In this episode of the MFGMonkey Podcast, we explore the art of empowering teams to make better decision-making with expert Chris Seifert founder of Enabling Empowerment. Discover practical strategies for fostering collaboration and leveraging diverse perspectives to enhance decision-making processes. Whether you’re a leader or a team member, this conversation offers valuable insights to help your team achieve greater success through informed and effective decision-making.
How to Get in Touch with Chris Seifert
If you’re interested in learning more about Enabling Empowerment or connecting with Chris Seifert, you can reach him via the Enabling Empowerment website:
- Website: Enabling Empowerment
- Contact Through Website: Fill out the contact us form on the Enabling Empowerment site, and Chris or a member of his team will follow up.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherseifert/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/enabling-empowerment/
- Enabling Empowerment: A Leadership Playbook for Ending Micromanagement and Empowering Decision-Makers
- Chris’s book on Amazon and Kindle
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Empowering Teams for Better Decision-Making with Chris Seifert
In this conversation, Chris Seifert discusses the importance of empowering teams in decision-making processes. He emphasizes that many leaders struggle with delegation due to a lack of training in decision-making and the complexities of business environments. Chris introduces a structured framework for effective decision-making that includes framing problems, brainstorming alternatives, and analyzing risks. He also addresses the issue of codependent decision-making, where teams rely too heavily on leaders for direction, and shares personal experiences that highlight the need for leaders to cultivate confidence in their teams’ decision-making abilities. In this conversation, Dustin McMillan and Chris Seifert discuss the importance of decision-making in leadership and organizational culture. They explore how experiences in the Navy, particularly in the nuclear submarine force, shape decision-making processes and accountability. Chris shares insights on a decision-making framework developed at Koch Industries and emphasizes the need for leaders to intentionally improve their teams’ decision-making skills. The discussion highlights strategies for enhancing decision-making capabilities and the positive impact on both professional and personal lives.
Welcome Chris. We have Chris Seifert on MFGMonkey today and he comes on with a lot of experience in enabling empowerment, I believe that is exactly what your company is named correct?
That’s right, that’s the name of the company and the book.
Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about your company and a little bit about your book right out of the rip.
Sure. So yeah, the reason I named them both is because that’s exactly what I aspire to do. To enable leaders to empower their teams to be better decision-makers. So, over the course of my career, one of the things that I’ve found that people struggle with is decision-making. A couple of different reasons for that. One, most people are not taught that formally in school, especially in the context of making business decisions. Yet we often promote people who have engineering training or ops training into leadership roles. And then we ask them to start making business decisions and they just don’t have that experience. Also, the human mind isn’t really wired for making decisions in complex, uncertain environments, which the business world is. And so, we’re subject to a lot of decision traps. Over the years I developed a framework that I used to make decisions that I’ve taught to my teams and now I teach to my client’s teams that helps enable those leaders to delegate more decision-making and give more decision-making authority to their teams.
And do you find that managers are having trouble giving that power off to their team to make those decisions?
Well, so first off, I find that most leaders in my experience want to be able to empower their teams. Right? I think there’s a bit of a notion out there, in the ethos that like leaders that are micro-managers do that because they’re arrogant or they’re narcissists. Right? They just have this desire to control everything. My experience has been rarely the case. Usually, when leaders are making all the decisions, it’s because they feel like they have to, not because they want to. If you just think, I mean, who wants to have people coming to them all day long, getting calls after hours and on the weekends about what should I do about this problem? What do you want me to do about this problem? Nobody actually wants that, right? You want your team to be able to make those decisions on their own and be confident in doing so. Of course, you want them to reach out to you when they need help when they’re not sure what to do. But I think most of us would like that request to be structured as a, hey, here’s my problem, here are the things I’m considering, here are the advantages, disadvantages, here’s what I recommend doing, rather than a just, I have a problem boss, what do want me to do with it? Right?
Right.
And drop it on their lap. But the challenge is that, again, like I said, most folks haven’t really been trained on how to do that. Most folks haven’t been trained or taught how to make an effective recommendation to their leader or their boss, right? And so, they are just either bringing the problem to them or just saying, hey, I think we should do this without explaining their thinking process. And what I’ve learned is that when I teach you, hey, here’s how I think about decisions, how I think about making a choice between different alternatives. And I’d like you to use that same process so when you communicate it to me, I can be more effective as a coach. Right? So, if an employee just comes up to me and says, hey Chris, I think we should do this crazy thing. And that’s all they tell me. Probably got a lot going on that day.
