Imagine you're leading a meeting where the group is ready to approve posting a new role on your team.
By this point, the recommendation has been reviewed, major stakeholders have weighed in, and people around the table are beginning to nod in agreement.
Then out of nowhere someone says, "Before we decide, have we considered how Operations will support this?"
Five minutes earlier, the room was deciding whether the organization needed a new role. Now it's discussing how Operations will integrate it. Without anyone realizing it, the room moved from deciding whether to create the role to deciding how the role would work.
Earlier in your career, your value comes from identifying risks, solving problems, and contributing good ideas.
As an increasingly senior leader in the room, your responsibility shifts. You're responsible for making sure the organization is solving the right problem—not for answering every question that gets raised.
That responsibility starts with one simple question:
What does this mean for the decision we're making today?
One response I've heard from experienced executives sounds something like this:
"That's an important consideration. Before we discuss it, let's determine whether it changes today's decision or whether it affects implementation after today's decision."
In one sentence, the executive separated today's decision from tomorrow's discussion. They also did the room a favor by brining the decision that needed to be made back into focus.
The Unwritten Rule:
Protect the decision you're actually making.
Every meeting exists to answer a specific question. One of the senior leader's responsibilities is making sure that question never quietly changes in the middle of the discussion.
Difficult questions don't usually derail executive meetings. Confusing one decision with another does.
Try this tomorrow:
The next time someone introduces a new concern during a decision-making meeting, encourage the group to stop to process it, perhaps with a question like:
Can we pause for a second? Does this concern change today's decision, or is it something we should capture for implementation?"
The answer will usually tell you what to do next.
In the case of the position approval, the concern being raised might help you discover today's decision isn't ready to be made. Maybe you’ll realize the concern actually belongs to the hiring manager and can be solved for after the approval. Or you may find that the room simply lost sight of the question it came together to answer.
As your responsibilities grow, you'll discover that executive leadership isn't measured by how quickly you answer difficult questions.
It's measured by how consistently you help the organization stay focused on the decision it came together to make.
Until next time,
Andy
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It's earned by becoming the person people trust when the answers aren't obvious.
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