The Art of Making Decisions That You Can Live With

As a leader within your organization, you are accountable to various stakeholders. Depending on your role, you are accountable to your supervisor, board of directors, or investors. You are also accountable to your peers, direct reports, and customers. If you think even more broadly, you are accountable to your vendors, community, and society at large. With so many people you are accountable to, it can be difficult to know what action you should take when dealing with a complex and important decision. Having a framework can make the decision-making process easier. As you tackle complex problems, I encourage you to define the decision you need to make, explore different perspectives, make values-based decisions, and stick to your commitments.

Define the Decision

Taking the time to explore the different perspectives of those impacted by your decision is a great way identify potential actions you can pursue. Before you can explore different perspectives, you must clarify the decision that you are looking to make. In doing this, you want to define the decision in one sentence with no judgement. By clearly define the decision that is under consideration with no judgement, you open yourself up to see thing more clearly.

Gain Perspective

Once you have identified the decision, you can begin to explore the perspective of different people that will be impacted. Talking with individuals that represent different perspectives is ideal. When you are short on time an alternative approach is to imagine yourself from the perspective of different stakeholders. By doing this, you can explore how your opinion on what should be done changes based on those perspectives. For example, if you are trying to determine whether to offer better health benefits to employees, you could start by imagining yourself as a middle-aged employee with children. What would they want the company to offer in benefits? Would their opinion be different than a single young professional within the organization? How about your customers? Would they care about the quality of benefits you provide employees? Now consider your Chief Financial Officer or your company’s investors. Would they have a different point of view on what the company should do? By pausing and considering each stakeholders perception on the topic, you expand your thinking, and are better able to see all the potential risks and benefits of your purposed actions.

Make Value-Based Decisions

Once you have taken the time to consider the various perspectives related to your topic, it is time to consider what values you will use to guide your decision making. Leveraging your values when making decisions is crucial. It helps to ensure there is alignment between who you say you are, and the actions you take. People follow leaders that they trust. Being inauthentic is one of the quickest ways to erode trust. When you clearly communicate your values, and use them to guide your actions, people can rely on you being consistent. This consistency promotes psychological safety and encourages trust.

After defining the values, you will use in making your decision, it is time to start brainstorming. As you brainstorm, you want to develop solutions based on the different perspectives that you have identified. Going back to the earlier example, from a middle-aged employee perspective, you might see value in adjusting the benefits package to be the best in the industry, because retirement and health care benefits are more important to you than base salary. From a young professional’s perspective, you may keep things the same, since you see more value in a higher salary than better benefits. From a customer perspective, you may be in favor of better benefits provided it does not lead to increment product or service cost. From the chief financial officer or investor perspective, you may be in favor of improving the benefits if you can reduce other cost, or past the expense on to customers. As you consider these perspectives, you want to bounce the purposed actions, and anticipate impact off your guiding values. This will help you to determine if the actions you are considering resonate with who you want to be as a leader.

For some leaders, making money is a core value, and they will allow this to guide all their actions. For other leaders, fairness is a core value, and they will sacrifice earning in pursuit of this end. Regardless of what your guiding values are, you will only find peace in your decision if the actions you take align with your values. Taking the time to define your values upfront, and then sticking to them through the decision-making process will help you to be at peace with the decisions that you make.

Commit to Action

Once you have aligned on your course of action, it is important to make a commitment to execute your plan. During the brainstorming period, it is great to take in as much information as possible. You should talk to different stakeholders if you can, and get their thoughts on potential solutions, but once a decision is made, you must commit to it. Trust in organization wavers when leaders do not honor their commitments. There is a time for fact and opinion gathering, a time for commitment, and a time for action. As a leader, it is important that you are clear with our organization when each of those time periods start, and when they end. This will give your organization comfort in knowing that you allow for debate but once a decision is made, it is final.