Sure.
I’ve got a bunch of competing things going on. I don’t have time to deal with that, right? So, maybe the best-case scenario is I kind of blow it off. And now that person feels like I didn’t listen to them, I didn’t value their input. But if I can teach them, hey, when you come to me with a recommendation, what I’d like you to do is first explain to me what the problem you’re trying to solve is. Explain to me what alternatives you’ve considered. Talk to me about what the risks, the upsides, and the downsides are with each of those alternatives. And then make a recommendation. When you explain it to me that way, now it’s much easier for me to follow your train of thought and understand what you’re doing. And if it is a crazy recommendation, understand why, right? Maybe you didn’t frame the problem right, or maybe there were other alternatives we could consider or risks we’re not thinking about.
Sure. Will you walk us through the framework that you have developed?
Yeah, sure. So, it starts with Framing the Problem. Again, this is the most important step, I think, because the way you frame a problem, or an opportunity has such an impact on the outcome. Let me just give you an example, if I could, Dustin.
Absolutely.
Do you know how you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Do you pronounce it Louisville or Louisville?
Neither because it’s not the capital of Kentucky.
Well, you are the first person I think you are the first person that I’ve done that with, I mean, thousands of times it actually got that. You’re right. It’s not. It’s Frankfurt, right?
Correct.
But I’ve had people who live in Kentucky fiercely defend like either Louisville or some variation of the pronouncement of that until I reminded them it was Frankfurt and they’re like, of course. Right. But that’s because the way I worded it led you to that conclusion, right? Led you to one of those.
Absolutely.
But the same thing happens when we think about business. You know, if you frame a problem, I need to buy a bigger house, right? Okay, so what are my solutions? Buy a bigger house, don’t buy a bigger house. But if I frame the problem as my ratio of stuff to house is too big, right? Well, now maybe I need a bigger house, I could get rid of some stuff, and I could find another place to source some stuff besides my house, right? All of a sudden, I’ve got a bunch of opportunities. The first step is to frame the problem or opportunity in a way that optimizes the solutions we can come up with. The second step is to Brainstorm Creative Alternatives. And in that we want to avoid anchoring on certain things or know, overweighting the first ideas that people come up with too much. That’s the biggest mistake I see when a group, particularly when a group brainstorms, right? You know, what you see around the table, the leader says, hey, we’ve got this problem or this opportunity. I need some ideas on what to do about it. Well, somebody spits out an idea and pretty soon the whole room is just that’s the idea now, right? We’re stuck on that idea.
Right.
So, how do we brainstorm those range of creative alternatives? Once we have alternatives, we need to identify what are the key drivers of the decision. In most cases, while there may be dozens of variables that impact the decision, there’s usually only a couple, like three, that really make the difference, right? If we’re right about these things, this is going to be, this is the right choice.
Right.
And if we’re wrong, it’s going to be bad. The next, once we Know the Key Drivers, is to understand the ranges of those and the risks around them. So, the only thing I know about tomorrow is that I don’t know what’s going to happen, right?
Right.
So, if I say, too often in decisions we’re coming and saying, well, next year we’ll sell a thousand of these units. Well, the only thing I know for sure is you’re not going to sell exactly a thousand. Maybe it’s 1,100, maybe it’s 900, maybe it’s 500 or 1,500, right? But if we talk about ranges instead of single-point estimates, now it helps me understand your confidence in your estimate. If you give me an estimated range between 900 and 1100 versus between 500 and 1500, you’ve communicated to me I’m in the second scenario not very certain about this, right?
Right.
Then the next step is to Do the Analysis. Do the economic analysis on is this a good idea or not using the data that we’ve captured in the previous examples. And then understand, so now if based on this economic analysis, this alternative is the most attractive. What capabilities do I actually need to do that? Am I capable of doing that? And what do I need to do next to do that? And then the final step is I call Show Your Work, meaning writing down what we did in those previous steps because another trap that we all fall into is hindsight bias, right? Falling into the trap that it’s easy for us to believe that we could have known things that we couldn’t have known in the future. One of the things I’m always advocating for is we shouldn’t judge the quality of a decision based on the outcome. And I know that sounds crazy to say but think about it like this. If you walk into a casino and you put a thousand dollars on black and you win, was that a good decision? No, right?
