How to make the call when you do not have all the information.
When I interviewed Doug Gosnell, Senior Vice President of National Account Sales at Idealease, for The Power of Being All In, I asked him about the most significant leadership challenge he had faced in his long career. Without hesitation, he cited it was the economic shutdown during COVID and the supply chain disruption that followed once the economy “reopened.”
“The largest challenge was our teams facing A LOT of unknowns,” he said.
Would they keep their jobs?
Would key customers survive the shutdown, especially those in the food service industry?
How would their jobs evolve?
His team and his customers also faced a wide range of uncertainty at home, from their children’s education to their spouse’s career to the family budget. “Customers,” he said, “were all facing the same uncertainty and needed reassurance and innovative solutions to help them through this time.”
Gosnell’s answer was speed. “Training on new tools and processes began the week the shutdowns were announced,” he said. “Decisions were made very quickly. Even if they did not turn out to be one hundred percent accurate, they could be adjusted. What could not be risked was letting imaginations run wild filling in answers of the unknown.” In his words, “A plan was developed quickly, communicated quickly, and implemented quickly.”
He was just as clear about what he would not do. “Some things I could not pretend to know, so I did not pretend to know them.” As the pandemic persisted, many of the new practices and policies proved to have merit long after the shutdown. In his words, “We are a better team now than before the pandemic.”
Leading From the Point of Decision
Gosnell’s approach sits at the heart of the fifth of our Big 6 Leadership Principles®, When in Charge, Take Charge. When you are in charge, you are always leading from the point of decision-making and establishing the conditions for others to make good decisions. In my last article, I wrote about the bias for action that allows your people to move forward without waiting for permission. The decision point is about the harder moment, when you are the one who has to decide, and the information you’d like to have is not there.
Few plans ever survive the first shot. I used to think that once I had written a plan, I should stick to it regardless of changing conditions. Through painful experience, though, I learned that when you do that, you are probably going to fail, and I certainly did more than once.
All-In Adaptive Leaders pay attention to their surroundings. They stay curious, keep asking questions, and are willing to change their plans as conditions change.
The Pressure Has Changed
When I asked General Martin Dempsey, our 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what steps he has observed leaders have taken to meet the challenges of chaos, he said successful organizations have had to become adept at making decisions both faster and more inclusively. Patrick McBrayer, who was leading ACell through the pandemic, described a company where decisions and actions were made almost hourly, with limited guidelines to follow.
That is the environment most of us lead in now. The leader who waits for a complete picture will often find that the picture never arrives, and all of these leaders understood the cost of waiting too long and keeping information to themselves. While a leader stays silent, people fill in the answers themselves, and those imagined answers are usually worse than the truth.
The practical question is how to decide well while the picture is still forming. Below, I share what General Crosbie Saint, my boss when I served as his aide-de-camp in U.S. Army Europe, taught me about when to wait for the second report and when to act on the first, how Doug Gosnell remained open and honest with his people about what he did not know, and how to bring your team into the room and review the facts and assumptions together. To read the rest of this article, visit this link.
Enjoy the journey!
