You’ve been known in your career for being someone who gets things done. You’re someone who is brought in when things need pushing forward and excel at working through ambiguous and complicated situations.
Yet recently you’ve started encountering a problem: You’ve started to lose momentum. Not because of your own lack of drive but because you’re being blocked. Strategic decisions everyone agreed to in the room are starting to be stalled out, with private conversations sending the discussion back to square one. Calls for dissent during the meeting are going unanswered leaving you in the frustrating position of not knowing where exactly it’s all going wrong.
In this blog post, we’re talking about navigating decision making in the politics that is senior leadership and why the tools that got you here aren’t necessarily the ones to get you to the next level. We’ll also cover what you can start to do about it.
Getting all senior stakeholders in the room is high pressure, and a lot of expensive company time spent in one meeting. This means that getting the best out of them is incredibly important.
Everyone Agreed On The Call. I Explicitly Asked.
I worked with a client who had this exact same problem. In fact they were put into their role because they were very good at collecting consensus and pushing stalemates through to progress. Part of the reason they were so good about this is because they were very good at focusing in on the problem that needed to be solved and finding solutions to work their way out of there. They’d had excellent success with this in their career so far and only now it was starting to become less effective.
The thing that was most confusing to this client was that it wasn’t always immediately apparent that their strategies were no longer working. They would leave the meeting with everyone having agreed on the course of action and thought that that meant everything was wrapped up. It was only later on through the rumour mill that they started to realise things weren’t as simple. People had doubts, ones that they hadn’t brought up in the meeting.
This was of course very frustrating for my client. It was a challenge in itself to secure senior leadership time and if the decision was later walked back then this time was wasted. It would be far more efficient for everyone to share all their concerns in the meeting so they could be discussed and dealt with, instead of now needing to call a second meeting to address the exact same problem again, wasting more time of the people that didn’t have a lot of it spare.
This also affected my client on a personal level. They were the go to person to cut through this noise so it felt like a personal failing when their expert efficiency was thrown into question.
The problem that my client and I uncovered was that they were an expert in using a hammer, but this wasn’t the appropriate tool for this job. Their push towards quick decisions bashed out in one call may have felt like the most efficient path forward but it was also responsible for this cycle of walkbacks, making the final decision actually slower. For my client to get back their usual efficiency, we needed to slow down to speed up.
Just because it seems more efficient, doesn’t mean it actually is.
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Why This Is Particularly Hard for AuDHD Leaders
This kind of challenge comes up regularly among my clients because often the traits that make us excellent at driving things forward overlap with traits of their neurodivergence. Creativity and divergent thinking often open the doors to novel solutions or making connections that others might miss, allowing them to close gaps in differences of opinions. The impatience that often comes with ADHD hyperactivity often brings energy and momentum and a disinterest in distractions that might get in the way. The directness that often accompanies autism allows focusing in on what’s important. There are various profiles of neurodivergent traits that can contribute to someone being excellent at moving things forward, but like all of our strengths, they can be overplayed.
Strengths become overplayed when they’re relied upon in situations where they’re not the best way forward. It’s something that is easily done, particularly as they’re usually rewarded in other circumstances, but just because it worked in one situation doesn’t mean it’ll work in another. We’ve all seen people who are competitive pushed to perform at their best. We’ve also all seen people who are competitive to their detriment. When a strength is overplayed, it doesn’t just stop being beneficial, it actively undermines us instead.
In the case of AuDHD leaders, that combination of impatience and directness that gets the decision over the line can also become the very thing that stops it from happening at all. The more complex the decision, the more space it needs and the more at odds this is with a direct, impatient approach.
In this example, the key symptom is the conversations that happen outside of the meeting. If people are not willing to raise dissent in the room, it’s probably because they don’t feel like they can.
Most clients I work with on this understand this concept at a fundamental level and therefore ask for disagreement as part of the meeting, but there is a big difference between being asked for disagreement and feeling like you actually can disagree. When the culture is to move quickly towards a decision and stick ruthlessly to the topic at hand, it discourages exploration that might often lead to a better decision. And if an individual doesn’t feel like they have a voice at the table, they’ll use their influence outside to undo the decision that gets made there.
It becomes a case of what got you here won’t get you there and while they way forward doesn’t require abandoning the things that worked in the past completely, it does require expanding your toolkit to enable the dissent to happen that will ultimately lead to a better decision.
