A good friend of mine once said that a team is running well when it’s moving at the speed of trust (which is a classic Stephen Covey line). I’ve always found that trust at work has so much to do with how a boss delegates work, and empowers team members to make decisions themselves. Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter is a huge help in this area.
Easy to say, but hard to do, right? If you’re a manager, how do you free up your team to make decisions without you getting in the way? Or how do you try to change the behaviour of a micro-managing boss so that they will trust you more?
Draw a Decision Tree
One way I’ve found that really helps is (surprise surprise) using drawing and visualisation. More specifically: drawing a Decision Tree*. The Decision Tree is from Susan Scott’s book Fierce Conversations, and looks a bit like this:
Go ahead and sketch a tree yourself**. Think of your project, your team, or your company as a tree that grows and bears fruit. For this tree to thrive, countless decisions are made every day, week, month and year. But there are different levels of decisions:
- Leaf decisions – Make the decision and act on it. You don’t need to report the action you took. There’s no real risk here.
- Branch decisions – Make the decision, act on it, and then report the action you took (daily, weekly or monthly). There might be some risk, but it can be mitigated.
- Trunk decisions – Make the decision, but report on the decision to check before you take action. There could potentially be high risk of harm to the project, team or company.
- Root decisions – Make the decision with input from other people. There could be great risk of harm to the project, team or company if these decisions are poorly made and/or implemented.
Example: if you yank a leaf off a tree, the tree isn’t going to die. In the same way, a ‘leaf decision’ poorly made won’t really impact the company. But if a wrong action is taken at the root level, it could really damage the tree.
How to use the Decision Tree
The Decision Tree has tons of uses:
A way to figure out autonomy – To help you and your team think about and clarify what ‘autonomy’ means in their context (this was HUGELY helpful for me in a previous job!), so that everyone knows exactly where they have authority to make decisions and take action.
A way to chart professional development – To help articulate clear paths for professional development. The more senior an employee gets, the more their decision-making power moves from leaf to branch to trunk level.
A way to free up senior management – To help senior management release control appropriately, and develop grassroots leadership within the organisation. This frees up senior management to focus on the more strategic decision-making, while providing more learning and development opportunity to employees at various levels.
A way to help a team work better together – To help a team and/or management articulate where team dynamics and leadership feel wrong (micro-management, anyone?), and where changes can be made in how decisions are made and acted on.
A way to coach junior managers – Junior managers are typically on a journey of relinquishing control and empowering people around them (I’ve been there). The Decision Tree is a great way to coach a junior manager on how to delegate more to others.
Here’s an example way to use the Decision Tree in your team
Do you manage people? Are you a project manager, change manager, or product manager? Here’s a step-by-step way you might want to try using the Decision Tree in your team:
Draw the Decision Tree on a whiteboard, and use the Root / Trunk / Branch / Leaf structure to explain the four different types of decisions to your team.
Get everyone to list the various decisions that need to be made in the team. My favourite way to do this is to capture them on sticky notes, one decision per note (you’ll see why in a second). Ask each team member to read out what they wrote, and ensure that everyone understands each one. Here are some examples:
- Leave request approvals
- Quarterly ad-spend changes
- Commits and pull requests (for the developers amongst us!)
- Stationery orders
Map the decisions on the Decision Tree. Everyone can then place their sticky notes on whichever level they think each decision belongs. You can always combine any duplicates as you go.
Discuss the map of decisions on the Tree. Are all the decisions placed where everyone expects? The interesting insightful parts of this discussion should be about any decisions where people don’t agree on the level at which they should be. Why do different people expect specific decisions to be at different levels? how can they come to a common understanding about the appropriate level? This can be particularly insightful for a team manager.
Finally, discuss what specific actions can be taken, to change the situation to be more favourable.
As always, I’m keen to hear if and how you use this visual framework, or any other techniques included in this blog.
* I should say that this Decision Tree visual framework is different to the boxes-and-arrows decision tree drawings you might have seen before, which are still great for analysing decisions and outcomes.
** I probably went a bit overboard on mine (above); a simple bunch of lines is completely fine!