Reduce chaos, even when things are uncertain

This resource first appeared in issue #34 on 24 Jul 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other, Managing A Team: Other

Don’t Create Chaos - Stay SaaSy
How to Lead Decisively when you Don’t Know What’s Next - Karin Hurt and David Dye, Let’s Grow Leaders
Making Decisions with Others - Deepak Azad

“Great leaders vacuum up chaos” - The Stay SaaSy post uses this as a nice way to describe one really important function of managers. We have to be entropy-fighters, reducing chaos and uncertainty about how a project will go forward, what priorities should be, what are good next steps for a team members career, and any of a number of other things. And one key point they make:

The fancier your title, the more you must avoid causing chaos.

This is something that a lot of new managers (including myself at the time) don’t get. Once you’re a manager, you can accidentally sow chaos by musing aloud about some idea that just crossed your mind, or asking lots of questions about stuff that doesn’t matter but you’re just personally curious about.

All that chaos reduction means making decisions, especially in the face of uncertainty. That’s really hard for some of us in research. I probably like many of us, was trained in academia. My wife was trained in the Emergency Room. One of us is much better at decisive decision making! The other of us prefers to thoroughly and leisurely analyze things, maybe read a couple books first. No points for guessing who is who.

The short Hurt and Dye article urges us to lean into uncertainty in decision making, by accepting the uncertainty and acting anyway:

Ground yourself in your values
Stay focused on what matters most.
Make the best, next, small, bold decision.
Show up with confident humility, and
Preparing for the pivot.

The article by Azad counsels us to have clarity about your decision making process, especially decisions large enough to have to think about RACI:

What decision needs to be made?
What’s the timeline of the decision making?
Who will do the work and arrive at a decision?
Who are the stakeholders?
Who will ratify or veto the decision?
Who will need to be informed of the decision?
When can you revisit a decision?

Even for smaller decisions, being clear with yourself about what decision needs to be made now, setting a timeline for the decision making, understanding the consequences are of making the decision, and being clear on how easy or hard it is to revisit the decision later has made the decision making process a lot easier for me. Now it’s like one book, tops.