Women at Work - Making Great Decisions

0:00We all make a lot of decisions at work. Some are easy and they go over well. Others, not so much. And when we're struggling to make a decision or someone pushes back on what we've decided, we might ask ourselves, is this because I'm a woman? I think it's pretty much a daily concern of mine, of am I making the right decision? And is the fact that I'm a woman affecting the decision I'm making right now? Maybe, because decision making is not gender neutral.

0:28Research shows that women are less likely than men to be overconfident. This is the good news. The bad news is research also shows that when women make a mistake, our colleagues are harder on us than they would be on men. I'm going to take responsibility, like ultimate responsibility, for any problems that may come up. But I'm not being given the authority to make calls. Sometimes the issue is not having enough access, even if you're in senior management. And you're always assured you have a seat at the table.

0:57then they forget to tell you that there's more than one table. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Nicole Torres. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. This episode, we're talking about women as decision makers. Therese Houston is a psychologist who basically wrote the book on all of this. It's called How Women Decide What's True, What's Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices.

1:31Teresa why do you think women in particular need to understand decision-making? You know it's funny people like to say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but I find that when it comes to decision-making it's much more like Men are from Mars and women are from a less respected part of Mars Because you know decision-making is challenging for all of us men and women alike, but when a man faces a hard decision he only has to think and focus on making a judgment. But when a woman faces a similar hard decision, she, especially in business, has to think about both making a judgment and she also has to navigate being judged. And that puts a lot more pressure on her in the whole decision-making process. What's an example of advice about decision-making that tends to work well for men but not so well for women?

2:25There are two pieces of advice that I think can backfire for women even though they work really well for men. One piece of advice that you'll see in a lot of decision-making books is to take the time to consider a wider array of options. It makes perfect sense. When a man takes the time to consider a wider array of options, he's considered strategic and he's considered very contemplative. When a woman takes the time to consider a wider range of options, typically seen as indecisive and as someone who's dithering. Another piece of advice that you'll see in a lot of decision-making books is try to find a solution that meets everyone's needs. Again, if a male leader were to do that, he would be seen as very inclusive. If a woman were to do that, she would probably be seen as someone who lacks vision, that she needs to lean on other people to make a decision.

3:20There are pieces of advice that if women were to follow them to the letter or to up the way that they're approaching a decision, it can really be challenging for her because she's being judged so under so much more scrutiny. Since we're talking about women making choices, I feel like we have to talk about the stereotype of women's intuition. What's really going on here? You said there's two sides to it. Often when we talk about intuition, people mean a gut feeling.

3:48being guided from the inside. It feels like knowing without any effort. There's another kind of intuition, and that would be what social scientists would call social sensitivity. And that kind of women's intuition would be you are being really attuned to the verbal and nonverbal cues of the people around you. So let's say you walk into a meeting later on this afternoon, and before anyone says anything, you look over and they're like, oh, Carl is in a really bad mood.

4:16Oh, this is going to be a long meeting, right? And that would be, some people would also call that women's intuition. And the first kind, the first part where, you know, this notion of going with your gut, the research actually shows men do that more than women.

4:31that we should be calling that men's intuition because women don't tend to go with their gut. Women tend to do a lot more analysis and double check their data before they go with a decision. The second kind, the kind of social sensitivity, the reading nonverbal cues, that kind women do do more effectively. Women do pay more attention to nonverbal cues. Yeah, I'm curious to know where that comes from because...

4:54Earlier you were saying, you know, men and women are both from parts of Mars, right? So where does that come from? Well, so you know, there are really two things to understand there. One is around expectations. So if you tell people that you're testing them on social sensitivity.

5:10Women are gonna really outperform men. But if you tell people you're testing their intelligence or their cognitive abilities, and you give them the same test of reading nonverbal cues, suddenly men perform as well as women. So part of it is, am I supposed to be good at this? Does this matter, right? To what I think men or women should be good at. The other part has to do with power. So there have been...

