Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (22 page)

DEMAND RIGOR (THE YANG)

• Ask the hard questions
  
• Challenge the underlying assumptions
  
• Look for evidence in the data
  
• Attack the issues, not the people
  
• Ask “why” repeatedly until the root cause is unearthed
  
• Equally debate both sides of the issue
  

III. Drive a Sound Decision

Multipliers may relish a great debate, but they pursue debate with a clear end: a sound decision. They ensure this in three ways. First, they reclarify the decision-making process. Second, they make the decision
or explicitly delegate it to someone else to decide. And third, they communicate the decision and the rationale behind it.

Reclarify the Decision-Making Process

After the issue has been debated, Multipliers let people know the next step in the decision-making process. They summarize the key ideas and outcomes of the debate, and they let people know what to expect next. They address such questions as:

• Are we making the decision right now or do we need more information?
  
• Is this a team decision or will the leader make the final call?
  
• If it is a team decision, how will we resolve any differing views?
  
• Has anything that has surfaced in the debate altered the decision-making process?
  

One executive we studied was strong on closure: “Allison says who is going to make the decision and when. People aren’t left in limbo wondering how the decision will be made.”

Multipliers let people know what will be done with their thinking and their work. With this sense of closure, people around them are assured that their discretionary effort won’t be wasted, and they are likely to give 100 percent the next time. In this way Multipliers get full contribution not just once, but over and over again.

Make the Decision

Although Multipliers know how to generate and leverage collective thinking, they are not necessarily consensus-oriented leaders. At times, they may seek the full consensus of the group; however, our research shows that they are equally comfortable making the final decision.

One manager responsible for emerging markets within a global technology firm said of her leader, “Chris prefers collective decisions and consensus, but he’s practical and he’ll either make the final decision for speed or defer to someone else because it is clearly within that person’s domain.”

Communicate the Decision and Rationale

One of the benefits of purposeful, rigorous debate is the business case and momentum it builds to execute the decision. As people debate an issue thoroughly, they develop a deep understanding of the underlying problems and opportunities and the imperatives for change. They put their fingerprint on the decision. Because they achieved a collective understanding, they are capable of executing collectively.

Lutz often held his organization’s debates in a conference room they came to call “The Theater.” The Theater looked like any other conference room, with a large conference table that the key players sat at during the debates. However, the room had twice as many chairs set up around the perimeter of the room. These debates were open to anyone in the organization. Anyone interested in the issue could come and listen. The team called it The Theater because it was like a surgical theater in a teaching hospital. As people watched these debates, they came to a better understanding of the issues. When decisions were reached, there were people at all levels of the organization ready to execute. With this model of transparent decision making, communicating the decision and the rationale is easy because the organization is already prepared to move forward.

The Theater not only helped employees in this organization understand and prepare to execute the decision at hand; they were also learning what was expected of them when they were called to the table to a debate on another issue. They were like medical students learning to perform surgery.

THE DIMINISHER’S APPROACH TO DEBATE

Instead of looking out broadly into their organization for intelligence, Diminishers tend to make decisions quickly either based solely on their own opinions or with input from a close inner circle. Then people begin to spin and speculate and get distracted from enthusiastically carrying the decisions out.

In sharp contrast to The Theater of the executive above, one Diminisher I worked with held meetings in his office in a two-circle format. Seated at a small, round table was his equally small inner circle, who would discuss the issue and make the decisions. But around the perimeter of the room was a collection of silent people standing and taking notes. After participating in this strange meeting format, I couldn’t help but ask one of these voiceless individuals standing on the outer edge about the role of this silent body. She said, “Oh, we don’t ever participate in these decisions and we certainly don’t get a ‘seat at the table.’ We’re just here to take notes so our SVP doesn’t have to tell us what to do later.” This was less of a surgical theater and more of a lecture auditorium.