Little acknowledged fact: the majority of any company’s decisions are not made at the top of an organization – they are made by leaders in the middle of the organization like you and I. The organizational strategy is nearly always a “tops down” exercise…but it still relies on everyone else to execute on the vision. As we all try to execute on other’s visions, it can be challenging to make sure we frame decisions in the right light as we evaluate them. Every organization will have some different focus relative to stakeholders, including:
- Employees
- Customers
- Partners
- Community
- Shareholders
And let’s be super clear: there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” focus here. On LinkedIn and some other platforms, you’ll often see “wisdom” like “put your customer’s first and you can’ t go wrong” or “if you employees are happy, your customers will be happy”. They sound catchy and in some contexts are right…but they are not iron-clad rules for success as they are often portrayed. There are no absolutes here. That’s what make this topic so difficult.
As a leader in the middle, the best course of action is to understand what your organization values at that moment in time – how they weight the stakeholders – and as best you can, align to that. It’s a balancing act based on other’s predispositions of weight and value. Sounds easy, right? Well, you will have a few challenges just like the person that created the below did – and maybe even more as at least the weights of rocks are tangible and non-negotiable.
Most organizations are not clear in word or deed about how they want you as a day to day decision maker to relatively value the stakeholders. Think about your current or past roles – how many times did you hear that your organization was some variation of “customer obsessed” but yet watched high level strategic decisions be made that ran counter to that statement (maybe a change in offerings, price increase, or change in access to support). That doesn’t make your organization “bad”…it just highlights the difficulty in communicating how the high level leaders balance all their stakeholders. Your organization can be customer obsessed, but yet need to make some decisions based on shareholder impact or employee needs or partner desires. All are equally valid and, depending on the context, of varying importance for a given decision.
Depending on where you sit in an organization, it can be hard to both understand the organizational direction and then balance that with the confines of your role. To give you a generic example, if you lead a supply chain function in a medical device industry and you are negotiating a large, critical order for a key component for your apex product, what matters most?
- Employees – Size/timing of the order – How much product can your team receive, track, and build?
- Customers – Speed of delivery – How fast is the product needed?
- Partners – Burden on suppliers – Can the current supplier handle this order? Can your other dependent suppliers keep up? Will the quality be as expected if we go fast?
- Community – Urgency of need of the product – How badly and when does the broader community need the device in question?
- Shareholders – Financial impact – Is there a financial benefit to getting to market quick? What is the cost of materials (product, shipping, expediting, etc.)? What is the opportunity cost of production?
In your narrow role relative to supply chain, your goal is to optimize the supply chain. As a result, you are likely conditioned to focus on lowest cost with acceptable speed and high quality. In your role, typically, higher costs are bad, delivery too early or too late is bad, subpar quality is bad, and so on. Your day to day focus will be somewhat isolated from the broader organization with a laser sight on efficiency and effectiveness.
You’ll likely be asked to make a decision without knowing the answer to many of the above questions…and you may not even ask many of those questions. But what if you happen to be ordering a key component of PPE at the early stages of a pending pandemic? Would that make your focus change? Would you consider the questions above differently? Of course it would.
Extreme examples like this open our eyes. In a world of efficiency, a change of external factors can leave us out of lockstep with the organization in our specific roles if we are unaware that sea-change is happening. Less dramatically, if senior leadership sees tough economic times ahead but the rank and file of the company don’t know that, the decisions made at the top and the middle could be at odds. Or be wildly misunderstood by the middle. This is going to happen in your career. It probably already has. More than once. Senior leaders can’t share every bit of their thinking in every decision – either because of need for discretion, a lack of communication, both, or other reasons. Again, none of those things are bad…they just are.
So what can you do? When you make decisions of consequence, do a couple things:
- Think through the impact on the key stakeholders involved (for your team and company)
- Take time to line out your thinking for each stakeholder so you can explain the impact
- Make the decisions that aligns with your best interpretation of the organization’s focus at the time
- Be explicit on why you chose the way you did and the tradeoffs you expect
- Verbalize this with your immediate leaders and your team, so everyone understands
Does this ensure you are aligned? Heck no! But it does position you as a thought leader – someone who has all parties interests in mind. It shows you are a thoughtful evaluator and deliberator as you make decisions. It serves a clear demonstration that you are driving to align with the organization’s broader strategy as you know it. And finally, it will make pivoting away much easier as leaders above you can clarify what may have changed in the strategy or environment that would cause your decision to need to change.
As a leader with the unenviable task of decision making without all the information or context needed, the best we can do is be explicit about what, how, and why we made our decisions and be open to changing those decisions when new information or context comes to light. As a matter of fact, as humans in the same situation (incomplete information or context), it’s the best we can do in life.
View from the Middle 