It's Highly Likely Your Values Were Written for a Slower World

I have just finished a week with a team in Australia. They are part of a global business, and for this session they flew colleagues in from around the world. We spent three days working together in the Hunter Valley and came back to the office in Sydney for the last day. It was good work - the team worked through issues, talked about their pace of execution, and how to add value to their business.

What struck me was something I've observed in teams of all sizes around the world: somebody would say that the business had to move faster, and then somebody else, or sometimes the same person a sentence later, would say that more people needed to be in the loop. And while both statements were right, the challenge for management teams is to figure out how to get these two sentiments to live alongside one another.

Why do management teams feel pulled in two directions?

The issue is that teams are asked to deliver two legitimate things at once: (1) faster decisions, (2) in a collaborative environment, and there is no clear guidance on which outcome should take priority when these two imperatives collide.

The pressure for speed is real. Competitors are already moving and the market expects results. Earlier this year I wrote about three CEOs telling their companies the same thing in public: simpler, stronger, faster, fiercer. Faster decisions, but thoughtful ones, with the risks understood. That is a fair ask.

Then there is the values statement. Look at almost any company's website and you will find some version of 'collaboration', proudly highlighted. And of course no-one would object to this well-intentioned value. In practice, though, it tends to mean more voices, more input, and more time. When McKinsey surveyed 1,259 executives and managers across 91 countries, just over half said they spend more than 30 per cent of their working time making decisions, and 61 per cent said most of that time is used ineffectively. Those are senior people describing their own weeks, and I have written before about the economics behind that drag.

Holding speed and collaboration together is the real job of a management team, and it is not at all easy.

Is collaboration actually slowing your decisions down?

Yes, when nobody has defined what it is for. Over the last twenty years collaboration has drifted from meaning that the right people shape a decision to meaning that everyone who might be affected gets to touch it.

Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant wrote about this in Harvard Business Review in 2016, drawing on data gathered over two decades across more than 300 organizations. They found that the time managers and employees spend in collaborative activities had grown by 50 per cent or more, and that at many companies people spend around 80 per cent of their day in meetings, on calls, and on email. The work itself gets done in whatever time remains.

Think about choosing a restaurant with eight people. Everyone has a veto. Nobody has the decision. Forty minutes later you are at the place nobody minded and nobody wanted. That is what consensus does when it creeps in as the unstated standard, and most leadership teams have let it creep in without ever intentionally deciding to let it in.

When everyone has a veto and nobody has the decision, you end up at the restaurant nobody minded and nobody wanted.

Can a team be fast and collaborative at the same time?

Yes, provided collaboration is essential to the outcome, which is a better decision rather than a fuller meeting.

In the sessions I run, this comes down to separating three things that usually get mashed together:

1. Collaborate widely on the framing of the problem and on the information.
2. Decide with few.
3. Then commit together, including the people who argued for the other option(s).

Jeff Bezos talked about the middle part plainly in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders: most decisions should be made with somewhere around 70 per cent of the information you wish you had, many decisions are two-way doors (i.e. they aren't irreversible) that can use a light-weight process, and when there is conviction without consensus the useful sentence is 'I know we disagree on this, but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit.'

This is where elements of The Science of Ambition™ are highly relevant. Conviction and audacity are what enable a team to decide before it is comfortable and ready to decide. Energy is then what carries the people who were consulted but did not get their way. None of that asks anyone to be less collaborative. It asks them to be clear about where the collaboration happens and where it stops.

Collaborate on the framing and the facts, decide with few, and commit as one.

So, should you rewrite your values?

In a way, yes. I encourage every team to recalibrate their values. The values most companies espouse and publish were written for a world that moved more slowly than the one they now operate in, and I would suggest they need adjusting for the velocity of business - not to diminish 'collaboration' for instance, but to put a focus on what it really means in practice, and to be clear on how long it is allowed to take.

A value that cannot answer the question 'how long is this allowed to take?' is a poster. Conversely, a value that does answer that question is an operating instruction. 'We collaborate' doesn't give any real guidance to someone who has a decision in front of them. 'We bring the people who have the information into the conversation, and the decision owner makes a decision within three days' tells them exactly what to do. And it is still collaboration.

What this looks like in practice

Start by saying the tension out loud at the next leadership meeting, in plain words, so it stops being the thing everyone is trying to work around. Then take the three decisions that have been circling longest (the ones that keep coming up, the ones that you find yourselves litigating) and, for each one, name who decides, who must be consulted before, and who must be told after. Put a date on the discussion and the 'consulting'. Most of the delay in a slow decision is the result of unbounded consultation and the absence of a firm deadline.

Then, treat the time the decision takes as a number the team looks at the same way it looks at a revenue or headcount number. Why? Well we know teams get faster at the things they focus on and measure, and the pace a team runs at is a choice its leaders make.

If your team is living this tension, it's irresponsible not to address it and resolve it. You must resolve this the next time you're with your team. It won't get better on its own. You must confront it and resolve it together.

(This is the work I do with teams through The Ambition Playbook™, and you can read how at russellraath.com/teams.)

How do you make faster decisions without excluding people?

Well, not everyone can or should be involved in every conversation and decision. But over the past few decades we have gone from a 'the decision has been made' operating environment to one where 'we need to make a decision'. More and more people expect to be involved in the conversation. To address this you need to separate consultation from decision rights. Involve the people who have the information or who will own the result in framing the problem, give that consultation a date, and then let one named person - the owner - make the decision. Yes, while people accept decisions they were involved in far more readily than decisions they were asked to approve, we can't default to including more people than absolutely necessary. Be ruthless in determining who needs to be involved. If you have a sufficient basis of trust, everyone else will know that the right people will make the best decision - even if it isn't the decision they might expect.

What does collaboration actually mean in a management team?

It means the right people shape the decision, which is different from everyone touching it. Collaboration belongs in the framing and the information-gathering. The decision itself belongs to one person, and commitment afterwards belongs to everyone.

Should corporate values change as the market speeds up?

No. Look, the words can stay but what needs to change is how each value is defined in practice, and especially how long it is allowed to take. A value with no time attached to it will stretch to fill whatever time is available. You need to artificially create tension that would otherwise not be there in an organizational teaming environment.

How do you know if your team is too slow?

Count the decisions that have been on the agenda for longer than they should have been. Honestly look at your pace of progress and the velocity of your business. Your competition are moving. The problem is rarely a lack of information. There is actually more information than you need. The problem is usually that nobody has been given the decision. And you can address this clearly by assigning a decision owner.

Fix your values and accelerate your impact. Be the team your company needs you to be.