Reflecting on your Decision-Making Mistakes: Anne Mulcahy

Source:  CNBC

In this article for McKinsey, former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy reminds us that you need to analyze the decisions you didn't make, as well as the decisions you have made, when reflecting on your mistakes. The missed opportunity may be a bigger mistake than the poor decision that you made. 

Decisiveness is about timeliness. And timeliness trumps perfection. The most damaging decisions are the missed opportunities, the decisions that didn’t get made in time. If you’re creating a category of bad decisions you’ve made, you need to include with it all the decisions you didn’t get to make because you missed the window of time that existed to take advantage of an opportunity.

She also writes about the absolute necessity to cultivate internal critics on your team:

My own management style probably hasn’t changed much in 20 years, but I learned to compensate for this by building a team that could counter some of my own weaknesses. You need internal critics: people who know what impact you’re having and who have the courage to give you that feedback. I learned how to groom those critics early on, and that was really, really useful. This requires a certain comfort with confrontation, though, so it’s a skill that has to be developed.

I started making a point of saying, “All right, John-Noel, what are you thinking? I need to hear.” And this started to demonstrate that even if I did show my colors quickly, they could still take me on and I could still change my mind. The decisions that come out of allowing people to have different views—and treasuring the diversity of those views—are often harder to implement than what comes out of consensus decision making, but they’re also better.