I do a lot of interviewing. Not only have I been building out a team of my own, but I am also a “bar raiser” at Amazon which means that I participate in many interviews in an effort to maintain a high hiring bar for roles all over the company. I have interviewed candidates senior and junior roles ranging from software developers to economists from marketers to security guards. I get to ask candidates about the decisions that they have made and the outcomes of those decisions. This has sharpened my focus on decision making as a leadership skill.
Early in your career, when you are new to a role, or in some process-oriented positions, your job is to execute on decisions made by others. You run the plays, follow instructions, and earn the trust of the organization, your colleagues, and your manager.
As you develop your scope and influence, you are called to make decisions. Others seek you out for answers and advice. You look at the data and determine the ruling. You umpire. You judge. Your opinion becomes the recommendation. If you make good decisions, you get to make more decisions, faster and with greater complexity and risk. More people are impacted. More dollars are at stake. More is riding on you getting it right.
That broadening scope of decision impact is fairly well understood. When interviewing, I try to assess the kind of autonomy and responsibility a person had in their previous roles by learning about the decisions that they made (or didn’t). Decision making authority can be codified in things like spending authority. At leading companies, cultural fit is determined by how the candidate made decisions, who they involved (or not), and how they learned from mistakes (or didn’t). Making decisions is a litmus test of organizational seniority.
However, scope and impact of decisions aren’t the only measures of leadership. The most impactful leaders don’t just make decisions, they create the moment of decision. They don’t just answer questions brought to them, they ask new questions. If you consider the business leaders who have lasting impact outside of their individual teams, business, or industry they have in common that they created disruption. That disruption is caused not by answering the questions in front of them, but by anticipating tomorrow’s questions or forcing the answers to questions that no one else is considering. If you wait until there is an obvious fork in the road, it may not matter which path you take. Truth is you are too late and you have lost the race. Why? Because someone else created the fork in the road. They were the first to divert from the path to create something new. Truth is, if you are at a fork where the options are clear, you are a follower.
Most forks in the road don’t start as high-stakes decisions, thankfully. When done best, they are small experiments, pilots, or proofs of concepts. Small ventures, building upon each other in layers of learning, until a road is paved. By the time others come to fork in the road, the stakes are higher. This is what defensible differentiation is all about. Making the fork in the road more costly for the next traveler. Followers are faced with high-stakes decisions. “Should we abandon their existing legacy business to pursue something that would maintain their competitiveness in the future because we can’t afford to do both?” they must ask. Often they are forced to partner with frenemies to lower the stakes, which can be a sound approach when it is clear that there is a front-runner and it isn’t you. But how much better would it be to have created the fork in the road? To disrupt yourself. The annuls of business history are littered with companies with dominant positions in their space, the bigger market share, the most loyal customers, and with the best minds in the business…who got left at a turn.
This is true of the movement of whole organizations and down at the team level as well. Managers make decisions within the boxes on the organization chart or within the confines of the business charter. Leaders work in the blanks between the boxes and can see possibilities. The leadership pioneer Peter Drucker once said that “the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” Or perhaps not asking questions at all or after the answer is obvious.
As you think about your work, your short-term goals, and long-term ambitions consider your decision. : the decisions you are asked to make and what decisions you can truly make proactively. May you have the boldness to make your own forks in the road.