5:34fascinating research studies where people are assigned either the role of a leader or subordinate and they're discussing an issue and what they find is that the subordinate is much more sensitive to the nonverbal cues of whoever is the leader and it doesn't matter if you're a male or a female if you're in the subordinate role you notice the nonverbal cues of whoever's in charge vice versa whoever's the leader doesn't tend to notice the nonverbal cues of the subordinate. And so some people, instead of calling this women's intuition, call this subordinate's intuition. And all too often, unfortunately, women are in a subordinate role. How do you take this intuition and use it as the basis for a well-informed decision? Well, intuition is really reliable in certain circumstances. So intuition is really good if you're making a what.

6:28decision. So if you're trying to decide on colors for your office and that's a what decision where it's about your tastes and your preferences, it's actually best to go with your first strong gut feeling. Research shows that you tend to actually like that decision better in the long run. The place where it's really problematic to go with intuition for men and women alike is on who decisions.

6:53We might get a gut feeling about someone like, oh, there's something, there's just something I really like about him. He shows a lot of potential. And there's something about her that just doesn't sit right with me. There's a good chance that's unconscious bias. So you've said that society often expects us to make decisions like mother ducks. What do you mean by that? In general, I'm not saying this is true, but we tend to expect women to make decisions that are focused on other people.

7:20that are about maintaining relationships, that are about thinking about our communities and making other people comfortable. And social psychologists would call that, we expect women to be communal.

7:31And where I see that is it's kind of like a mother trying to get her brood across the street. That mother duck is going to make sure that everyone makes it across. If I need to back up to make sure that there's a straggler that's going to make it, I'm going to do that. But you certainly don't expect to see a mother duck just proceed ahead of the entire group, regardless of what's happening behind her. Because the idea is that would be a bad mother duck. And likewise, women are often penalized for making a decision where they're not taking everyone else's needs into account. Classic piece of advice for women when they're negotiating for a raise or a promotion is to point to the needs of their team. It's not enough to say, I need this, but instead, here's how this would be good for my team. And that's a very mother duck piece of advice. So what price do we pay for all this communal decision making for getting input and consensus? I think there are two prices that women pay.

8:31by being more collaborative. So one price is that they're often seen as less decisive. Unfortunately, people think that collaborative and decisive don't mix. And if you're making a decision and bringing other people in, is it because you can't make that decision by yourself? That's often how women can be viewed when they bring in other people. I had a female manager that I interviewed, and she said in her organization, there was this problem of the last person who touched it. She said, if there was a decision to be made and a female manager had to make it, there'd be a line of people outside of her door on the day that that decision had to be made. And she said, basically, people viewed it as, I want to make sure I'm the last person who has any say in this because that will be the person that she listens to. And I asked, yes, right? And I asked, what happens for the male managers? And she said, no lines outside of their door because when he makes his decision, you'll find out about it.

9:31And she found this very frustrating as a female manager because, you know, on the day that you need a decision to be made, if anything, there might be people you want to seek out, but perhaps you want your door closed and to be left alone. So very different views of how men and women are making decisions.

9:49insulting view of how women make decisions, if you ask me. The second price I think women pay for being collaborative is that they're seen as less visionary. There's a fascinating HBR article about the fact that the one leadership quality that women are seen as lacking is vision. I think part of that is because they're often bringing a lot of people in on decisions, and unfortunately that's then seen as that person, that woman leader doesn't have some essence of vision that that perhaps Steve Jobs or some other great male leader has. Teresa, is there a way that we can act decisively and collaborate in a way that works to our advantage? I think there are some strategies that I've heard women leaders use really successfully. So I'm going to offer you some of the language that I've heard them use.

10:36You want to focus on action. You want to express I'm still interested in your concerns, but I want to focus on action. So what that language might look like is, okay, you've read the report that I sent around. I need to move ahead with this decision because management wants the decision yesterday, of course. Are there any objections to our doing this, this action that I've proposed? Does anyone see a reason why this isn't a good fit for us?