At that time, it was.
It was luck, right?
Sure.
I mean, you drive home from the bar drunk, and you get home safely, and you don’t have to pay for a cab and your car’s at your house in the morning. Was that a good idea? No, you got lucky, right?
Right.
So, you can’t judge a decision based on the outcome. You can only judge a decision based on the quality of the analysis done on the information available at the time. That’s why I always say the last step in your decision-making process should be, let me write down those assumptions I made. Let me write down, hey, when I said the sales could be between 500 and 1500, let me write that down so that later, a year from now, once everything’s happened, I can come back and actually learn, how did I do? How was my range? Was I within the range or was it outside the range, et cetera?
Right.
So that’s in a nutshell, the framework that I teach and it’s something that can be used on very simple decisions from, hey, I had this machine go down and I have to decide what am I going to do? Am I going to take the whole plant down or am I going to run part of the plant? You know, decisions like that, that a shift leader needs to make all the way up to I’m thinking about buying a $10 million machine or launching a new product or entering a new market.
We can scale those steps obviously, right?
Right.
The level of effort I’m going to put in is not the same as what I need to do right now on shift versus a major strategic decision, but we should follow the same general steps.
Yeah. No, I love it. Most likely people listening to this right now are just unconsciously incompetent, they don’t even know if they’re a micromanager or not. So, what could be some signs that their team is struggling with being micromanaged?
Yeah, so we use the term micromanager, but let me just actually expand it to you. I prefer to use the term codependent decision-making. And the only difference there is just to signal that we think of micromanagement as very one way like the leader telling everybody what to do. Teams often fall into the trap where the team is comfortable with that, right? They would almost prefer the leader just to tell them what to do.
Sure.
You know, I’ve had folks, leaders that worked for me. One of them, when I would go out and visit plants, when I was the vice president of operations, you know, I’d often sit in the plant manager’s office and one particular plant manager was in there for three or four hours doing some work. And over the course of that three or four hours, there must’ve been a dozen people that came to his door, knocked on his door, said, hey, there’s a problem. What do you want me to do about it? And he would give them an answer, right?
Now, if you ask those folks, they love them, right? Because they didn’t have to come up with any solutions. They just came to him, and they asked him. And if you asked them, is he a micromanager? They probably would have said no, but it’s the same difference, right?
Sure, yeah.
The same thing is happening. And it probably was some other micromanager before him that started that culture, right? That got people comfortable with that’s how we should do things. And so, there’s a couple of things that I’ve become almost allergic to hearing that are clues to me that this codependent decision-making is going on. The first one is what do you want me to do? Right? So just here’s the problem. What do you want me to do about it? The other one is I’m just doing what I was told. Right? So, meaning that, hey, Supervisor told me this. I don’t own this decision at all. This is just what I was told to do.
Sure.
Those two things, those two phrases in particular, when I hear them, signaled to me that we have a culture of making decisions based on positional authority. Not making decisions based on the right thing to do for business. Right? So, if I said to an employee, hey, why are we doing this this way? And they told me, well, that’s what the supervisor told me to do. You know, hey, I’m saying timeout. Let’s talk about that. We don’t do anything around here just because the supervisor told us to do it.
Right.
We do things because they’re the right thing to do. So, let’s understand why is it the right thing to do.
Right.
And if it’s not, we should challenge it.
Sure.
So those are a couple of the clues I look for.
How do you know your efforts are falling short to empower your employees?
Well. So, what happens most commonly is when you try to empower them, you try to push back on that. Hey, I’d like you to make a recommendation, and they just don’t. So let me give you the exact story of how I came to think about what I call the micromanagement doom loop, right, which is, you know, I say once you get stuck in this mode of codependent decision-making, it’s very hard to get out. Because we often start telling people, hey, I want you to start making decisions, but they’re not comfortable with it. They’re not good at it. Right. And so, they start making bad decisions. They start making bad recommendations. The leader takes back over and now we’re worse off than we were before. Right. Cause now the next time you tell me you wanted to make more decisions or like, that’s what you told me the last time.
