Defining the Most Important Thing

Defining the Most Important Thing

Not all criteria are the same. There might be a hundred variables, but they are not equally important. When you’re clear on what’s important, evaluating options becomes easier. Many people are shy to pick out the most important thing because they don’t want to be wrong.

When you don’t communicate what’s most important, people are left guessing about what matters. They need you to solve the problem for them. While you feel needed and important, you’re also busy making all the decisions that your colleagues should be making.

A lot of managers secretly enjoy being the bottleneck. They like the way it feels when their team is dependent on them. Don’t be fooled! This is the ego default at work, and it puts a ceiling on how far you will go. It tries to convince you that you’re the best; that you’re so smart, so skilled, so insightful that only you can make the decisions. In reality, you’re just getting in the way of the team performing at its best.

I learned this lesson the hard way. I had just taken over a team and was surprised that they would check in with me before making any decisions—a pattern their previous manager had established.

To speed things up, I came up with a system for them to sort decisions into three boxes:

1. decisions they could make without any input from me,
2. decisions they could make after sharing their reasoning with me so I could double-check their judgment, and
3. decisions I wanted to make myself.

But the problem persisted.

After a few months, I consulted my mentor. “Do they know what decisions they should make and what decisions you want to make?” he asked. “Are the boxes clear?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but due to the operational nature of our job, if I’m not around, they have to make decisions in the third box without me. That’s where we’re running into the biggest problems. They seem incapable of doing that.”

“Do they know the one thing that’s most important?” he probed.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said. “What’s most important differs for each decision.” I listed off a few different types of decisions and how the variables were different.

“That’s not what I mean,” he replied. “Do they know what you value most?” I hesitated. He looked me square in the eye. “Shane, do you know what you value most?” I stared at him blankly. He sighed. “The problem isn’t your team. It’s you. You don’t know what’s most important. Until you do, your team will never make decisions without you. It’s too risky for them to figure out the most important thing. Communicate that to your team, and they’ll be able to make decisions on their own.”

“What if they make the wrong decision?”

“As long as they make a decision based on the most important thing, they won’t be wrong.” He paused, then said slowly, “A lot of people reach their ceiling in this job because they can’t figure out this one thing.”

I learned three important lessons that day. First, I couldn’t expect my team to make decisions on their own unless I told them how I wanted them to make those decisions. That meant focusing on the single most important thing and not inundating them with hundreds of variables to consider. Second, if they made the decision with the most important thing in mind, and it turned out wrong, I couldn’t get upset with them. If I did that, they’d never make decisions without me. The third lesson was perhaps the most revealing: I myself didn’t know what the most important thing was. That’s why I couldn’t tell them.