To rise into a leadership role, you must demonstrate to people that you are trustworthy, and that you will take care of their interests. As you move higher within organizations, the number and diversity of the people that you serve increases. This creates both the satisfaction of being able to provide value to more people, the challenge of competing priorities and the burden of making decisions that will result in some people being winners, and other people being losers. When faced with complex problems, it is easy to give in to the loudest voice, or to the stakeholder with the most power. When leaders do this, they typically make decisions that do not align with their values. Non-value-based decision-making leads to inauthenticity, inconsistencies in actions, and an erosion of trust. As a leader you must fight the impulse to move quickly. Being purposeful in defining the decision you need to make, seeking out different perspectives, making value-based decisions, and committing to decisions once they are made, will help you to build a culture that aligns with who you want to be as a leader.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

What is Co-Active Coaching?

The Co-Active Training Institute has been around for 30 years and has trained over 65,000 coaches worldwide. The program has been certified by the International Coaching Federation which is the largest coaching accreditation organizations in the world. The Co-action training model is powerful because it challenges clients to declare their values, self-reflect, develop actions items, and commit to change. The model’s foundation is based on 4 guiding principles.

People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole

The first principle is that people are naturally creative resourceful and whole. In the Co-active model, it is not the job of the coach to fix the client. The client does not need fixing. What the client needs is assistance defining who they want to be, support in identifying negative thoughts, strategies for tapping into internal motivation, assistance in identifying options for improving their current situations, and encouragement to hold themselves accountable for their goals.

Dance in the moment

The second principle is dance in this moment. This principle is rooted in the fact that coaching is not therapy. During coaching sessions, we will only lightly touch on the client’s past. The past is fixed and cannot be changed. Our focus and attention are on the future. During coaching sessions, coaches will talk about what is happening now, and coming up with strategies to help the client move from their current state to their desired goal.

Focus on the whole person

The third principle is focus on the whole person. In the co-active model, coaches examine a client’s life from nine different segments. Career, Family and Friends, Significant other/Romance, Fun & Recreation, Health, Money, Personal Growth and Physical Environment. The reason coaches focus on all these segments is that they are all interconnected. As a client works on one segment of their life, it is important to understand the impact that it is having on other areas.

Evoke Transformation

The final principle is evoke transformation. People work with coaches because they want to experience a change in their life that they have not been able to achieve on their own. Coaches are taught to hold space for clients, so that they can self-reflect, gain emotional intelligence, define their goals, establish and renew motivation and develop actions plans to improve their lives.

Within my coaching practice, my primary focus is helping leaders define what they want from their careers and developing strategies to help them grow. As a former corporate executive and small business owner I know the importance of surrounding yourself by people that push you to be the best version of yourself. I help clients transform by deeply listening to them, asking thought-provoking questions, and reflecting back to them the things I have heard. With the information, I affirm the client's identity, challenge thinking that does not serve them, encourage action, requesting commitments and act as an accountability partner.

In summary, the Co-active coaching model can be summarized as a coaching approach where a coach, helps clients to define who they want to be, and what actions they will take to transform from who they are today, to who they want to be. Part of the magic of the coaching process is clients having the ability to get personalized unbiased help. If you have never experience executive coaching, I encourage you to give it a try. It will likely be one of the first times in your life that you speak to someone for 45 minutes, have their undivided attention, and know that they are exclusively listening to you with the unbiased goal of helping you self-reflect and develop plans to improve your career or business.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

Building Trust Will Grow Your Influence With Your Boss.

Influencing up is an important skill to master. While there is tons of literature on leadership, there is not a lot on followership. Followership can loosely be defined as the ability to understand a leader's vision and help them bring it to life. Followership differs from leadership in that, as a follower, you have less organizational power, fewer resources at your disposal, and competition for your leader's attention. In this article, we will explore followership and how you can gain more influence with your leader by focusing on building trust.

Trust is Built Through Action

Your boss has more pressure and obligations than you imagine. They are responsible for all of the work you and your peer do. In addition, the higher you are within an organization, the more cross-functional responsibilities you have. It is common for senior leaders in organizations to be overscheduled and overstressed, which can have negative impacts on focus, decision-making, and executive function. These negative effects tend to roll downhill, creating a culture of false urgency, unproductive collaboration, and missed opportunity.

