It's Leaders That Make the Decisions In Projects By John C. Goodpasture PMP Articles / Newsletter Article Date: Nov 08, 2006 - 08:55 AM |
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If Decision-Making Were Easy… If decision-making were easy, we would all do it well; certainly, our leaders would. Naturally, we mean making “good” decisions, decisions of high quality that others will see as wise and thoughtful, and, therefore, decisions that project members can readily follow, if not agree with. Good decisions attract followers. Good decisions are rational. Those who decide rationally apply facts, judgments, and estimates to a decision making process, but rational decisions need not represent a consensus. Leaders who really understand leadership know that decisions made according to process have a natural appeal to those governed by the outcomes, even for those who would have decided another way. Governance, a practical and essential quality of leadership, is an outcome of good project decision-making. By contrast, decision-makers who make or impose decisions that seem disconnected from the facts, seem at variance to established policy, or seem counter to the project strategy, risk not only not being irrational, they risk making decisions that are not easily enforceable. Unenforceable decisions have the practical effect of being decisions without a following. Leadership is forfeited when there is no following. Decision Participants in Projects Everyone who has ever worked on a project has experienced the opportunities to make decisions. Indeed, there may be a large cast involving themselves in decision opportunities. Among the familiar participants there are key decision makers [KDMs], supporting subject matter experts [SMEs], decision process managers [PMs], and other affected parties [OAPs]. None of these participants may actually be titled as leaders. Many will have management titles. Some will be individual contributors with functional or technical positions. But their formal position in the organization, the project, or job function does not foreclose an opportunity for leadership. KDMs actually make the decision. Usually they have positional and administrative authority over resources, scope, and schedule; they are KDMs because they can commit to the outcome and cause performance. KDMs are usually recognized as leaders, but not always; they may act more as manager than leader in any specific decision situation. SMEs bring the functional and technical expertise to the decision process. They assemble the facts, make the estimates, and lay the groundwork for judgments to be made by the leadership. PMs manage the process of making decisions. Often it’s the PM that foresees the decision need. Usually the PM presents recommendations, interprets facts and estimates, and translates jargon into the natural language of the KDM. PMs are often leaders in decision opportunities. OAPs live with the results of the decision process. OAPs are part of the corps of followers in the decision paradigm. OAPs are stakeholders in the project, sometimes they are project participants, but ordinarily OAPs are not directly involved until the decision is made and implemented. Leadership in Decision-Making We are using leadership much in the way John House described it in his 2004 book, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, to wit: leadership is "..the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members." Influence, motivate, and enable: these are the heavy lifting of leadership. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, leadership is separable from management in the following way: Managers, it is said, can make the trains run on time, but leaders can see that perhaps we don’t need the trains at all! Leadership opportunities to influence, motivate, and enable others are present in every project decision opportunity. Getting the team to the moment of decision is frequently where the leadership challenge is. Often, team members other than the KDM find themselves playing leader, scoping the challenge, motivating the SMEs, and driving the team effectively into the decision making process. Leadership expectations in the decision process Everyone would probably agree with our point that leadership is not exclusively reserved to the KDM, and likely there would be no disagreement that decisions are made in projects each day by various members of the project team. But expectations vary as summarized below:
What they decide: Goals & strategies, winners and losers among project proposals, and top-level resource deployment
What they decide: Who will lead the project, what the top-level project plan requires and will deliver, and what the returns will be to justify the investment
What they decide: Tactical questions that arise as a consequence of project execution
What they decide: Tactical questions that arise as a consequence of project execution
