Bruce Daisley

Transcript

SH: I'd love to ask you Bruce as the author of, The Joy of Work, what did you learn about the role of decision making in the workplace?

BD: The best decision is the one you make. Because quite often it's to my mind, it's the hesitancy from making decisions, it's the equivocation, it's the procrastination that actually costs you the opportunity.

What I do know is that I'm decisive. I make decisions and I move on with things and what I know is that making quick decisions is often the most powerful thing.

Just quickly having a process where two or three of you make that decision and move on, I found was energising and liberating. And I used to say to my team, the maximum I had for my team was “just make a decision and blame me”.  And the very fact that you've got someone to blame means you can make a decision.

SH: When I first approached you about this interview and your response to me was, “I wouldn't consider myself as a good decision maker”. That did surprise me because if you look at your history and what your achieving now career wise you could see a whole evidence base of good decisions that you have made.  What is it that makes you think, “oh actually, I wouldn't class myself as a good decision maker”? Had you even contemplated that before I asked you?

BD: I think the challenge of modern work for most people is that there's no scope for decision making. If you look at the average person in the UK, I think around 70% of UK workers describe they do their job in teams.

And the consequence of this, it's a reflection of not just of the UK, but of global firms, people who do their job in teams, they often feel that have no personal autonomy, they have no personal input they feel disempowered.

SH: Have you seen a difference with leaders making decisions when they don't have access to those old clues and triggers we used to get from being together?

BD:  I think there's a real danger if you look into the research, the research shows that senior leaders are the ones who believe workers need to be back in the office.

It's generally, the thing that those leaders are confronted by is that maybe their instincts are just habits that they had just learned behaviours.

SH: And what would your advice be for leaders around making decisions in 2022 where uncertainty is still the norm?

 BD: I don't believe this is the time to make decisions when it comes to working because none of us have got full information. My strong feeling is that it's worth doing experiments, it's worth measuring them, but the organisations I've been most inspired by the ones who've said we don't have a top-down solutions.

One of the best organisations of work we've had said there were 60 different proposals by different teams about how they wanted to work. Some were fully remote, some were fully back in the office, and they said yes to all of them. And what they said to all of them was, “please demonstrate to us, how are you going to measure whether this works and then get on with it”.

Now, that's an interesting contrast to what we've seen as the missteps from some of the big firms, some of the big firms who've earned a position in esteem as just thinking that they know the future. Apple Google, both of them have made really big mistakes where they've said to workers “you need to be back these days a week in the office”. And both of them were confronted with workplace uprising. I think that's the challenge of modern work for a lot of people that, if they're trusted and they're able to make decisions, they feel capable of doing really good work.

If they're not trusted and they're not able to make decisions, they gradually become a bit disengaged and think, I can't be bothered with this.

SH: What advice do you have for helping leaders to get that trust?

BD: The smaller teams the best thing for it, generally what happens is when people are working in small teams, you can reduce the amount of electronic communication you need. You can reduce the amount of meetings you need. As a consequence of this, people just feel more empowered to get their job done and to work quickly.

Jeff Bezos believed that communication between the teams should be eliminated as much as possible. He believed the team should communicate via API, not via meetings and emails. Now, whether they're able to do that fully or how that works but for me, that's one the freshest ideas I've heard.

SH: For me winning trust is supported when you ask yourself as a leader ‘do I actually have a job spec a clear on my job?’ So many people I believe, make poor decisions and fail to win trust because not only are the people not clear on what their job should be, they're stuck in those meetings.

Senior people don't get asked the simplest questions such as ‘how are you feeling? Because to me feeling massively influences good or bad decision making.

BD: I'm in agreement with you having a clear measurable job description where there's two or three clear metrics you be measured on clarifying what you're employed to do. If you weren't employed, what would stop happening? That's the fundamental thing, I agree strongly on that.

SH: Because you can't make good decisions if you don't know the parameters about what you're making good decisions.

BD: Having a discussion of scarcity is also a really helpful thing and asking the question “What would happen if I stopped doing something in the workplace?”

SH: What is your top tip to make good decisions, no matter how high the stakes, within an organisation?

BD: When you've got enough information to make a decision, making decisions strikes me as really helpful. Fewer people making decisions quickly gives you a bit more agility. And in my experience, making a decision is better than procrastinating. I'm just in favor of smaller teams being empowered to do things more quickly.

SH: Sometime the right action when you are really struggling to make a decision, is in fact, to make the decision not to make a decision”. It’s very liberating.

Thank you Bruce, for your great advice on making good decisions. To summarise:

-       Let people be decisive

-       Move quickly

-       Be agile

-       Empower people

-       Don't be scared to take the blame because then that will empower people to actually get on and take risks.

BD: Exactly that.