11:02And that's really nice language because it's focused on we're going to act. I'm going to make this decision, but I want to make sure before I make the decision that I've included your brilliant input. And I think that's really nice because it's combining both the collaborative and the decisive components.

11:18Another important strategy is to clarify the kind of input that you want. So you can specify I'm seeking input from marketing and engineering or I really need input from sales to let people know this is the group that needs to weigh in. And that way it doesn't feel like everyone in the world has a say in a decision if that's a concern in your organization. One other one that I heard from someone in the C-suite is the way she presents when she's leaning towards a decision and she's already 80% of the way there. She comes to her team, her leadership team, and says, okay, I'm leaning towards saying yes and going ahead with Plan X. I want five pieces of data on this by Friday.

12:00It can be data for or against. And so that's very nice because she's already let them know, here's the direction I'm going unless I hear otherwise. So give me data either to back this up or to challenge it. And I think that's really nice because again, it's collaborative but it's showing your decisiveness. One of the concerns that we've been hearing from some of our listeners is that financial decisions at work can be especially tricky and they sometimes have trouble.

12:26owning their right to make those calls. So I want to play a little bit of tape for you now, and we'll just hear from one of our listeners. I've often felt with financial decisions that, though I lead an entire department, that I'm unable to actually make those decisions on my own, that I still need permission to spend money that I've already been given, that's already in my budget, that I still want either a group consensus or I still want my boss to approve it.

12:53i have felt like maybe i'm not qualified enough to be able to make this decision or i don't have enough business acumen to make this decision or i haven't led this department long enough to make this decision i'm lucky that i have a very supportive ceo who tells me you know this best so if you think it's worth the money we should do it but it has been a struggle through my whole career to say that i have enough information or enough experience to be able to make small or large financial decisions on my own. What stands out to you, Therese, in hearing that? It's not surprising that she's struggling with this. So the decision to spend money on X and to not spend money on Y, especially when it's large amounts, can feel really risky. And men are much more socialized in our culture to take risks than women are.

13:48One of the key findings is that women are especially uncomfortable taking risks that are new. And I'm guessing for that listener that part of her anxiety comes up when there's some new possible expense, not with an expense that they've done in the past. In terms of what I think that listener needs to do, I have advice that kind of goes in two different directions. So I think she first of all needs to decide, does she want to wean herself off of the boss's input?

14:12Or does she want to accept that this is how she makes financial decisions? And I think either of those would be fine. She just needs to move forward on one of them. If she decides that she wants to wean herself off of her boss's input, I'd recommend I love spreadsheets or some way of tracking the impact of her financial decisions. All too often we don't keep track. We remember the anxiety of a decision, but we don't pay attention to what were the actual consequences. And so if she could track, what's the actual impact of a financial decision? She might see that, oh, I've got lots of good ones in my track record. If she decides she really wants to accept this is how she makes financial decisions, she should be reassured it's smart to get buy-in. When women leaders make autocratic decisions, there's more of a penalty for them than there is for men who are making autocratic decisions. So getting buy-in can be really wise protection for her if there are big ramifications for that financial decision.

15:08One of the other patterns that came up that we heard from listeners is this struggle around when you have enough information. Is there kind of tip or rule of thumb that you've heard that has sort of helped you cut off debate and kind of say, we have enough. We don't need to fill out more spreadsheets. We have enough info. Let's just make a call.

15:27You know, it's it's it's hard to to set what that what that threshold or tipping point should be I think the thing that's really helpful What the research shows is that people make better decisions when they have at least two preferably three concrete options on the table now by that Two concrete options. It doesn't mean, you know, should we build the parking lot or no, right? That's that's really only one option and you're trying to decide yes or no A second concrete option would be let's give everyone a bus pass. That's a really different option and it could also solve that problem. Or the third option, very different, would be let's give everyone one day a week to work from home. That could also solve the problem if the problem is employee parking. So what I'm trying to point out is that if you're having trouble making a decision,

