention. I'll see you on the next one.

SPEAKER_00 44:41

Leadership isn't learned in pages, it's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard, and what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been the Leadership Series, hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by J Squared Podcast Productions.