Decide who decides
As many of my posts start, I was listening to a podcast. This was a startup founder who was talking about the company she started with a partner and how they handled decisions where the two of them didn’t agree about something.
With a fifty-fifty split it was always likely they would hit decisions where they held different opinions. The way they addressed this was that they would identify ahead of time who was the ultimate decision maker for the decision. They would then have the discussion and if it ended in deadlock then the designated person would make the call.
With the way they split the work, in a lot of cases it would be clear who the ultimate decision maker was however for those cases where there was any doubt they had a simple solution.
We had a situation at work where someone had a strongly held opinion that was different from someone they were discussing with. There should always be a discussion, held in the right way, i.e. no abuse, shouting etc. And it is okay if the outcome of the discussion is that an agreement cannot be reached. In the case at work, one party was closer to the work needing to be done and had the overall vote but the other party, as they didn’t have this framework in place, wasn’t able to easily let go of the decision.
Maybe something we need to introduce.
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