Thinking through unintended consequences of actions, inactions, decisions, and lack of decisions. Often, leaders make decisions without thinking through any unintended consequences. Additionally, leaders overlook potential consequences of inaction or indecision; this can lead to a lack of empathy and compassion, disengagement, and a negative perception from others.
Given this topic, you might be wondering if critical thinking can be developed. The answer is yes. As a Coach, I find myself frequently doing this with clients – sometimes in more simplistic ways that might surprise you. It is a process of breaking things down into smaller bits, working through them, identifying potential paths, working together to identify otherwise unknown, unchartered paths and discussing advantages / disadvantages of the top paths identified. These advantages/disadvantages include how these decisions, actions, policies, inaction/indecisions could potentially affect others (think about all “others” – employees, clients, stakeholders, potential employees/clients).
I’ll give you a case study example. Recently, I had a client who is going to be stepping into a CEO role and he is trying to prepare. We were discussing writing job descriptions and laying out the overall hierarchy and he asked a poignant question: “What do you think about making everyone’s job descriptions transparent to everyone at the company?” (GREAT question!). I led us back to more of a high-level overview of strategy – how do you want to treat your employees? What are your overarching priorities? I already knew the answer to these questions from what he had told me in the past – he wants to treat them like adults. He wants to set a foundation of trust and create his SOPs in a way that makes it as easy as possible for his employees.
Relating his question back to his priority of making things easy and clear for his employees, we then talked about – how does making everyone’s job descriptions transparent tie into this? What are the potential advantages and disadvantages that could arise – both from doing this and from not doing this? This is a good example showcasing how we let our values, priorities, mission and vision rule our decisions. We use our values and mission/vision as a guidepost.
Moral of the story: thoughtfulness and more deliberateness about the whole picture will go far. Your employees will be able to tell when you are putting a lot of thought into your decisions and they will recognize that you thought about how this would affect them.
Why isn’t this happening? Lack of developed leadership, lack of solid thinking/contemplating/brainstorm time (whether because of action addiction or poor time management), lack of empowered middle managers, lack of caring about people.
What are some areas this is prevalent in: any policies & procedures (both unspoken and spoken), hiring, compensation, performance reviews, etc.
One more thing that I find helps in this area is – if you are a leader and you are communicating a company-wide decision/policy, providing some insight into how or why the decision was made (additionally, providing insight into why action isn’t being taken or a decision isn’t being made) can help with engaging others. It allows for more buy-in and understanding.
