leaders make tough decisions

Summary

the CrossFit Games had a competitor die during the event. the response from leadership was to let the remaining athletes vote on whether to continue. that is not leadership. that is leadership outsourcing the hardest call of the year to the people who should never have been asked.

the decision-making framework I use:

1. gather feedback. talk to the people closest to the situation. read the data. understand what each path costs.

2. never put it to a vote. votes feel democratic and inclusive. in a business they are a flag that nobody wants to own the call. employees, customers, and observers see the vote and know exactly what just happened.

3. decide for the business, not for yourself. the test is not what feels good in the moment. the test is what the company needs five years out. sometimes the right call costs you short-term sleep, short-term revenue, or a short-term relationship. you make the call anyway.

leadership is loneliest in the seconds before a tough decision. that’s the job. if you wanted comfort you would have taken the W-2.

Transcript

introduction: discussing the nature of leadership and decision-making

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. When you’re a leader, how do you make a really tough decision? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And how do you make those really tough decisions? And I’m not talking about necessarily when you have to fire somebody or cut an expense or you know, those kinds of things that are just like, those aren’t hard decisions to make.

They’re hard things to do. You can decide that I need to fire somebody because they’re not performing, but that’s different than going to do the thing, doing the things way harder than making the decision. But sometimes you might encounter a really tough decision in business in which the stakeholders, your employees or even your customers are affected.

analyzing a case where leadership was crucial in crisis management

Like for instance, if you’re brick and mortar, maybe changing locations or even online business, changing prices or changing terms, changing contract length, all these kinds of things, they can be tough decisions. And these things even happen internally with the team and they can be very hard to decide what to do because sometimes you can kind of go either way.

And so how do you make those tough decisions? And what got me really thinking about this was, and I talked a lot about this on the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. If you didn’t know, I have another podcast where I talk primarily about fitness things. What was published this week was the death of a CrossFit Games competitor happened recently, which I thought was very unfortunate and also avoidable.

I talk about that kind of from a fitness and programming side, but I still want to talk about it even on this podcast, just from a leadership perspective. In one particular instance, and that is, I read some articles after the fact that when Lazar passed away, he drowned in the CrossFit Games. They didn’t know what to do.

detailed walkthrough of the decision-making process using real-world examples

They suspended the rest of the events for the Friday competition. And then they sent out a survey, like a yes or no survey to all the athletes on, should we continue? Yes or no? Would you continue? Yes or no? And all the athletes like chimed in with, yeah, whatever, and I think it was like 78% of the respondents, the games competitors, came in and they were like, yeah, we will still compete or whatever.

And so then CrossFit leadership was like, okay, 78% will still go, so you know what, we’re going to go. We’re going to keep running the CrossFit Games. And they decided to keep going. Now whether or not they stopped the CrossFit Games entirely and didn’t have them that weekend, or they pressed forward, is not what I’m here to debate.

And I’m sure you have opinions of that if you’re kind of in this space or you’ve heard anything about it. But ultimately, big picture, let’s zoom out. A CrossFit Games competitor dies Friday, you suspend events Friday, and then you don’t know what to do. You don’t really know what to do, so you throw it to the competitors.

tips on how to effectively gather data and feedback without resorting to a democratic vote on critical decisions

And this, the failure, is obviously, again, I’m not getting into the technical, should this person have drowned? Was it a freak accident? Were there not enough safety precautions? Should the event be programmed differently? When someone passes away, there’s a myriad of failures that we could discuss, but I’m talking specifically the leadership side of whether or not to continue the CrossFit Games.

That’s the only decision I’m trying to touch today. But, and again, I don’t care if you decide to keep doing the CrossFit Games or don’t, the failure in this instance was CrossFit Games acting like this decision was a democratic, like a vote. Now if you just actually think about how a democracy works, you know, it’s an election year, so we’re all going to go in and we’re going to vote for whoever we want to be president, right?

So you’re voting based off of, hey, this person, I think this person should be president, either based off of their record and, you know, moving away from president, like even down to local leaders. A lot of that’s happening this year. And so it’s like, you’re voting on the person based off of their record.

closing thoughts on the responsibilities of a leader and the importance of making informed decisions

What have they done? You’re voting on this person based off of what they say they’re going to do, their agenda, what their views are, all those kind of things. But once they get in the seat, you don’t have a say anymore, right? You don’t have a say. We don’t vote on all these big rights in America or even down to the local level.

They don’t say, hey, you know what, here comes another big decision. Let’s throw this back out to America for a vote. That’s not what happens. We vote for the leader, then the leader makes the decisions. And sometimes you could have voted for the person and you’re not happy with the decision they made, or you could have voted for the person and you’re happy with the decision they made.

But that’s how it works. That’s how leadership works. They put the person in place to make the decisions. But once the person’s in place, the person in place doesn’t go back to the lower level and ask, what decision should I make? That’s not how leadership works. And that’s where I think there was a huge failure.

And this is not what I want you to do in your business. And I think it’s very easy to do is to act like when we’re in this leadership position as business owners, we could act very easily. Hey, you know what, I don’t know what to do here. So I’m not going to make a decision. I’m going to let you guys vote.

