Every Decision Leaves A Mark

Why small decisions determine how far bigger ones travel

Hi, this is Fiona, Welcome to my newsletter with observations that may change how you think, decide and lead. This is the first new timing as learning from last 6 months I have moved the bi-weekly newsletter to a Wednesday. To get is directly please hit the subscribe button. Thanks and enjoy this 4 -5 min read.

The first words I spoke publicly in Polish were on a factory floor.

I had just become the new managing director of a company acquired by my current employer. I was new to this business. I was new to the country, and new to the people who were about to decide whether to follow me.

I had practiced my few lines and stumbled through them enough to say hello and to tell him how excited I was to be there.

It was uncomfortable in many ways. I can remember it clearly. Standing still in the production corridor a little nervous, my feet aching in my high heels. My office attire was not replaced by my normal flat factory shoes on this occasion given it was one a number of formal moments that evening.

It wasn’t good Polish either, but faces lit up surprised, with nods and smiles of appreciation that I had at least tried.

This brought me something that I couldn’t have asked for, it gave me the benefit of the doubt for the future.

Trust is built gradually

I recently wrote about portability as part of my take on The Exhausted Organization and why decisions that are right on paper still failed to travel. This builds on that, and I want to go deeper with one reason why.

When a decision doesn’t land with people, leaders frequently look back at the decision itself. They see that the logic was sound. They look to see if the plan was clear. They check if the messaging worked. The they may rewrite the deck, repeat the Townhall or send another email. None of that touches what is missing.

Trust in leadership is that an all-time low and we keep searching for the cause to sit in the big moments, the restructure, the poor results, the all-hands. But some of the leaders whom people trust the least are still delivering the financials and in some cases in that masks the problem. Poor trust lies elsewhere in the history.

Every jump happens in the wind

We don’t make decisions at a desk, really. I like to think of it more as a jump, a ski jump in fact. You commit, you take-off, you fly – vulnerable in the air – and you need people to be with you when you land.

I’ve started to think that retained trust, the idea that your track record, is that wind – with the balance that you carry into every decision built from the ones you’ve made before. If you arrive with a strong track record, you jump with a tailwind. If you arrive with a poor track record, you’re definitely jumping with a headwind, regardless of how strong the decision at hand is.

That’s because every decision we make leave the mark. It becomes a footprint of our leadership and the accumulation of actions and decisions. The email you do or don’t decide to answer, the person you support in a promotion discussion when silence might have been easier, or a customer you fight for. The rule you held firm on when the person breaking was your best performer. These sorts of things don’t make it to the big townhall meetings, but they do go into the balance of trust that we all have.

The small decision decisions speak volumes

You can start a big (consequential) jump with no track record and it can still land well, that does happen. But those are few and far between. Starting a new job, a new company, a new country or simply a new role, and your balance can often be reset if people don’t know you. You begin from scratch and so you need to do so humbly.

I didn’t learn this lesson in Poland. I learned it earlier along my career and it wasn’t always learned the easy way.

I lost trust through some of my decisions. I would definitely make them different today. The speed I exited someone for continued poor performance rather than simply weathering the storm for the greater harmony of the team, which might have been preferable – the team watched how closely I did that. Or when I cut back two deeply into the office sundries that impacted smaller things when budgets were tight. People read it as a statement about what I value. Yes, I don’t care for pot plants it’s true, but others do and it is a part of a welcoming environment.

The marks accumulate, so own them

When I took over in Poland, I knew the bank balance of trust had to come before I made big changes. There were going to be big ones coming. That’s quite normal after an acquisition, but getting people to buy-in and to come with you on them isn’t taken for granted.

I listened to people before deciding how to approach transformation and integration. I chose to meet many leaders individually rather than in layers. I studied culture ahead of the acquisition, and paid attention to the little things. I also attended meetings (as an observer in the run up to the official handover.) I heard how people felt about their office conditions and the day-to-day stuff. The carpet was stained and old, there were no windows, poor light and tired offices. I fixed that amongst some of the first things I invested in.

Communication was also going to be key, so as my colleagues all signed up to learn English, I settled into learning Polish. I joined in.

No-one asks you to do the little things

These things weren’t necessary. No board asked for me to do them. No plan had required me to do them, and yet I think that was part of the point. Each of those decisions showed what I thought mattered. People read me because they could closely see my actions, not just a strategy document and integration plan.

It took some vulnerability as the new leader. As for my continued use of the language? Stumbling over words in front of our own team doesn’t always look like authority, but it did start to look like intent and certainly authenticity.

The small decisions also travel further than you might expect. Your team inherit your habits not just the speeches you give. What you do gives permission to others to do similarly. My stance to not work weekends and to get home in time to see my small children made others leave work on time to see theirs too.

Months later in Poland, I stood up at a company all hands and shared the bigger plan the direction the integration and changes will be becoming to product lines. I remember clearly standing there on the podium in slightly lower heels – with a fully pregnant belly as my second was on its way – and I spoke in Polish. It was still imperfect, but I got through my whole talk in Polish and took a translator for the Q&A. It was more than anybody expected.

It worked not because it was flawless, but because people were already behind me. I have been building that that retained trust for months, one small decision at a time

One of the factory floor colleagues, came up to me after the speech and said how much she and others had appreciated the way I went about things and how I kept to the little things that were me, including the shoes, and still working while pregnant, which was less common than we might think there. She remembered the first time I had spoken or tried to speak to them and that people had talked about it, positively. She said it had meant a lot. That had meant a lot to me too.

Once you start leading you never stop. There’s no line between the decision that counts and the ones that don’t. Your performance is the sum of the whole journey. It’s carried into – and ideally through – every call and jump you make.

Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but your leadership footprint is the cumulative effect of all of them.

With that in mind and given the next decision you make and communicate is likely to be judged by people you don’t even know are looking, what will you change today?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

P.S. For more on decisions, trust and the ski-jump, you may like Decisions That Carry, I am counting down to it’s launch October 6th.