#136 - Akbar, don’t worry about Birbal
How to get over the loss of your domain-specific expert in your org or team with something better
👋Hi, I’m Satyajit. Welcome to my newsletter that picks apart the messiness of decision-making for managers, execs, and builders.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to be a better leader. I even made a handbook for those in charge of leading people and delivering results, having experienced not too long back myself the choppy waters of middle management.
So I invite you to check out the Middle Manager Playbook. It describes 14 real, common, and tricky managerial situations and shows you how to deal with them. More than 60 people have got themselves a copy already, and the word on the street is that it is relatable and actionable. So go on, get yourself a copy.
On to today’s issue…
Wisdom from the wonderful book Brave New Work (paraphrased):
👉Organizations are particular about who gets to make decisions. But the same organizations are lackadaisical about how decisions are made.
One outcome of this cultural artifact in organizations is that success becomes more people-dependent, less process-dependent. Business owners and team leaders are on permanent vigil about their trusted lieutenants with expert judgment. If these Birbals leave, they take with them the most important ingredient for good decision-making, which is their well-honed intuition.
When such a scenario looms, organizations resort to something mechanical. Since they no longer can have the subjective expertise of the departing maverick, they put in place rules. These rules are really only rules of thumb that have been elevated to the status of defaults.
It need not be like this.🤚
If you own a business, handle a P&L, and/or manage a team and you have reacted to the departure of your trusted lieutenant by setting black-and-white threshold rules, you may have overcorrected. Sample these:
Candidates must have a postgraduate degree in economics.
Candidates must have had a minimum of 5 years of experience in B2B sales
Candidates must be taller than 180cm
(Okay, I stole the last one from a matrimonial ad)
🚀Instead, when the domain expert in your team leaves (or even before that), build a new operating system for decision-making that is less expert-dependent.
In this issue I’ll show you how to build one simple model. This is the model that started off Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman’s career as a psychologist in the Israeli army, and this model will yield better results than your expert did over time. Here it is:
1️⃣List all important attributes that influence the decision.
2️⃣Assign weights to each parameter.
3️⃣Give a numerical value to each parameter for each of the options. This means that for some attributes you may have to convert a qualitative value, like ‘average’ or ‘excellent’, to a number on a scale.
4️⃣Multiple the numerical parameter value with its assigned weight for each alternative.
5️⃣Add up all the scores to get an overall score for each alternative. Now you’ve an apples-to-apples comparison for all the alternatives or options you’re considering.
Let’s try this model. Let’s use it to hire for an open position.
Get your team of interviewers together and make them go through steps 1-5 above. The most important step arguably is including all important attributes, followed by assigning weights to the attributes. Getting to agreement on these two lays the foundation for a more reliable assessment.
To understand why, think about how the interview process pans out generally. The interviewers are trying to predict how good a fit the candidate is based on some cues. They don’t agree on the cues, they don’t weight the cues the same, and because of these reasons their interviews are not structured. They’re not asking questions that lead them to relevant evidence.
The suggested model, on the other hand, helps structure the interviews. You can’t drift off to your favorite but irrelevant stock questions. The model picks out calibration errors too. Found a candidate who was rated 9 on resourcefulness by Interviewer A and 3 by Interviewer B? Maybe the team needs a shared definition of what resourcefulness is.
Why does this simple model do better than an expert?
💡Because the model reduces the impact of noise like first impressions or one interviewer’s unique set of attributes.
All decision-making problems are prediction problems. You’re trying to predict how the future will be based on what you know at the moment of decision. No decision-making model is perfect. But some are more useful than the others.
This model is better than being tied to an intuitive expert’s judgment. It is better than making hard-and-fast rules. Yet, it is subjective. You (or your team) decides the attributes, you decide the weights.
There are more objective models to make decisions with but they are often not needed because the marginal improvement in accuracy is not worth the time lost; or the skill level needed to run it (regression analysis, for example) is high; or what you’re doing is too new for you to rely on past data.
I believe any simple but systematic way of making decisions improves the quality of decision-making. So a subjective model like the one proposed here will work just fine for any organization that until now has relied on the well-trained nose of a handful of prized experts or has, in the absence of such experts, mechanically enforced rules for important decisions.
Have you faced you this problem of suddenly losing your brain trust and being left high and dry? Do you promise to try to build your own decision-making model on the lines of this issue? Let me know your thoughts about today’s piece. And don’t forget to try the Middle Manager Playbook. It’s a labor of my love and it’s made for you.
Until next week…