Helping Leaders Navigate Cost Pressures

Many of us feel that leaders are facing unprecedented cost pressures. And we are seeing the impacts of this in our leaders and teams.

One of the impacts is that these financial pressures often drive managers to make more, and faster decisions, with incomplete information.

Without having the right skills and tools in place to manage what may be becoming a new norm, businesses, and importantly the people involved, can face significant risks.

Being equipped with insight into effective decision-making mindsets and frameworks can help reduce stress, anxiety, frustration, procrastination and can help guide robust collaboration.

As leaders it is important to remind ourselves, and others, that the quality of decision-making is likely to be less about having perfect data. It’s more about having the right strategy and mindset around the decision.

Here are a few observations I’m seeing consistently with senior leaders in this position:
🔴 There’s a danger that stress and anxiety narrows perspective. Consequently, people resort to what they know and are comfortable with. So innovation and creativity are being lost.
🔴 Urgency replaces prioritisation and it starts to feel uncomfortably like constant firefighting.
🔴 Decisions become reactive, not strategic. Many short term reactive decisions can be the wrong decision long term for the business.

So what actually helps?

There are a few solutions and here are a couple of things I often start with with clients:
🔹Start with the small decisions first. Practice making decisions with uncertainty, ensuring you separate facts from assumptions.
🔹Can you determine when you have 70-80% of the information needed?
🔹Create clarity by choosing fewer, better priorities. Make sure you have a strategy on how to address those.
🔹I also suggest using the 4 questions in the Cartesian Quadrants:

• What would happen if I/We did?
• What would happen if I/We didn’t?
• What wouldn’t happen if I/We did?
• What wouldn’t happen if I/We didn’t?

At Mastering Mindsets, we work with leaders and teams to show how new insights, new tools and changing mindsets changes outcomes.