16:17a really productive direction to go in is do we have more than one option? Or are we just debating back and forth on the yes or no? Should we go with the one option? Research shows people make worse decisions when they only have one option. And the other, I love this piece of advice I got from a woman in the C suite. When she's mentoring women, what she says to them is, okay, you need to ask yourself two questions. Question number one, do I know more than most people on my team about the factors that are affecting this important decision. And usually the answer is yes. She said, okay, now you need to ask yourself a second question. Do I know everything there is to know? No. Okay, let's circle back to question number one. And I really like that because chances are you do know more. Do you know everything? No, not possible. The other thing that often comes up in this same neighborhood is risk taking. And I have seen

17:11sort of arguments on both sides, one that women are less comfortable taking risks, so therefore they don't make as good leaders. I have also seen some on the other side saying, well, you want a, you know, risk averse leader because they make more intelligent decisions, but are women more risk averse? And if they are, how does it show up in their decision making?

17:34So on the issue of risk taking there's a there's a lot of mix of data on this of all the topics We've discussed. This is where there's the most controversy at least for researchers So there are certain areas where men definitely take more risks leisure activities You also see more men taking risks when something is novel and I think that's concerning in the workplace because if there's a new project and nobody knows exactly what that the outcomes gonna look like or how to get that project done, men are more likely to be the ones raising their hand and eager to do it than women are. I would love to get into some more of the advice that you would give about handling some of these decisions. So when it comes to something like making a risky decision, do you have a strategy for determining if it's worth taking?

18:22One that I really like is called the 10, 10, 10 strategy. This comes from Susie Welch. She's a journalist. So the notion is this, what are the consequences of this decision in 10 minutes? What are the consequences in 10 months? And what are the consequences in 10 years?

18:39All too often we're only focused on one of those time frames and often it's just the 10 minutes, right? How am I going to feel? Or it might be 10 months. Should we move or not? And you're thinking about how my life will be different 10 months from now. But it's really helpful to think about all three because it can often put in perspective like 10 years from now, it's not going to matter. Or 10 years from now, I am going to be set up for a much better position within the company, right?

19:02if you're thinking about asking for a raise or a promotion. And so even though it might make my life unpleasant for the next 10 minutes, it's worth it in the long run. So 10, 10, 10, that's a really helpful one. Oh, also like even if you're in a meeting and you're trying to decide, should I make this point or not? It's not gonna matter probably even 10 months from now, although maybe it will because you'll be seen as someone who's an innovative thinker. That's powerful. So let's talk about risk taking and decision making when you're working.

19:31with a team when you're making collaborative decisions. How does risk-taking factor into that? What's interesting there is, particularly if you're a female leader of a team, there's an expectation that you'll collaborate and take other people's views into account, particularly if it's going to be a risky decision that might fail. And women tend to pay a higher penalty for making decisions autocratically.

20:01And if those decisions fail, she pays a much higher penalty than a guy who makes a decision autocratically and then that decision fails. If a woman brings other people into the decision and it fails, she's much more easily forgiven for that than if she made that decision on her own. And so I think that particularly for risky decisions, there's a lot of wisdom in bringing in other people into the decision because if it turns out that it doesn't work, you've padded yourself.

20:30It's interesting. It's frustrating, but it's interesting. So what if taking a risk when you're making a decision kind of freaks you out? What do you do to calm down and focus? Allison Wood Brooks out of Harvard talks about reframing anxiety and I find this very useful. The notion being when you're Getting anxious about taking a risk or just anxious in general to instead of saying oh my goodness I'm nervous this is going to hurt my performance instead thinking hey This isn't anxiety. This is excitement. I'm excited to do this. So that's one way that's how Allison Wood Brooks talks about it What I find even more helpful in my own head or the way that my husband and I egg one another on is to say This is how my body prepares for something that really matters to me

21:24I'm going to do a better job because of how I feel right now. Because anxiety and excitement are very similar things in terms of your body's physiological response. But what's fascinating is if you reframe it as this is going to help me, this isn't going to hurt me, research shows you actually do make better decisions. You're more astute at assessing risk. You have better reasoning abilities. So you're not clamping down on your body's response. You're harnessing it and actually freed up cognitively to do better work. And hasn't research also shown that women perform particularly well under stress? So yes, they do. This is one of my favorite findings that's out there. It's not the case that you want to stress women out so that they can make better decisions. That shouldn't be the takeaway from this, right? But there is this very, probably the most

22:18popular international belief about men and women is that women are more emotional than men. You can find that in just about any culture that people believe women are more emotional than men. And people especially believe that women are going to fall apart under stress, that their emotions will get the best of them, that they'll have trouble thinking rationally. And what the data actually shows is that emotions affect both men and women under stress, but they affect them differently.