We’ve all seen people become too competitive that objectively successful moments become frustrations because they became too competitive. What strengths are you similarly overplaying?
What Role Do You Actually Fulfil
If I asked you what your role was in this situation, you might answer something like: “I’m the person who has to make the decision happen”, or “I need to get everyone on the same page” or something similar. I’m now going to challenge that interpretation by adding some nuance. Your role might be to get the decision to happen, but that doesn’t mean you need to make it happen and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to make it happen in one meeting. Your role, rather, is to facilitate the decision being made.
The distinction is subtle but by keeping it in mind it can change how you approach it. The person who makes the decision happen needs to wrangle the decision out of the individuals involved. The person who facilitates it shepherds the collective towards the decision themselves.
Note that there are different approaches you can take towards this role. Sometimes there is no dissent because everyone genuinely has no idea where to start, in that case bringing your own suggestions into the room to jump start the conversation and push it forward is a brilliant strategy to take forward, but generally that’s not the situation I’m talking about in this particular article.
In this particular circumstance, facilitating the decision means enabling the conversation and that means giving people an environment where they can speak up and know that their voice is heard, not just because you said disagreement was welcomed, but because they feel like their disagreement is welcome.
The key point needed to make this happen is psychological safety. In order for people to have a productive conversation in which they can be open to new ideas, they need to feel safe about being wrong and they need the environment to let that happen.
Before we jump into how to do this, I do want to highlight directness here because while it is a hugely valuable trait to have in business, this is the exact kind of situation in which it has the potential to become overplayed and send things spiraling out of control. I’ve done a whole blog post on when directness starts to become a deficit and what to do about it so feel free to read this if you know that’s your natural tendency, but for now we’re going to dive into psychological safety instead.
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How to build psychological safety
Building psychological safety is a part of relationship building that often occurs naturally without you needing to think about it. It’s only when it’s absent that you need to start paying attention to it. The early symptoms of low psychological safety tend to be an unwillingness to speak up, misinterpreting what others have said in a way that adds negative connotations and a disengagement from conversations. The goal is to spot when psychological safety needs addressing and start building it back up before it deteriorates further.
One of the ways you can build psychological safety is by building one-on-one relationships with the people involved, especially those that are more reluctant to speak up. Note that this needs to be approached as genuine relationship building, rather than giving them the impression that you’re trying to win them over to the decision. Your goal is to make them feel like their voice is being heard.
This of course involves a large upfront investment, especially if there are multiple individuals you need to build relationships with, however this is a short term investment which has a long term payoff when it comes to building up that psychological safety. I’ve written a deep dive into how to repair relationships when psychological safety has been damaged in the blog post linked and you can go and read it for more information on how to approach this topic for more challenging relationships.
The second thing you can do is show disagreement. Rather than presenting your ideas as: “Here is my idea, does everyone agree?” or immediately agreeing with good ideas that are brought by others, play devils advocate a little. Create space to explore ideas, bringing in potential pitfalls to be examined by the group for even good ideas. This is a case of leading by example and demonstrating that even the best ideas require proper consideration.
It is important as well to ask open questions with this, especially when people are disagreeing about something. Your role is to be curious and ask questions that open up the conversation, rather than wrapping up discussion quickly to move things on quicker. There is, of course, a time and a place for that and you already know how to deploy it when it’s needed. Before that, keep the conversation open by leading with curiosity.
Finally, keep the outcome front and centre. When the conversation strays off topic, encourage linking it back to the original topic so that everyone can see the through line. It will become apparent pretty quickly if there is no through line. In most disagreements, most people will agree on the bulk of it, usually even 80% or more. It’s the remaining 20% where the disagreements lie. When things are feeling unproductive, bring the conversation back to the agreement as a starting point and build from there with the new information that has been learned. As the conversation grows, so will the fraction upon which people agree.
Yes, fundamentally, this does take more time. It can be tempting when the pressure is high to push through to a decision because some decision is better than no decision. Sometimes that truly is the right answer. But that can’t be the case for every decision and slowing down in the short term is an investment to make better and more efficient decisions going forward.
You have excellent tools in your toolkit already. It’s just a case of adding more.
And of course if you need help with navigating these relationships, particularly through ambiguity and complex situations, this is the exact area in which I excel. I help neurodivergent leaders tackle impostor syndrome, navigate difficult relationships and come to better strategic decisions, so if this is something you find yourself in need of support with, then and let’s talk about what my personalised one-on-one coaching might look like for you.
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