I’m going to let my customers vote, or I’m going to let, you know, my employees vote. What should we do? What should we do? I don’t know. I’m just going to let you guys vote. And then whatever you guys vote and decide, that’s what we’ll do. That is the definition of core leadership. In fact, when I was going through all leadership training in the military, if you ever did something like that in these scenarios they put you in, that’s basically called delegating leadership.

If you do that, you would fail. It’s an automatic fail. It doesn’t matter how many other things that you had in place or that were going correctly. Automatic failure, if you’re the one who doesn’t actually make the decision, you could agree or disagree with that. But ultimately, I think we can agree that the leader makes the decisions, especially the tough decisions.

The tougher the decision, the more it’s needed. Because if you are, you know, running the front desk of your company and you have a couple of employees and you’re like, you know what, I don’t know what kind of candy we should put there at the front desk. You guys can vote whichever piece of candy we want, we’ll put up there.

If that was an actual like point of friction between some of your employees. Yeah, who cares? Have that be a vote. But when it comes to something major, should we continue or not continue the CrossFit Games when this is going to have a forever impact on our business? That’s just a CEO level decision.

No one else gets involved. Sure, you can take feedback, input, whatever, but you don’t go based off of what that is. You go based off of what you think you should do as a leader. Okay, if you want the data points, get the data points. But you still make the decision. You don’t ever say, well, you decided to do this and that’s why we’re doing it.

That is the definition of poor, poor leadership. So here’s a simple framework that you can follow. First, listen to your team. Okay, listen to your team, listen to your customers, whatever this decision you might be facing. First, listen, do get the feedback. So I’m not saying as the leader, don’t listen to anybody.

You make all the decisions. Who cares what they think? That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, listen, get the feedback, get the data, get everything you need to be able to make a good decision. But once you have all that data, we have now shut everybody else out, right? So, okay, I listened to each one of you.

We did a survey. We did all the things. Okay, come into me. Like, okay, I have the data. Typically I don’t like votes, period, in a company. I only like feedback. If there’s like a, should we do this, shouldn’t we do, should we do this or should we not do this? I don’t like to go company-wide vote.

You say yes, you say no. Let us know. I don’t typically to do that. I don’t see where that works out well. But what I would like to do in lieu of that is, like I said, listen, get the feedback. Hey, feedback from you, feedback from you, feedback from you. I got all the feedback. I’m writing down, I’m taking notes.

Okay, so don’t vote. Don’t take a vote. So first step, listen. Second, no vote. Don’t try to stay away from voting. You already voted in place, even though you’re the CEO and you’re the one who decided to be there. You’re in place. We’re not going back down, trickle down democracy to, okay, let’s get another vote.

And then the third thing is decide. You make the decision. Even if you got all the feedback from the team and the team was like, yeah, the overwhelming feedback is they don’t think we should do this thing. But you know, as the business leader, that it’s going to be a little bit harder. They might be voting that way because they don’t want to be inconvenienced or they don’t want to go through a rough patch or they don’t want to take a step back and pay for three months or whatever the tough decision is that we’re making.

Do decide. They don’t decide because they’re deciding based off of their own personal preferences. Very rarely are they trying to make a decision for the vision of the company, for what’s best for the company long term, you know, all their, that’s not their role. So that’s not how they’re thinking.

So you have to decide. So listen, get the feedback, no voting, and then you decide that is leadership. Those are all the things that you have to do. Do not delegate decision making. Don’t trickle down to a vote. Do get the feedback. Do hear your people, do hear your customers, but taking this vote and then making the decision based off purely off of like how people voted.

That is poor, poor leadership all around. And so I just want to make sure if you’re listening to this, when you are faced with a tough decision as a leader, you need everything that you can. You need every data point, every piece of information that you can get. You need to go in well informed, know what everybody’s opinion is, and then you could take that in, start mulling it over.

But then ultimately you have to make the tough decisions. We’re not going to vote a yes or no, and then act like the vote is what, what carries us that direction. You have to go in and then put on your leadership hat and make the best possible decision for the business. Best possible decision for the business.

You hear how I’m not saying the best possible decision for you because you are separate from the business entity. A lot of CEOs, especially when you’re new or when you’re a founder, you don’t think that way. You think that me and the business are the same thing and you might feel that way, but you’re not because you could sell the business.

You could hire a new CEO. You could replace yourself. You could fully work yourself out of a business. So there’s what’s the best decision for the business. So when I’m making a best decision for one of my businesses, I’m not trying to make what’s the best decision for Jerred Mood. I’ve made plenty of decisions that I knew were going to make a company less profitable in the short term, which profit with how I get paid is going to hurt my income.

I’ve had to make those decisions because I’m trying to make the best decision for the company, not for me. You hear that? You see the difference, right? What’s the best decision for the company? Not for you. You can’t act like an employee when you are the CEO, the owner, the founder, and then you start making those decisions.

And when you can start making decisions like that, you are putting in the effort. If you’re not doing those things, try harder.