Right.
Right. But as I said, let me give you an example of how I discovered this. The first plant that I managed outside of the Navy, I had only been there about two weeks, it was a plywood plant, we had a large plywood press, and the shift leader came up to me after hours and said, hey, we got a problem, one of the openings on the plywood press broke. What do want me to do about it? And so of course, wanting to empower him. I didn’t want to just give him the answer. The other convenient thing was I’d only been there two weeks, so I had no clue what to do about it.
Right.
Right. So, I said, well what I’d really like you to do is I’d like you to make a recommendation. And you know he stood there and was you know kind of like huh, what do you mean?
Dumbfounded, right?
And I said, well, what do you think we should do? And he’s like, well I mean I could shut it down and fix it. I’m like, okay that’s one alternative. What’s another one? Well, I mean, we can run it like it is at a reduced rate. Okay. So, we brainstorm some other alternatives. Then I started saying, so if we take it down to fix it, how long is that going to take? Well, I mean, it could take six hours if everything goes right. It could take 12 hours if some things go wrong.
Right.
We started walking through those and came up with the ranges. And then eventually we did the math, and the math clearly said one of the alternatives we came up with was better than the others. And he still looked at me and said, so what do you want me to do?
Right.
You know, and I was like, man, we just did this together. What do you think we should do? He’s like, we should do that one. Okay. So that whole conversation was great. And that is exactly the conversation you need to have if you want to end that codependent decision-making. The problem was I had 500 people in that plant that reported to me. I couldn’t do that 500 times.
Wow. Right.
There’s no way, right? Like that’s not going to work. And that was to me when I realized that, hey, you know, what I need to do is bring people in and start teaching them how to make a recommendation, how to make a decision, right? And so that we’re all using the same format so that when you come to me with your recommendation, instead of a 30-minute conversation walking through all that math, it’s more like a two-minute conversation to coach, right?
Right.
And say, hey, did you consider this alternative? Or are you sure about that range? You seem more confident in that number than I would be more confident in that number, right?
Right, right.
Helped me understand why. And so, that’s where I’ve come to learn is that when you have that cultural codependent decision making, the number one reason that people are not able to get out of it is not recognizing the real root cause. The real root cause is your team isn’t confident and comfortable making recommendations or decisions, right?
Right.
And you need to get them there, right?
And they’ve never had that. Like the example that you just gave, that guy had never had that conversation in his life.
Yeah, no, I’m sure his boss, the 9000 times he previously had done something like that, the boss was happy to tell him exactly what to do, right?
Yeah.
Shut it down and fix it, right?
Yeah. It is.
And was that the right thing to do? I don’t know, you know.
Sure.
But I can tell you in that job, I mean, my wife literally told me one night, she said, if the phone’s going to ring like this all night, I would prefer you just to go sleep on the couch, right? Because I mean, that’s how often I was getting phone calls every night, right?
Wow, yeah.
But once I taught them how to make those recommendations and taught them my framework, we were able to get close that gap a lot faster, right? First off, those conversations weren’t 30 minutes anymore. They were like three minutes.
Sure.
And then after a few of them, it was, hey, why are you calling me for this? Because you just walked through your decision and that makes perfect sense.
Right.
And that’s like the third time we’ve had this conversation, and you don’t need to call me for this anymore, right?
Yeah.
And they’re starting to feel confident, so.
And people need to hear that. And I remember having that conversation with Ashley, my ops manager, and she’s military as well. And it was something very minor that she was coming to me with. We walked through something very similar to how you’re walking through it. And it was less than a $500 decision. And she’s like, well, what if I’m wrong? Then we fix it. I mean, it’s not bankrupting the company. Nobody’s dying. You’re going to make a bad decision at some point. And we just learn from it and move on. You can’t be afraid to make a bad decision because we all do it. And it’s just, in my eyes, it’s better to make the decision and move forward and do it calculated. And if it is wrong, then you shift and fix what you just messed up.
Yeah, well, and look, it may not be a bad decision either. It may have just been bad luck, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
So absolutely. Yeah.
