TOPGRADING TIPS: HOW ‘A’ PLAYERS MAKE DECISIONS
Dr. Bradford Smart is the originator of Topgrading, a successful method of interviewing for recruitment, talent audit and promotions adopted and endorsed by CEOs like Jack Welch and Larry Bossidy.
In mining the data in his files, Dr. Smart conducted 6,500 executive interviews, asking candidates for 3 successes and 3 failures for each of their 10 jobs (on the average). That’s 390,000 explanations of executive decision making – the challenges they faced, how they made decisions, and what the outcomes were.
This article is not meant to present a scientific model for problem analysis or decision making. The executive reports begin with Dr. Smart’s opinion on whether the candidate is an ‘A’ player or not. Based on 200 reports in which he rated the person an ‘A’ player or ‘A’ potential, the person’s successes, failures and decision making approaches were extracted.
The conclusion: how ‘A’ players make decisions is clear and commonplace. It’s driven by a compulsion to make things happen. Naturally, there were exceptions to the conclusions of this “field research.” But here’s what most ‘A’ players do, most of the time, to make good decisions:
- ‘A’ players learn at WARP speed
‘A’ players are bursting with intellectual curiosity. When a problem or opportunity crosses their path, they are like a shark that smells blood. They immediately learn whatever they can, as fast as they can, by tapping resources in and outside the company (vendors, former associates, Googling, etc.)
They weigh everything they learn against their experience, and they are quick to make a decision – to abandon a dumb idea. They have to quickly reject most ideas without thoroughly researching them, because they are confronted with challenges and opportunities all day, every day. ‘A’ players have the judgement to figure out when to allocate the time to learn more.
For sure, the ‘A’ players are not like college professors, slowly researching every nuance of a topic, dispassionately holding conclusions in abeyance. They are not like perennial students, who learn just for the satisfaction of learning. ‘A’ players keep learning at warp speed until they have enough information to dismiss the idea or move to step #2.
Sometimes it’s clear that taking time to learn a lot will be productive, and eventually lead to the right decision. For example, an ‘A’ player president has a head of manufacturing who says, “Pat, I’ve been doing a study and now is the time to open a plant in India.” The ‘A’ player president knows there are plenty of examples in which enough companies have succeeded and have failed while opening plants in India, and is sure the head of manufacturing will be a fountain of knowledge when presentations are made!
But what if the issue is genuinely new and complex? Remember the Y2K problem that scared a lot us? CEOs were flummoxed, unable to find the resources to fix code; they wanted to learn about ways code could be fixed, but no one had solutions. Then Jack Welch and others outsourced to India and “Heck,” many client CEOs said, “I don’t need to learn more – if Welch and other CEOs found a solution in India, that’s all the learning I need.”
‘A’ players are eager to learn and passionately do the best they can to learn enough to make the right decision. It’s not easy figuring out how much to learn about an issue, or how to best learn. But ‘A’ players are ‘A’ players because they do figure it out!
- ‘A’ players analyze, analyze, analyze
‘A’ players are always analyzing the heck out of issues – every issue, from company strategy to the best summer program for the kids, to what car to buy, to how to organize the Christmas party. It’s in their genes to analyze. After they have learned enough to want to perform analysis, they frequently perform instant analysis, using their experience to cite a few pluses and minuses, and then make a quick decision. For new, complex issues they generally sit down with the yellow tablet (old school-now it’s Excel) to list the pluses and the minuses. Some get really sophisticated, throwing in weighting systems and probability estimates.
Most ‘A’ players involve others in the analysis step. For a general business issue, ‘A’ player presidents want to know what the heads of marketing, operations, IT, legal, HR, etc., think. It’s common to get a group together and all bang a big issue around, so that everyone helps everyone clarify and focus. Almost all ‘A’ players have a couple of trusted sounding boards, executives/attorneys/consultants whose judgement they respect.
When ‘A’ players involve others, decision making is not a tea-sipping, slow-moving process. It’s energized. Dr. Smart recalls a meeting with Goldman Sachs executives the week of the 4th of July, and all were looking forward to one of their rare 4-day vacations. A couple of weeks later he enquired about their holiday, and the team had decided to cancel vacations and work. They had a deal with “30 moving parts,” and just wanted a few more days to analyze, analyze, analyze. Did that further analysis produce new insights? Nope. It just made them feel confident that their original analysis was right on.
In short, ‘A’ players try to analyze new, complex challenges as best they can, and their bias for action can result in shallow analysis, which of course can lead to failures. But ‘A’ players also cite successes that they attribute in part to their forcing thorough but quick analysis.