What they decide: “The buck stops here.” The KDM is the decider, and can be anyone in the process charged with making the decision Leadership Styles Affect Deciding Leadership has styles. And those styles affect decision-making in projects at all levels. Like it or not, leadership style is part of the decision process. Most leaders have more than one style, though perhaps there is a style that is dominant. When describing leadership styles, a model is useful. Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey created perhaps the most familiar and widely known model of leadership styles known as Situational Leadership. Writing in 1969 in their article entitled Life cycle Theory of Leadership in the “Training and Development Journal,” they conclude that there is no optimum style of leadership. The best leaders adapt their leadership behavior to the needs of their followers and to the operational situation. Situational Styles Authors Blanchard and Hersey propose a two-part adaptation requiring both situational awareness and knowledge of the follower’s capabilities. In their model, there are four leadership styles, designated: S1, Directing, wherein the leader defines the tasks of their subordinates and manages the task execution very closely, leaving really no latitude to the subordinate. The leader has, or presumes to have, all the operational knowledge of how to do the task, and correspondingly, the follower is not expected to be a task-oriented SME. Intrusive S1 style is tagged “micromanagement.” Aggressive S1 style is akin to “lead, follow, or get out of the way.” The paradigm is: I’m the leader, you’re the follower, and it’s my way or else. S2, Coaching, in which the leader modifies their S1 style to allow for some operational input from the subordinate and some latitude in subordinate independence. The leader is fully engaged, but not micromanaging. S3, Supporting, which further widens the latitude of maneuver of the follower. The overall task or task objective comes top-down in true S1 style, but implementation details are largely left to the subordinate. S4, Delegating, which is almost a role-reversal from S1. The leader recognizes the expertise of the subordinate, the leader probably possesses little or no operational knowledge, and beyond a very strategic level of participative deciding, the leader leaves everything else to the subordinate. Leaders lead followers. In Hersey and Blanchard’s model, followers perform at one or more “development” levels that describe commitment and competence. D4 is high commitment and high competence. There are three other combinations of high and low commitment and competence. D1 is low commitment and low competence. A follower may be a D1 performer in one aspect of the project and a D4 in another. Really good leaders can execute in all the leadership styles, though usually one style fits a person’s capabilities best. After all, if a leader cannot find a style to attract followers, their leadership is a hollow claim. Project leaders align their styles situationally with their follower development levels. We can all imagine that a S1 directing style fits the situation when the follower is at D1, low commitment and competence level. Deciding Not to Decide A frustrating variant of the S1 and the S4 styles is “deciding not to decide.” The S1-style leader decides for his or her own purposes to “let the best person win.” A competition ensues. It may be messy, intentionally so. The S1 leader may move to the S2 coaching style to encourage an outcome. The S4 leader may be bound up in the “paralysis of analysis.” The disengaged S4-style leader either cannot make the decision, or fails to engage and leaves the team rudderless. Regardless of root cause, the operational effect of “not deciding” is to surface the most passionate or most committed, or, at the very least, the effect is to cause different approaches to compete for the decision. But there is a downside. Project resources consume much energy in non-value effort to win the competition, and going through these motions may well be frustrating to all team members. Suffice it to say that leaders rarely make a process out of “deciding not to decide.” Ordinarily not stepping up to a decision leaves a vacuum and spawns worrisome uncertainty in the minds of the project participants. But sometimes “not deciding” has effectiveness much like brainstorming. There may be hidden factors that only come to light with the competitive chaos that ensues. To the leader who decided not to decide with purpose and forethought, revealing new information may be just the result sought. But many team members would probably offer that even digging for latent information can be a process, unlike “deciding not to decide.” Summary Leadership is not exclusively reserved for the key decision maker. Leadership opportunities are abundantly present throughout projects for executive and operational managers to step-up to and make a difference: to motivate, to influence, and to enable project members. Effective exercise of leadership invokes styles situationally appropriate to these moments of opportunity. Even though most of us do not want to be micro-managed, as a style it sometimes works well. The other styles, S2 through S4, are more rewarding to those on the receiving end of the decision, and these styles serve to fill out the leader’s repertoire. Frustrating as it often is to the led, some leaders even find that ‘not deciding’ motivates and enables! The important thing at the end of the day is that decisions made by leaders in whom we have confidence are decisions that attract followers and appeal naturally by virtue of their quality. About the Author John C. Goodpasture is Founder of Square Peg Consulting. He can be reached at www.sqpegconsulting.com. |
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