Decision Making in Remote Environments
Decision making alone can be a difficult task, but in a remote environment, you walk an even thinner line. In the distributed environment there are communication gaps, a lack of visibility, and a mismatch of expectations, making this remote era a whole new playing field for leaders and managers.
One of the most important actions that you can take for yourself and for your team is to document every decision you make. Lean on asynchronous communication channels like Google Docs, Slack, and Trello to chart your own progress and receive feedback from your team. Successful remote teams have been using these tools to keep track of their decisions continually, on a day to day basis.
To bridge the communication gap, it’s important to overshare and over communicate your decisions every time you make one. By brining your team into your decisions so they get word of the decision directly from you, you will increase their level of trust and confidence in your leadership to the point where a healthy feedback loop opens up where team members feel they can openly raise concerns and share information with you.
Right now, focus on strengthening the ties that bind your people together. The pandemic has created corporate and societal stresses at an unparalleled level. Add emotional criteria into your decision making and embrace decisions that feel good because they benefit your stakeholders and community members who need it the most, even if the decision may make traditional stakeholders unhappy. You will also need to make decisions that revisit core competencies of your company and perhaps pivot your production to create products that are not traditional, but are in high demand to the public during this pandemic era. Your decision making needs to move away from satisfying yourself and other internal stakeholders and towards generating societal value, satisfying the needs of consumers and society, and preventing further social damage.
Good decision making occurs at the intersection of high quality, and fast decisions. Take a page out of the playbook of winning organizations and discover how to make high quality decisions quickly. To do this, its important to make decisions at the right level,, delegating decisions down to lower levels of the organization when you need to. Secondly, all your decisions need to be in line with company decisions and team values. When you are making a large scale decision, its going to be important for decision makers to explore assumptions beyond the given information, actively seek information that would disconfirm your initial line of thinking, and designate a members of the senior-executive committee to play devil’s advocate and present counterarguments to the group.
When it comes to implementing these decisions, you have to think about what good process looks like. And as you approach decisions, segment them and treat them individually, because no two are alike. The final factor of importance when it comes to decision making is velocity – when the people closest to a decision are empowered to act autonomously as changes arise, the conditions are better for both quicker, and more successful, decision making.
Behaviors to Get Behind for Decision Making
Remote Environments inherently have uncertainty because of gaps in communication and person to person information relay. In the face of this, our brains tend to overreact firing the the limbic system of the fight or flight response. You have to overcome your knee-jerk fear reaction and quiet your limbic system to avoid the fear-based mindset that will inhibit good decision making. Here are a few behaviors for you to exercise that will reward you with good decision making.
Stay positive, whenever your brain starts to wander towards negative irrational thinking, consciously select something positive to think about to refocus your attention
Focus only on what matters, Don’t ask “what if?” it will only derail you
Don’t strive for perfection
Don’t dwell on your problems, instead focus on what you can do
Trust your intuition. Be patient with it now, don’t force it, head out for a walk to allow your intuition to kick in
Recognize your own bias and try and filter out the feelings that aren’t coming from your intuition
Breathe. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a couple of minutes to focus on your breathing.
Actions for Making Decisions
Communicate a clear what and brief why to your team as you execute your plays.
Focus on the impacts of the decision itself and be as specific as possible about what each member of your team has to do.
Highlight only the most important reasons why you are making the decision.
Demonstrate a clear consideration of the alternatives to give people the confidence that you thought about their idea and move on from there–you don’t need to go into why these alternatives aren’t viable, just show your consideration of other options. them.
List everyone who’s feedback you are seeking by name so they feel more confident and can step into their roles.
Widen the circle of decision makers, in crisis mode you should expand your capacity by pulling in other voices to help navigate the onslaught of short-term decisions. It's estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day - it is okay to outsource some of these decisions to your team to get a greater and more informed perspective on the issue at hand.
Elaborate on the expected results of the decision, and what milestones you will implement to ensure that the decision is on track for success.
Lead with focus, resilience, and compassion for others in your decision making, and you will find yourself manoeuvring swiftly through the current crisis.
You Got This.
If you’re interested in developing your leadership style in these uncertain times, you might be interested in talking to us about some of our remote offerings.
At OverTime Leader we provide executive leadership and management advisory for technology-enabled businesses and teams. If you are looking to spark a people-powered change in your business our team has a toolbox full of ways to help you get started.
Sign up for our newsletter for insights, tools, and tips.