Decisions, Decisions

Michael Jordan is one of the greatest basketballers of all time. When the game is on the line there are very few other people you want with their hands on the ball. So why in the game-winning moments did he pass the ball to a short white guy to win the game?

An explosion rocks the Apollo 13 space shuttle. The Flight Director and the biggest swinging d*ck in the room, Gene Kranz, had to assemble all hands to help save the astronauts and the mission. He told the team what they were going to do before a young NASA engineer John Aaron, told him that his plan would not succeed and also why it wouldn’t succeed.

Kranz realised that Aaron’s plan was better than his and put him in charge of that part of the rescue plan.

What do these decisions tell us about leadership?

Decisions

There are two decisions happening. The first decision is who is making the decision about the decision. In the examples above, the person in charge was Jordan and Kranz respectively. Generally, this person is the most senior or has the most authority.

The second decision is who is making the decision. In this case, it was Kerr and Aaron.

The distinction is huge, real, and has consequences.

Mature Leadership

A leader knows they don’t know everything and that they are not the best at everything. It would be ridiculous if they were. It means they are not recruiting talent, they are recruiting butt-kissers.

A leader’s primary job is to get the best out of everyone towards a common goal.

This means that they empower others with more knowledge/ skill/ creativity/ recklessness/ etc to come up with great ideas that they can decide upon.

Immature leadership thinks that they have to be the ones with the ideas. That everyone else is there to make them feel better. This is why you hear the stories of ‘make it feel like it is your boss’s idea’.

How soul-crushing and team eroding is that, that you have to make the person in charge feel bigger by making yourself smaller.

Lead Well

There is a difference between the decisions that are made and who makes the decisions.

When you focus on who makes the decisions you lose the chance to make the best decisions.

Here is how Steve Kerr tells the story of the last-second shot.