How Successful Leaders Make Decisions

Lydia Dishman has written a column for Fast Company titled, "How Leaders at Google, Buzzfeed, and More Make Decisions."   She has a number of interesting tidbits from various leaders.   A few key themes emerged:

The Value of Seeking Small Wins:

In a recent report for Fast Company, Harry McCracken asked staffers of Facebook how their leader has pulled off some of the company’s recent major achievements.  "I don’t hear a lot of anecdotes about him swooping in and personally making genius-level decisions that suddenly changed everything. Instead, they praise his inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to deploy resources, and devotion to improving Facebook and himself. He has a knack for carving up grand plans into small, doable victories."  

Ask Good Questions

Mark Parker, CEO of Nike: "You can’t always predict the winners. I end up asking a lot of questions, so the team thinks things through. I don’t say, ‘Do this, do that.’ I’m not a micromanager. I don’t believe in that. My father, when I was growing up, would say to me when I had to make a decision, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I think this.’ And he’d say, ‘That seems like a good idea.’ And over time, I started picking for myself. I didn’t need to go to him. At Nike, we have incredibly strong people. They know what to do."

Step Out of Your Functional Shoes:

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox:  We don’t want to compartmentalize people’s expertise based on their internal organization alone. We try to give individuals parity–-equality-–in the discussion. In our leadership team, I expect all of them to check at the door their function as the primary thought process by which they give me input. I expect them to think more about the customer, competitors, employees, and shareholders. So, I give everyone parity to speak about an issue.

Test Your Hypotheses: 

Dao Nguyen, Publisher of Buzzfeed:  Publishing volume is actually really important. It's not that we want to crank stuff out there for no reason at all. The more you publish, the more opportunities you have to look at things that are happening, read comments, have a new hypothesis, test a hypothesis. And if you can do that relatively quickly, then you remember what you were testing.