Loud Thinking

Don’t Put Off Tough Decisions

When it comes to organizational change, making big decisions is cognitively and emotionally taxing. But when team leaders fail to decide which old directions need to be sacrificed in service of the new direction, the tradeoff doesn’t magically disappear – it simply slides down the ladder. Trickle-down tradeoffs create two major problems for change efforts:
Team misalignment: When a team leader avoids the discomfort of deciding priorities, each team member has to decide what her priorities are – and it’s highly unlikely that everyone will independently arrive at the same conclusions.
Poor judgment: Making tradeoffs depletes our overall mental capacity. When your team has to spend a long morning making the tradeoffs that leaders haven’t, it easily leads to long afternoons of making poor choices for their customers, their workloads, and their budgets.

Adapted by HBR from “To Move Ahead You Have to Know What to Leave Behind,” by Nick Tasler.