Or just not a 100% bad decision. But no, I love it, and I think that people would enjoy their lives so much better if they weren’t constantly just giving people the information. My dad used to do this to me when I was a kid. And I’m like, I’m a horrible speller, still to this day. And I’m like, well how do you spell that? And he’s like, there’s a dictionary right there, go figure it out. He refused to ever give me an answer and it just absolutely frustrated me. But what he was doing was very impactful because I have learned to figure things out on my own. Do you feel that the Navy helped you come up with this process and really put a framework together where you can teach other people?
No, not really, to be honest. So let me back off. So, yeah, I served in the nuclear submarine force, right, which I will say is a very different culture from the rest of the military, at least, what the perception of the military culture is. So, typically we perceive the military culture to be very command and control, right? Meaning you get told to do something, you say, yes sir, and you go do it. Right.
Right.
That, you know, and look, when you’re talking about sending a Marine up a hill at a gun, look, that’s what we want them to do. We don’t want them to think, to be honest, we don’t want them to think about it because if they think about it, they’re probably not going to do it.
Right. Or question. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Absolutely.
Right. So, in a lot of situations, that is what we need. Right. But when it comes to driving a nuclear submarine, man, that ain’t going to work. Right. That is so complex and so there’s so much risk going on with what you’re doing, that you need every operator on that submarine to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, constantly questioning things, if we are doing the right thing, willing to get in somebody’s face if they have to say, I don’t think what we’re doing is right. Because the consequences of being wrong are so bad, right? I mean, you’re not just talking about yes, if we’re wrong about running up the hill with a gun, we lose a few lives. But if we are wrong with the submarine, then we’re losing a lot more than that.
Right.
And so, I will say that the notion that we don’t do things because we’re told that we question things, that we hold each other accountable regardless of rank, those definitely came from the nuclear Navy and submarine force. But my first job outside the Navy was with Georgia Pacific, which had just been acquired by Koch Industries at the time.
Okay.
Charles Koch and Koch Industries. Now, look, regardless of what you think about him politically, I mean, the facts are he’s grown the largest privately held company in the world. So, I think he has some good ideas about how to run a business. Right.
Absolutely.
And one of the things that he did when he was buying, growing Koch Industries and then buying Georgia Pacific was he said, you know, I think that over the years I’ve become pretty good at decision making. I would like my leaders to make decisions like me and the bigger this company grows, the less involved in every decision I can be. So, I want people to be good at making decisions. He developed a decision-making framework that he taught to all of his employees. Actually, one of my first jobs at Georgia Pacific was to teach his decision-making framework in the plywood division. So, there were about 15 plants or so and I would go around and teach the leadership team that decision-making framework. So over the years I’ve kind of evolved that framework a little bit, you know to make it more suitable to other industries, you have to be part of Charles Koch’s company to understand what they’re talking about. And that’s really where I was exposed to it. And the unique thing about it was, decision-making is such a critical skill. At the end of the day your company’s success or failure is going to depend on the decisions that the leaders make. Are they good decisions or not?
Right.
But I have come across to be honest, the only company I’ve come across that has partly said we’re going to purposefully be intentional about making our leaders better decisions was Koch Industries, right? I don’t see it in most others. I mean, many leadership development programs at companies, you’ll find topics like conflict resolution, performance management. How to talk to employees, how to motivate employees, but you won’t find anything about making decisions, right?
Sure.
Which, not only as a leader do they want, if they’ve been promoted into a leadership role. One, they’re going to be making more decisions. Number two, they need to be able to explain those decisions to their leader, but they also need to be able to explain those decisions to their team, right? And so, again using the framework to explain this is why I did this. This is how I came to this conclusion that this is the right thing to do is very helpful. So that’s really where I got introduced to the concept of being intentional about making decision making a capability and kind of where I’ve seen it done the best.
No, that’s outstanding. And for listeners, you know, our audience, a majority of folks own companies and that, if somebody wants to get ahold of you to speak, do you go into facilities and teach this?
Yeah, absolutely. I have a workshop that I do. It’s around four hours where, with a large group of people and what we’ll do is, we’ll use a couple of, if you’ve got a couple of problems or opportunities that you’re thinking about, we’ll use those as examples, but I’ll take them through, first off understanding decision traps. So, understanding framing traps or anchoring and hindsight bias and all these different things that tricks our mind can play on us. So, we’ll do some exercises on those. The good news is, although we’re all susceptible to those research shows that even just being taught on them helps you recognize them better, right? That you’re falling into those.
