Sorry for shouting! I did want to get your attention though.

When was the last time you got shouted at or equivalent by one of your stakeholders? Terrible feeling isn’t it? No one wants to fail their stakeholders. But, geeeeeezzz it’s hard to keep all stakeholders happy all the time.

I remember my first months of consulting to Australian Government agencies in Canberra many, many moons ago. To the Department of Finance in particular. I would be walking along the halls of the John Gorton Building seeing large meeting room after large meeting room with 15 to 20 people in a meeting. I discovered the extent to which government agencies needed to consult because they had so many stakeholders they are doing their best to please, or at least not disappoint too much. That is, trying to find a balance.

In my book Team Think, I write about decision support tools. These can be as simple as a risk appetite appreciation checklist, risk scorecard, or a decision tree. These are important tools for helping leaders and their staff to navigate However, going deep with decision support tools can make a very real difference. You get better decisions, made more consistently from a stakeholder’s perspective and they are made quicker.

How do you know when and where you need a decision support tool? You can be like many teams and implement them when something goes wrong and someone makes a helpful suggestion to develop one. Or you could do something smarter. Map your team’s decision processes and identify bottlenecks (see last week’s blog) and/or where decisions are made poorly or inconsistently.

It never ceases to amaze me the insights a team gets when I facilitate this process for them.

Did this resonate with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.