How do the people on your team view most situations? What do they focus on when they make decisions? For that matter, which variables of the situation do you focus on when you make a decision? How long is the time horizon you typically consider when making decisions? When you make a decision, do you value speed more than thoroughness and prudence? Or is it the other way around for you?

Thanks to my extensive experience with stalking, you can learn the answers to these questions. And with a little luck and a lot of hard work, maybe someday you too can be a stalker.

To begin, we find it most helpful to understand people's decision tendencies along three dimensions.

1. Operational versus Conceptual: Do you tend to approach strategic decisions more operationally or conceptually?
2. Risky versus Cautious: Are you drawn more to high-risk/high-reward options, or do you view your options from a more cautious perspective?
3. Deliberative versus Impulsive: Do you like to make sure you have all the facts before deciding, or do you just get on with it?

Understanding where you land on each of these three continuums can tell you a lot about the way you like to approach changes and how you like to go about executing plans. Are you constantly looking at the big picture, or do you get charged up by digging into the details and really getting your hands dirty? Just as importantly, you can also learn a lot about the way the people on your team approach change and execution. In which situations are they likely to thrive? Where are the blind spots and stumbling blocks most likely to appear?

When you put these three dimensions together you wind up with one of eight general profiles or “styles.” (The eight styles are listed below.) The collective style of the group can tell us quite a bit about the culture of execution on that team or within that organization.

We recently helped the managers at a regional healthcare provider bridge the gap between their new strategy and the execution of that strategy. The executive team felt some trepidation about how quickly and effectively the organization would be able to deploy this strategy. In our diagnostic survey, we saw that the managers were remarkably clear about the top priorities of the organization in this new plan. However, they were deeply concerned that too many urgencies would arise throughout the day that would distract them from focusing on those top priorities.

The group's decision style illuminated the source of this challenge. Their management ranks were dominated by Builders—people who are operational, cautious, and deliberative. Builders are great at digging into the details of a situation, and they really don't like leaving things to chance whenever they can help it. Their mantra is better to be safe and diligent, rather than sorry and broke. While those tendencies are highly effective for managers in times of stability, Builders can easily feel overwhelmed in times of change and uncertainty—when the old “building” is getting remodeled or torn down before it has even been completed. They don't like loose ends and they hate leaving things partially completed even when those things are no longer a priority. This group felt overwhelmed by the volume of urgent issues they faced every day because they felt like doing their job effectively required them to respond immediately and diligently to every hiccup and fire drill that came across their desk or dropped into their inbox. That told us that in order to help this group, first and foremost we needed to help them redefine what “urgent” actually meant, and then reclassify which issues, and their priorities in the job right now, were actually urgent and which fires they needed to let burn while dealing with other issues.

Another issue is that those leaders in the executive ranks were mostly Hunters and Inventors—people who tend to think more conceptually and are less risk averse. Even though all the layers of management seemed perfectly clear about what the strategic priorities were, there was a notable gap in the way that the executives expected the strategy to be executed and the way in which the lower level mangers actually approached execution.

Neither of these issues is especially rare, and both of them are eminently solvable. Our studies show that the only demographic variable that can reasonably predict decision styles is job title. The higher up you go in an organization the more likely people are to be conceptual versus operational. We haven't tracked it over time for a long enough period to determine conclusively whether job title is the chicken or the egg—whether conceptual thinkers are more likely to be promoted, or whether people who get promoted started out thinking more conceptually. Our hypothesis is that it's a little bit of both, but what related research shows is leading us to believe that it is probably more of the latter.

Either way, the gap in styles between lower and upper levels of management is fairly common. The important thing is that you are aware of whether that gap exists for you and your team, so you can make your styles work for you instead of against you.

If you missed it in Chapter 6, you and your team members can find your decision styles for free at www.decisionpulse.com. If you are digitally deprived at the moment, the information on the following pages will give you a pretty good idea about which decision style belongs to you. For extra credit, you can guess which style your team members belong to also.