Fear based decision-making is an easy trap to fall into, especially right now. But it is a slippery slope that can get an agency into trouble in a hurry.
It takes courage to lead every day. But it particularly takes courage on the days when difficult decisions need to be made.
How adept are you and your leadership team at avoiding making decisions from the wrong place?
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Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute, this week coming to you from Louisville, Kentucky. Was with a leadership team today and we were talking about how we make decisions. And we were discussing an employee situation that their first reaction was all the things that could go wrong. This person's going to be hard to replace. This person is going to talk badly about us out in the community. This person is fill in the blank, fill in the blank. All too often we make decisions, especially around employees, based on fear: fear of what might happen, a fear of how hard it's going to be to replace them, fear about the work that's going to come back to our plate. We cannot run our agency from a place of fear. What that does, that scarcity mindset, what that does is it allows us to be held hostage by a bad situation. Whether it's a bad employee, a bad client, whatever it may be, when we live in fear of making the right decision, we are held hostage and we make bad decisions that hurt the agency long term. So one of the questions I want you to ask yourself as you are making hard decisions for the agency or when you notice yourself avoiding a difficult decision or a difficult conversation is, "Am I sitting in fear right now? Am I allowing my fear of what might come out of this conversation or this decision to dictate whether or not I do the right thing for my shop?" I have never ever seen an agency who makes decisions based in fear, make the right decisions consistently enough for the agency to be successful. So if you're feeling like there's a decision around the corner for you that you've dodged maybe for six months or a year or that you are dreading coming up, you need to find a way to dismiss that fear and just plow ahead with a decision you know is right and know that you have all the capability in the world to correct whatever comes after that decision. But decision made in fear is paralysis, a decision made in fear is being stuck, and a decision made in fear, too many decisions made in fear, means that eventually your agency is going to be extinct. It cannot survive in that environment. So shed the fear, make the right decisions, and trust in yourself that you know how to course-correct after that tough decision. All right? I'll be back next week, see you then.