22:44So what happens when women are under a lot of stress is that women decide differently than when they're calm and They tend to go to the guaranteed wins. They tend to go to the thing that's safe the known solution Let's just do the thing that we know works men under stress They go for the risky option they go for the big rewards you know whether you want to think about that as they go for the home run even though that might be a ball that's caught but they under stress men tend to go for really risky options even if there's a very very small chance that it'll work out and so where I think the advice. Comes is that we need both men and women in the room when high stress decisions are being made and all too often.

23:29at the top level of an organization, you only have men in the room, which would suggest they're going to lean towards risky decisions and not even be checked on it. So what is stereotype threat? So stereotype threat, I think, is one of the most powerful concepts in this whole arena. It's the anxiety that you're about to live up to someone's negative expectation of a group to which you belong.

23:57And this happens in the workplace for women. A number of researchers are looking at the ways that when we become concerned about other people's stereotypes, even if we completely disagree with them, we don't believe in them.

24:11we become preoccupied, it becomes important to prove them wrong. We need to show that that is not a problem for women and that's not true for me. And as a result, that takes away some of our cognitive resources to actually do the task at hand. And so this has been shown to affect decision-making, particularly for women in math and science and engineering roles. If you're the only woman in the room, that's one of the cues that...

24:36triggers stereotype threat where you become preoccupied because why am I the only woman in the room? It changes participation in meetings. It changes your willingness to lead. There are lots of ways in which this preoccupation with someone else's stereotype hinders performance. So is there a way to shield ourselves from that? Thankfully, yes. Thankfully, yes. So first of all, it's simply knowing about stereotype threat reduces it for people because it's all within it's you know, it's your own you don't have to worry about whether they believe it or not. It's your own internal wrestling with the stereotype. Two other things that help. First of all is to tell yourself that the anxiety I'm feeling right now, because stereotype threat tends to happen on really hard tasks. If it's an easy task, it doesn't happen. But if you're in a really judgmental meeting with really smart people, this is where stereotype threats likely to happen. So telling yourself, you know, anyone would find it hard to get a word in edgewise in this meeting. The anxiety I'm feeling is about

25:32the fact that this is hard. And the other one is to do a little work. If you're going into a situation where you know you're going to be the only female or you know it's going to be a really hard task and high pressure to do what's known as a values affirmation. And that means to sit down and write for 10 minutes, you know, you can get out your iPhone and do it on your phone or you can do it on a piece of paper where you write about something that's really important to you. It could be your health. It could be your family. It doesn't have to do anything with the task that you're about to perform. But writing for 10 minutes about something that really matters to you and times that having that value has made a difference, research shows that that inoculates you from stereotype threat because now you're more than just that person at work. You're more than the person who is the only woman in the room and you've expanded your identity and that now protects you so that you're less likely to get preoccupied.

26:30When you think about confidence you've you've described it as a dial so you can sort of dial up your confidence You can dial down your confidence. How does that work? You know one of the women that I interviewed for my book gave me this idea and I love it so all too often Both men and women see confidence as a hammer and every problem as a nail, that we just need more confidence, particularly women, and more confidence, more confidence. And that will solve the problem. And the research shows that confidence interferes with decision making. You make better decisions if your confidence is turned down. And I much prefer to think of confidence as a dial or like a volume knob. And the idea is you want to keep your confidence turned down when you're making a decision.

