In this week's newsletter

• Q&A: Why is my team bringing status updates and flagging risks instead of teeing up decisions?
• Warm-up and check-out questions you can use this week to improve decision-making on your team
• Your weekly bird break

Q: My meeting is supposed to be a place where decisions are made, instead people bring status updates and new risks. What can I do differently?

A: While you can likely do a few things differently in terms of meeting logistics and leadership, an even more fundamental challenge could be at play: different people walk into the same meeting with different ideas about where they are in the decision-making process.

In a previous executive leadership role, a leader who reported to me was passionate about increasing front-line staff compensation. In every executive meeting, they pushed us to make a final decision to support this initiative. The problem? We were never on the same page about where we were in the decision-making process:

1. Identify when a decision is needed
2. Scope the decision-making process: define the decision to be made, why, by when, why now, roles, input needed, and decision-making criteria
3. Gather input from stakeholders and research
4. Consider options
5. Make a recommendation
6. Decide
7. Communicate decision and execute

For straightforward, low-stakes decisions, we can usually get away with leaving these steps unnamed. Don’t worry, you don’t need three meetings and a spreadsheet to decide where to buy lunch! However, when the decision involves many people, has budget implications, or shifts organizational priorities, we need to make the steps more explicit to avoid stalled decisions and meeting frustration.

That passionate leader advocating for compensation adjustments? They had done part of step 1 and part of step 2, then wanted the executive team to skip straight to step 6. We needed them to do the rest of the steps before we could responsibly approve a budget increase.

Each step requires work outside of meetings and you do not necessarily need a meeting for every phase. You decide whether a meeting is needed based on the dynamics in your organization, the stakes of the decision, and the kind of alignment needed at each step along the way. The key: if you do have a meeting, make sure you’re designing the agenda for the step you’re on.

So what about the status updates and new risks from the original question? Instead of asking why your team isn’t using the meeting for decisions, I’d invite you to determine which decision-making step they’re on and nudge them to use the meeting to move to the next one.

Are they flagging that someone needs to make a decision (step 1)? Challenge your teammate to build out a draft decision scope and bring to the next meeting for feedback.

Are they trying to gather input (step 3) or get feedback on options (step 4)? Encourage them to outline the pros and cons of three potential directions. Then use the next meeting to explore options and tradeoffs.

Try it:

Meeting Minute

Use these to start and end your meetings this week

​Warm-up question​

In How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, Annie Duke introduces the concept of “resulting.” We often judge our decisions by the results we got, not by our process. A good result from a bad decision-making process is dangerous because it sets us up to make bad decisions in the future. One way to get around this? Reflect on decision processes gone right.

​Check-out question​

This is good data for you as a meeting leader. It’s often helpful to follow up one-on-one either in your 1:1 meeting or over email/Slack to probe on where exactly they are in the decision-making process (which step). You can sequence future meeting agenda topics based on what you know about the decision stage and timeline. And you can help your team match their decision expectations to the step they’re actually on.

Next week:

How are you accounting for your meeting's overhead tax?