#03 - The Smartest one in the room
Hello and welcome to Leadership Sketches, our weekly reality check on Creative Leadership. Every week, I want to share ideas and best practices on #creativity, #leadership, and everything in between. In this sketch:
The Smartest one in the room
For many years, as a founder, I believed that I had to be the smartest one in the room. However, this notion turned out to be a flawed assumption. By positioning myself at the top of the pyramid, I unintentionally hindered any effective contributions from others, limiting the growth of the studio.
Placing myself as the smartest person in the room often led me to seek compliance rather than encourage the proliferation of diverse perspectives and ideas. It prevented the team from expressing their full potential.
I struggled and struggled to break free from this toxic practice.
When we had an issue with a specific project, and we didn’t know how to solve it, everything stopped. More often than not, the team went into compliance mode and started asking me or my partners to take decisions for them. This is because they didn’t want to take the risk, or they didn’t feel comfortable being accountable. And it was my fault.
The reality was that most of the time, I also didn’t have the answer. My “guess” was as valid as theirs. Actually, in some cases even worse as neither my partners nor I closely followed the development of the project.
We needed everybody to contribute with new ideas and enable them to make decisions independently.
But how could we evaluate if a decision was good or bad?
We all sat at the table and figured out that part of the problem was that the team didn’t feel comfortable being accountable. But most importantly that we needed a distributed and agreed-upon system to make such decisions.
To break free from this practice, we developed a framework that transformed the decision-making process. After a couple of sessions where we openly discussed how we made decisions, we came up with "Three E's" framework.
This framework provided us with a comprehensive approach to decision-making. Here is how it worked:
We looked at a proposed solution, and we would ask:
How Effective is this solution? Effectiveness = Result/Objectives, which meant: on a scale, how close is this solution to what we expect it to be?
How Efficient is this solution? Efficiency = Result/Costs, which meant: how costly is our solution? Cost is not only monetary cost, but also effort, struggle, energy and time.
How Evolving is this solution? Evolving = Result/Time, which meant: what is the long term impact of our solution? This is the characteristic I struggled the most to convey.
By employing the Three E's framework, we shifted our focus from being the sole decision-maker to empowering our team members. It allowed everyone to evaluate decisions through a common lens, promoting collaboration and ensuring that the chosen path was aligned with our objectives. With this framework in place, we collectively explored the potential effectiveness, efficiency, and evolution of our ideas, enabling our team to reach the full potential.
The dynamics of leadership shifted from me being the smartest one in the room to being just a contributor.
In an ideal world, we strive for 10-star solutions that encompass effectiveness, efficiency, and evolution. However, in reality, trade-offs are often necessary.
The framework provide a valuable reference point for evaluating ideas and making informed decisions.
In closing, I invite you to reflect on your own framework for decision-making.
How do you ensure that your team is consistently making the right decisions?
As always, I'm Gianluca Cinquepalmi, and until the next sketch, don't forget: Inspire the team to be creative, Challenge them to bring ideas to life, and Disrupt the status quo.