27:15and you want to turn it up once you've made your decision and you need to communicate it or you need to convince other people. I love that. I think that piece of advice, just be more confident in all the decisions you make, that has always frustrated me because overconfidence is not a good thing. But related to communicating their ideas, what should women know when communicating the decisions that they've made?

27:40You know there's been some great advice from I love your podcast I've been listening to the episodes and there's been some great advice from some of your other guests. Thank you. Oh sure But you know the avoiding the tentative statements of while I'm thinking that we should do this instead saying I strongly believe We should do this or it sounds as though we've come to this decision or Based on everything we've said here today this is going to be the plan. But to speak very strongly, or, you know, and you might even want to ask, is there anything that we haven't heard yet before I make this decision, right? To make it clear that we're now moving to action. All too often, there can be a blurry line for people about the distinction between we're gathering the input and we're making the decision. Lower confidence and tentative during the decision-making part and then a clear demarcation, here's what we're doing. I think that

28:35do people respond well to that? If you figure out later on that you actually made a bad decision, as opposed to a decision that just didn't work out, right? Like, something was wrong with your decision-making process and you made a mistake. How do you communicate that without sounding weak or undermining yourself? This is such a tricky issue. First of all, identify what a possible remedy could be, right? In terms of is there a different decision that could be made?

29:06or a change, a way that we could pivot now to get to a better decision. I do think it's important to do a postmortem where you talk with the group about, okay, so...

29:17What information didn't we have? I do think it's important to have that conversation male or female leader because otherwise people can wonder, do you realize it was a bad decision? Are you all right? There can be that question of whether the leader has blinders on and is ignoring the fact that something had bad repercussions. I'm not sure I scribe to this, but a thing that I've heard some leaders say is there are no good and bad decisions, there are just consequences.

29:44And I think that that can be helpful to take a group through, okay, what were the consequences and what could we have anticipated and what was unknowable? But it's really hard to figure out should women tread differently in this space than men should. But how can we look back at those decisions in a more productive way? How do we stop all the ruminating? How do we avoid beating ourselves up? I think when it comes to avoiding ruminating, I haven't seen research on this, but a thing that I've done is I've given myself a window of, OK, I'm going to think about it for this long. I am going to make lists of here are the factors that were important that I didn't consider. And then I'm going to stop.

30:28Right. So I'm going to ruminate on this until Tuesday. And then that's it. And that that can be helpful because you're giving yourself permission to, I really want to understand what went wrong that I didn't expect. Or I want to bring my team in to reevaluate this, but to put an end point to it and to give yourself permission to stop. Because I think all too often when a bad decision is made, we beat ourselves up for it and that becomes unproductive.

30:58Given all that we know about women and decision-making and the unique pressures women face, how do we support each other in decision-making? Such a nice question. I recommend that women...

31:12form networks if they don't already have them of groups that they can get together with. I belong to one that's particularly empowering. We get together for lunch once a month. And after a little bit of chit chat, we go around the table and we each identify, okay, here's a challenge that I'm facing and here's the support that I need. It might sound very structured, but it's incredibly helpful because...

31:37you get to find out for some women there's some decision that they need to make and there might be someone else at the table who can help them make that decision or it could be someone is needing to take a risk and they just need encouragement from other people or discouragement of like have you thought about this. You know so I find that's an incredibly empowering experience and there's research to show that when women have strong social support networks at work they're more likely to stay and they're more likely to move into higher leadership roles.

32:07Teresa, thank you so much for talking with us today. You're so welcome. This has been tremendously helpful. I feel like I will make many decisions this week with this all in mind. I just kept thinking about the double standard. It was a little frustrating to find out how to avoid that double standard. I feel like the onus should be on organizations to be aware that that happens. But I don't think you can avoid it. I think that was one of her points. So for me...

32:35Hearing the way she described it and the kind of the clean thinking about it. I found encouraging I think knowing knowing it's out there knowing you can't do anything about it Helps you navigate those situations better. Yeah that 10 10 10 strategy she said I thought that was interesting great and at first when she was saying that I was like Will this lead to more analysis paralysis? Will you try to think about?