- ‘A’ players connect the dots
After immersing themselves in a learning mode and getting others to help them analyze the issue from different angles, ‘A’ players are frequently the ones to draw brilliant inferences from the data; they “connect the dots.”
Okay, you say, if the ‘A’ players are general managers, they are the logical executives to connect thoughts from marketing, IT, etc. True, but there are plenty of ‘A’ players who hold back, see what others’ conclusions are, and go with the conclusion that is most credible to them.
This does not mean ‘A’ players go with the consensus or vote to make decisions. No way! They certainly want the whole team on board with the decision, but if only the IT exec and the ‘A’ player president agree to pursue a unique software solution, the president will challenge the group poke holes in it. Maybe the group will be so adamant in shooting it down that the president agrees.
But frequently the group articulates some negatives and goes along with the president. Political survival is a strong motivator, so people will simply follow the boss. ‘A’ players with their ego in control implore people to tell them the truth, to not just go along with them. ‘A’ players with an ego problem will make more mistakes because their team didn’t risk challenging the boss.
There is an easy way to see if the group is stuck on an issue – it’s if they delay a decision, meeting after meeting. This is analysis paralysis, making a decision impossible. Mot many ‘A’ players suffer this malady.
- ‘A’ players make a decision
A decision to dump an idea can take place at any time, even the first minute of Step #1. But for a decision to make a capital investment or change in strategy, the “decision” is so big, it merits a separate step.
Jack Welch was in a league by himself at making decisions. He transformed GE from heavy manufacturing to light manufacturing to service, to financial, to global. He was not inclined to hire a consultancy to create GE strategy – he did it himself, and guess who the major decision maker was all those successful years? Right – Jack. And when he made a bad decision, as in the Kidder Peabody acquisition, he manned up and took the heat himself.
If ‘A’ players rarely suffer from analysis paralysis, many do make decisions prematurely, qualifying them as hip-shooters. That bias to act drives ‘A’ players nuts when some members of the team keep on thinking of reasons to remain in Step #1, or Step #2, etc. “We’re missing another season if we don’t act now!” the ‘A’ player exclaims, “and I’d rather make a mistake and risk a $10 million loss than miss a $100 million opportunity.” Hey, if the boss is willing to take the heat, let’s move without all the learning, analyzing, etc., that we might later learn that we should have done.
Dr. Smart also does a lot of executive coaching, and a very common weaker point for powerful executives is hip-shooting. They view themselves as being decisive, but frequently they intimidate people who speak up to challenge them. “If I try to slow the boss down, I’m considered indecisive or wimpy,” we hear.
A major caution to ‘A’ players: realize that your impatience, your bias for action, and your powerful personality can result in terrible decisions because you cut corners on your decision making approach, and you intimidate people into going along with you.
- Execute the decision
Larry Bossidy, in Execution, does a great job spelling out how to execute decisions. Jack Welch does in Winning, too. Maybe Larry overstates his case in claiming strategy is easy and it’s execution that’s tough. He makes a good point: if you’re CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you have a zillion brilliant strategic advisors, and if there’s a big downturn in the economy, with no end in sight, you run the numbers and if they tell you to cut budgets, close plants, hunker down, you probably don’t need to spend $5 million on McKinsey to create strategy. (You might use them to help implement it, however.)
‘A’ players are ‘A’ players because they succeed, and success requires great execution. As Larry and others point out, execution requires patience, the patience to over-communicate, to get everyone on board.
Another caution to ‘A’ players: be patient in execution.
What competencies of ‘A’ players account for their brilliant solutions?
This is why Dr. Smart wrote this article – to try to convey what it’s like to be in the presence of ‘A’ players as they go through the 5 steps.
The answer is this: energized passion tempered by patience and turbo-boosted by resourcefulness.
The most obvious competency is their passion, their deep need to perform those steps that will rack up accomplishments, successes. It drives ‘A’ players nuts if someone is lackadaisical. The ‘A’ player will say, “How the heck can you not find out the market shares of those 10 companies until next week? Aren’t you dying to know? I am, because if the shares are as low as I think they are, we have a huge opportunity!”
The single most important of the 50 competencies we rate following Topgrading interviews is resourcefulness. ‘A’ players exude a can-do attitude. They love to constantly figure out how to get over, around, or through barriers to success. That’s why they are so passionate. That’s why they are hungry to learn. And analyze. And connect the dots. And make the best decision. And execute it.
In interviews with ‘A’ players they nicely pat themselves on the back for finding solutions where others were daunted. That’s what they do, they snatch success out of the jaws of defeat. They love to pull off miracles.
Plenty of B players have more IQ points than ‘A’ players, but they don’t have the ‘A’ player resourcefulness.
