how to factor your team culture into decision making

When it comes to decision making, Thinkers will generally use logic and facts to make a decision. Feelers may tend towards values, emotion, or relational factors to make decisions.

This is great until you have a couple of situations.

• You’re somewhere in the middle between extreme Thinker and extreme Feeler.

• You are one style, but your team culture is the other.

I am one of those who is in the middle. I sometimes feel pulled between the two ends or even bounce back and forth. My Thinking mind tells me one thing and my Feeling heart tells me another. It is difficult to resolve which way to go.

The other time it is challenging is when your team culture is very strong but you are the other end of the spectrum. You may make a decision based on your bent, but if you try to implement it, there will be a team uprising as people react to the reasons you made the decision.

The other night, I was having a dream that I was consulting for someone, and the advice I gave in that dream addressed this exact problem. I woke up and thought, “Hey, that is actually really helpful!” Besides being amused that I was giving myself advice in my dream, it was also a blatant sign I have been thinking too much about work lately!

This is what my Dream-Self advised that my Waking Self used to assess a difficult decision.

Imagine on the left end there is a Dispassionate Robot. The Dispassionate Robot makes decisions with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. It looks at hard facts, numbers, and data.

The first step is to put yourself at the end of the scale with the Dispassionate Robot. If you had to make a decision as a robot, what would you decide? Write that down.

The next step is to swing all the way to the other side of the scale. This side is inhabited by the Empathetic Pushover.

If you were an Empathetic Pushover and made a decision purely on feeling, what would it look like? Write that down as well.

Next, define where on the scale your team culture is. Does it lie more on the Dispassionate Robot side or the Empathetic Pushover side?

An Empathetic Pushover culture is one that acts primarily on relationship. It may have a people-pleasing culture or value people so much that the mission gets compromised. It retains people even if they are not competent or getting the work done effectively, because they are liked. Or, leaders don’t have the courage to make the tough decisions to transition out people who need to go.

A Dispassionate Robot culture is one that acts primarily on strategy. It puts forward the mission and goals of the organization and may run roughshod over people and their feelings. These kinds of organizations are typically top down.

Make a mark on the scale where your team is, and then make a mark where you think you are. The wider the gap between you and where the culture is, the more conflict there is.

Personally, I skew on the Empathetic Pushover side. I have been known to continue to invest in people until it was evident it would not work. I should’ve made the decision to let someone go ages ago, and my delay hurt the team. I work best when I am paired with leaders who skew on the Dispassionate Robot side, who can confront my pushover-ness and challenge me to move closer to the center of the scale.

It goes the other way too. I’ve worked for Dispassionate Robot leaders who have benefitted because I bring what they have called “the softer side” to the conversation.

That’s why I love teams — we all help each other and together we are stronger!

Now… back to the decision making.

Let’s say you work at an organization that skews on the Empathetic Pushover side (I pick that one because that’s the kind of organization we would end up with if I were in charge! Which would not be good. Which is why I hate being the #1 leader.).

But let’s say you are a leader more on the Dispassionate Robot side. There’s a pretty big gap between you and the organization or team. If you make a decision that is a significant change to the way your team does things right now, there’s going to be tremendous pushback and potentially failure of adoption.

The key to the decision is inching back towards the culture on the Empathetic Pushover side, just enough. The goal is that the gap becomes smaller.

There are no hard-and-fast metrics to know how far to go, but here are a few questions to consider.

• Even if the decision shifts closer to the other side, does the decision stay true to who you are as a leader and your core values and convictions?

• Think ahead to adoption. What parts of this decision will receive significant pushback so that a large percentage of people will have difficulty owning it? This may be a clue that you have pushed too far. (There are always naysayers. Think about the majority. How will the 80% respond?)

• What parts of the decision are you willing to flex on in order to accommodate the culture and ensure a successful outcome?

• Besides the decision, what processes can you implement so that your team feels a sense of ownership and greater understanding once the decision is made? (Like having them give input before the decision is made.)

What is interesting is that when decisions are made this way over time, the culture begins to shift. Decision-making leading to the opposite side of the scale that accommodates culture begins to permeate as people see good results of the outcomes. The gap between the leader and the culture becomes smaller.

The next time you have to make a decision, give this exercise a try. Hopefully it will add new perspectives to the decision that will help you and your team make a more robust and informed decision that will end up with a better rate of adoption and success.

Let me know what other factors you consider when you think about decision making and your team culture!