33:0410 minutes from now, 10 weeks from now, 10 years. But I think that's actually something you can think of fairly quickly. Once you realize what is the impact this is gonna have 10 years from now, you'll know. It will be fairly small and then you can move forward with your decision. I also liked her advice about turning up the dial of confidence after you've made the decision. Oh yeah. Something I do that kind of along the same lines is sometimes I pretend I've made the decision. I basically make the decision, but then I don't tell anyone about it if it's a really big decision for like an hour, if I can wait an hour or a day, if I can wait a day. And I just walk around and think, I've made this decision. This is what's happening. And I sort of live into it for a while. And if I start to feel like overwhelming anxiety, I'm like, maybe this is the wrong call and I should make another decision. But if I start to feel sort of more and more confident naturally, then I'm like, oh, I think this was maybe the right call.

33:56Amy, I'm wondering, do you have advice on how to make decisions stick if there's people who keep trying to reopen them? Yeah, you know, sometimes you just have to say, you know what, this decision is made and we're moving forward. You don't have to keep examining every additional factor. It might be that you hear something that moves you one way or the other.

34:18But there is a cost to the time you take to making the decision. 100%. So you have to ask yourself whether it's worth taking the extra hour, the extra day, or the extra month. And many times it's not. The consequences of a bad decision, most of the time, are pretty minor. As a veteran of many bad decisions, you know, it seems like what you don't want to focus on is the bad decision. Own it.

34:46Figure out what what made you make the bad decision. Yeah, what information did you lack? What question did you neglect to ask? To me the far more important thing is to figure out the better way forward So focusing so much ruminating. Yeah is is not helpful I'm curious if either of you two do this something I've found myself doing more now that I'm making more collaborative decisions is like I do seek input, but I will kind of limit or specify the type of input I'm looking for from particular people, because I've been in a situation where I'm like, what do you guys think? And I'm really looking for advice on a final step of something, but then I get advice on the entire thing. Yeah, so when she was talking, I kept thinking about the difference between decision-making and leadership and the need for buy-in, which for me is different from the need for consensus, because

35:46You know, if you ran an organization as a democracy, you wouldn't get anywhere in most cases, right? You need a vision. You need someone who's going to execute on the vision, who can get people aligned, making decisions in alignment with the vision. But seeking consensus on every little thing is going to get you nowhere fast. You're never going to get to a decision. And if you yield every time someone pushes back, you'll never move forward.

36:15And I think to Nicole's point about the kind of what are your thoughts? I think it can be dangerous to ask such a broad question. And it's actually sometimes infuriating as someone forwards you an email and it just says, your thoughts?

36:31Question mark or say you know that's crazy making because it's like what do you want me to do sort through this entire email string? Try to figure out what it is that you need for me and then and then respond So I think it's a really good idea to ask the targeted question of what it is You actually want absolutely and when you get feedback on stuff that you're not Trying to work through you can say you know what I kind of know where I am on that one And but what I'm what I'm still struggling it with is this point. So I'd love to hear what you think about that That's so helpful, yeah. Yeah, just you have to use your own filters. You have to figure out what you can control and what you can't control. You can control how you make a decision, right? You can't control all the feedback you're gonna get, except to channel it a bit. Right, you can channel it. And you can say thank you so much for your input. This is the call I'm making. Yeah, and then up your confidence and move away. Yeah, that's our show.

37:34I'm Nicole Torres. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Our producer is Amanda Cursey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buckholz. Maureen Hoek is our supervising editor, and we get production help from Rob Eckhart and Isis Madrid. We've already told you about the discussion guides we've made for each episode. Another new thing we're doing this season is giving you a platform where you can talk to us, our guest experts, and other listeners about issues related to women and work. It's an online community we're calling the HBR Idea Lab.

38:04We'll post questions to get everyone talking, swap stories, and lead you through projects that'll help you apply the practical advice you hear on the show. To sign up, check out our show notes. We hope you'll join us, and thanks for listening.