How to make asynchronous decisions?

As a leader, the goal of making a decision is to decide how to solve a problem and get your team unstuck so they can move forward with the mission. 

There are two benefits to making decisions the async way:

1. You gain enough time to gather more information, reducing the risk of bad decisions

2. You pull your team into the process, increasing the overall transparency and engagement of your team

As an async leader, you are less like a decision-maker power player but more like a facilitator of collaborative decisions.

But why do we make decisions? To unstuck your team, solve problems, and let them move forward. And when do we make a wrong decision? Either our emotions get in the way, or we need more information. In both cases, having more time to make the decisions can be helpful. Involving others in the process can also be beneficial as a team reduces emotional rollercoasters as they can act as a feedback loop on new ideas.

Making async decisions is easy if you follow this 5-step process:

1. Assess the issue. Write down the assessment in a document with an optional solution already provided.

2. Collaborate on the written assessment document with your team. Invite them to give feedback and insights.

3. Review the document. Resolve comments and understand the insights, then provide a complete document review.

4. Integrate all the aspects. This step is the only one that can happen synchronously through a meeting. Discuss all the feedback and insights, and share the review with your team. Since a lot of preliminary written work went into this, the meeting will be super productive for everyone.

5. Align the entire team around the decision. It can happen during your integration meeting or asynchronously later, but you need to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Aligning the entire team means a lot as it shows the way forward for everyone, the very reason why you made the decision.

Once you make decisions this way, you will see two immediate results:

• Your team is more aligned and engaged

• Your leadership becomes more transparent, inspirational

If you still have doubts and are afraid of letting the control out of your hands, I want to highlight three things for you:

1. It is the leader who announces the decision-making process for everyone with a pre-written assessment of the problem

2. It is the leader who makes the final review of the collaborative document that the team produced on the problem

3. And it is the leader who does the alignment with the complete team

Another added benefit of this type of decision-making process is documentation. We are familiar with the "we had this problem before" situation. You won't have this situation anymore, as written documentation is everywhere and is the critical element of the process. 

I understand that decision-making is the most protected process of leadership. Even so, leaders sometimes mystify it. That should be different - decisions affect everyone, so everyone should be involved in making them.

#TLDR

1. We make wrong decisions due to the lack of time or engagement from our team.

2. By changing the decision-making process to a transparent, collaborative, asynchronous process, we gain time and clarity for our team.

3. Involving our team in decision-making helps us with alignment, transparency, and engagement. Everyone supports a decision more in which they have some part in the making.

4. There is a 5-steps process for better asynchronous decisions: assess, collaborate, review, integrate, and align. Most of the steps are asynchronous and involve the entire of your team.

5. The asynchronous decision-making is heavily documented in written form for archival and collaboration purposes.

I hope I pulled your mind a little on decisions.

Peter

---