When you recognize that your boss is not listening or working well with you, the first thing you should do is pause and ask, "How can I reduce the pressure and stress that my boss is feeling?" Everyone appreciates help when it is presented in the right way. The first and most important way you can help your boss is by doing your job at a high level. Beyond that, seek to understand where you might be able to add incremental value to your boss while positioning yourself to become a trusted advisor over time.

Building on Your Role As Advisor

Most leaders recognize that they have blind spots. Leaders who are worth following surround themselves with people who provide data and insights that help them understand how their business is performing. If you are looking to become one of these individuals, you have to be seen as someone reliable and trustworthy. Information is most useful when you believe the person who is providing it, and when it is directly applicable to the problems that need to be solved. As you build your relationship with your boss, focus on being consistent and efficient in providing helpful information, suggestions, and questions that solve business problems.

How Do You Become a Trusted Advisor?

It takes time to build a trusting relationship with your boss. It starts with you making small investments around being on time for work, doing the tasks that you are assigned, and consistently being forthright about challenges and obstacles. By executing what you are asked to do, you establish credibility with your boss. Over time, this credibility can grow into trust, which will provide opportunities for you to share your opinions, thoughts, and ideas.

Whenever your boss comes to you with a problem, and you can provide a solution, you expand your influence with your boss. Think of delivering results as building a bridge of trust. Each time you help solve a problem, another brick is laid, strengthening your relationship with your boss.

How is Trust Eroded?

When you disappoint, fail to deliver, or provide inaccurate or hard-to-understand information, you erode trust. No one can be perfect all of the time, but when interacting with your boss, you want to put forth effort towards presenting the best version of yourself. Take time to understand what is important to your boss. If possible, create a checklist of things you should do before handing in assignments to your boss or sitting down with them for a one-on-one.

Each time you complete a task that your boss sees or interacts with them in a meeting, you are creating a snapshot in time. That snapshot can be positive or negative. Your goal is to create more positive snapshots than negative ones. When you make a mistake, own it and do all that you can to correct it. This will help to minimize the impact of mistakes, and place you back on the path of becoming a trusted advisor.

Communication matters

Once you have established a strong trust bridge, you can begin the process of influencing your leader. Having a good relationship is the first step in the process. The next step in the influence process is communicating brief, clear, and compelling information to your leader.

• Being brief is important because the higher your leader is in an organization, the more people pull on their time and attention. Your ability to summarize complex ideas into a 5 to 10-minute conversation is essential to getting your leader's attention and getting them to care about the information you have to share.

• Being clear is essential because your leader likely does not have time to help you flush out your ideas or help you refine your logic. Test your ideas with a trusted peer and ask them to help you refine your thinking before presenting a new concept, idea, or solution to your boss. Once it is clear to others, present it to your boss.

• Being compelling is important because there are always competing priorities and perspectives. Your idea needs to be better than the others your leader is presented with. If you want buy-in, you must present solutions that feel like no-brainers because they are easy to understand and can provide a qualifiable benefit to your leader.

Summary

Building your followership skills is essential in growing your capability as a leader. It may seem counterintuitive, but all great leaders started off as great followers. Being a great follower can give you more face-time opportunities with your leader, greater influence within your organization, and incremental opportunities to take on important, high-profile work.

Being a great follower starts with executing your role at a high level and then providing insight and perspective that helps your leader and organization perform at a higher level.

One word of caution: not all leaders deserve great followers. Do your due diligence in identifying leaders to follow that align with your ethics, values, and beliefs. If you are going to go all in on supporting someone else's success, you want to be confident that it will be a mutually beneficial relationship.

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Thank you for reading this blog

I am a father, husband, executive coach, and former retail executive. My coaching expertise comes from 21 years of leading operations, sales, and marketing teams. I understand what it is like to feel stuck, undervalued, and underappreciated.

I also know what it takes to invest in professional development, climb the corporate ladder, and find fulfillment at work.

Your career path is a scavenger hunt. Each opportunity prepares you for the next. Allow me the opportunity to help you clarify your path and accelerate your professional development.

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Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com