Yeah.
But then we’ll use those examples that you have, and those decision traps will go through each of the steps of the framework. And at the end of the session have, hey, here’s what we think we should do about this. So, I do that in large group settings. We also do that in one-on-one settings with people. If you have people who go through that group and they want more individual training, we’ll do that. And then also just facilitate decisions. So, if you have a big decision that you want to make and you’re considering and you want to make sure that you don’t let your biases cloud your judgment, then you know, someone who we’ve trained can facilitate that decision making process for your team to help you avoid that. I mean, I’ve found, especially if you’re making a large strategic decision that has a potential to wreck the company, it can be good to have an external person who doesn’t have all the biases that you have that can help you through that decision-making process.
Yeah, absolutely. I went through that myself by just making decisions in a silo, especially large ones, right? And found that I made some bad decisions. Or the best decision I could make at the time with the information that I had. That’s a little better way to say that I made a bad decision. One of the things that I did was join Vistage and really be able to sit around a round table with other owners or CEOs and go through, okay, here’s the problem. Here’s what I’m thinking. What are everyone else’s thoughts about this? And I love what you’re doing because when you start digging into it, you do have a bias about what you feel that the solution could be. But if you’re talking through the problem with others, then they’re going to uncover something that you may not have thought of right there in front of you and you’re like, I didn’t see it that way. And I think with what you’re doing it is just awesome for folks to be able to learn how to make a decision and then also brainstorm with all the other possibilities that somebody may not. Because of your experiences and the people that you have helped, you’ve seen a lot more than what most have. And that is tremendously valuable. One of the things that I was reading in your bios, just the strategies to enhance your team’s decision-making skills. What are some of those strategies? Yeah, some of the strategies that you’re working with folks on to make better decisions.
Yeah, I mean, it’s teaching this decision-making framework and figuring out how, so, I mean, oftentimes when I engage with a client, there’s like a, right now there’s an acute need, right? Meaning that like either my team’s really dishing, I have massive codependent decision-making going on, right? Like all day long, people just come up to me asking me, what do you want me to do? Right? And I can’t take it anymore. Or another great example where it’s acute. So, when I was Vice President of an ops manufacturing company, I had about a $20 million maintenance capex budget, and going to make my first budget through my first budget cycle with the team, they initially came to me with $40 million worth of requests. And I was like, I said to the accountant, the director of accounting for ops how did you guys handle this in the past? What did you do when they requested twice as much as we have? And he said, well, we just told them all they need, hey, there’s 10 plants. It’s 2 million each figured out. Right. and I said, man, that doesn’t seem like, I mean, there might be some plants that need four and some that only need 500,000, right?
Right.
I mean, you know, and he’s like, yeah, but how are we going to figure it out with all these plants? Right. And so that was another example where I said, look, what we need to do is we need to pull all the engineers who’d put those capital proposals together and put them through the training on saying, hey, when you’re making a recommendation to buy a piece of equipment or whatever, here’s the process I want you to go through, the thought process. And just by doing that, so we did the training with them, we allowed them to have some coaching between me and the director of accounting and director of projects. But then three weeks later, we brought them all back together and the requests had dropped from 40 million down to 17 million, right?
Wow.
And it was just by getting them to think through differently. Right. I mean, I was like, well, I thought we had a project here for $3 million for a widget Turner and engineers are just like, yeah, you know what, we rethought the options, and we figured out a way to do it without any capital. And I’m like, fantastic, right?
Fantastic. Yeah.
Right? Great. You solve the problem. So, a lot of times it’s an acute thing. But then, look, again, my mission is that I want every organization to have a leadership development program to incorporate this into their leadership development program, right? So that as people are getting promoted into frontline leadership roles or whatever their mid-level managerial roles are, they’re getting introduced to this concept and they’re getting practice demonstrating it, right? They’re getting assigned a problem or a project or an opportunity to make a recommendation to the leadership team on, and they’re getting practice doing that, practice communicating the recommendations and then executing it.
Yeah. Where can folks find your book? I know we were talking before we started recording and you’re close to it being on Audible. So, you’ve recorded it and you’re waiting for the approval and for it to launch.
Yes.
But if somebody wants a hardback or paperback copy of your book, where can they buy it today?
Sure. So, the book is titled Enabling Empowerment Leadership Playbook for Ending Micromanagement and Empowering Decision Makers. It’s available on Amazon, Paperback, and Kindle. As you mentioned, it will be available on Audible shortly, like within days.
Okay.
And then also my website, www.enablingempowerment.com. One of the things, the book, I give a lot of templates and examples, right?
Okay.
For instance, I have a financial model that I use to analyze capital decisions, right? If you got a capital project you want to analyze, you can put in your assumptions and stuff and it’ll tell you what the ROI is on that.
Okay, fantastic.
So that’s a tool I reference in the book, you’ll find it on the website.
Okay.
So, all the tools I reference in the book are available on the website for people to download and use as well.
And if you’re listening to this, don’t feel that you have to write everything down. You can go to our website. It’ll be in the bio. We’ll post about this on LinkedIn and that. So, everything will be in the bio. There’s a transcript that’s on our website. We’ll also write a blog about this that’ll have all this information. So, you can go to mfgmonkey.com and pull all this information up. We’ll have links to the book, to your website, to all the fun things that we just talked about. So very fun stuff. Is there something that’s on your mind that you want to talk about as we wrap up here or something that you’re thinking about that we didn’t quite touch on?
No. I’ll just conclude with hey if you’re a leader of people and you are not being intentional about improving your team’s decision-making skills. I would just challenge you to think about that right and think about what if your competitor is, right?
Absolutely.
What if your competitors do that and their team is going to start making better decisions than yours? Right?
Yeah.
So, I think that’s to me should be hopefully the sense of urgency to your right. If I don’t have a deliberate strategy to make my team better decision-makers and my competitors, what’s going to happen?
Yeah, and it’s quite honestly, it’s going to change your life and you’re going to cut down on those phone calls that you’re getting that your wife’s kicking you out of the bedroom.
Absolutely.
And there’s a book that I read, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, which I would encourage people to piggyback with your book, phenomenal book, but it’s about getting people to make their own decisions and not giving everyone every answer. And you are, you’re going to just improve your quality of life tenfold, regardless of what your competitor is doing.
And look, the other thing is not only are you making your life better at work and their life better at work, but you’re also making their own personal life better, right?
Yeah.
I mean, if they can, you know, should I buy this house, should I buy this car, should I lease the car, should I borrow money for my kid’s education or not, right? The ability to think through those decisions without biases, right? Keep the biases out of them and to think through them in a disciplined way, it’s making their whole life better, right?
Yeah, very good point. Well, and you do that and your culture changes at your facility and people just naturally, your culture is going to be uplifted because your folks are empowered, and they do feel like they’re making a difference.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of misnomers around there about engagement. You know engagement comes from paying people a lot of money or having perks at work or work-life balance or all these different things. At the end of the day, what people really desire is meaning, right? And they get that from working for an organization that has a purpose they believe in and believing they’re actually influencing it, right?
Yep, absolutely.
It’s one thing if you’re working for an organization with great purpose but you don’t feel like you’re actually impacting it, you’re not going to be very engaged, right?
Absolutely.
The minute I stop telling someone what to do, and they make recommendations to me, the minute they make that recommendation, they own the outcome, right?
Yep.
Because they are part of it now. And so, they’re going to be more invested in making that decision successful because they suggested it, right?
Sure.
It’s a huge love.
Yeah, no, I love it. When you’re talking about being in the Navy, by any chance do you know Jason Lange?
I know a Lange in the Navy but just in the Navy.
Well, he’s a civilian. He’s one of my very best friends and he’s a senior nuclear engineer. And I just thought by chance, you guys’ cross paths. It’s a small world. I’ve done this before. And they’re like, yeah, I know that guy. So, I just thought it’d be cool if you knew Jason. He’s an outstanding guy. But he’s a nuclear engineer.
Cool.
Cool. Well, man, I’m very happy that we did this. I think that there’s a lot of value packed into these 30 minutes or whatever. And I’m going to buy a couple of your books myself and distribute them. And we’re going to adopt some of the things that we talked about for sure.
Thanks, man.
So yeah, thank you so much.
Alright. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
Yeah, no thank you.
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