Leadership Decisions Based on Objective Criteria

Hiring a CEO or key leaders or promoting people to top leadership roles are profoundly consequential decisions. The right choice results in unprecedented success. The wrong call can set an organization back decades. Hire or promote slowly. Hire and promote for integrity and performance only. Adhere to objective evidence and avoid subjective and personal biases or irrational reasoning. Have a model process and allow it to work. Seek the input and insights of many. It will confirm a sound choice or avoid a disastrous decision. A professional, disciplined, comprehensive, strategic, and evidence-based recruitment and hiring process seeking the best pool of top tier internal and external candidates leads to positive outcomes. Know your mission, goals, objectives, culture, and team and who you need to excel with them. Your reputation enables you to attract a pool of high-quality candidates. You should have also developed a team of leaders in the organization ready for greater challenges. Employ a search process guaranteed to locate, interest, and engage talented leaders of integrity. Look at your mission, goals, objectives, culture, and team and specifically advertise and recruit for leaders who match them. Position advertisements can't be long generic wish lists. They are highly specific based upon the organization's mission, goals, objectives, culture, and team. Collect a lot of information from many different sources and create numerous different opportunities for quality interaction with the candidates and your diverse set of key internal and external stakeholders. Listen to and learn from employees and others who interact with the candidates. Dysfunctional organizations resort to rapid hiring, snap promotions, and fraudulent or make-believe searches. They allow a single person to handpick their successor with no input from anyone else. They rig the game to get their personally preferred candidate. Their reputation stops gifted leaders of integrity from ever applying. They allow friendships, family, personal likes or dislikes, being confident they can completely control the person, or any other non-evidentiary or illogical factor unrelated to performance and integrity to drive the decision. They write personal checks on the company account. Subjective biases replace objective evidence. They don't listen. In fact, they don't want to hear it. They will pick a CEO over the objections of most employees, key investors, and plenty of customers pointing to the person's total lack of qualifications for the role. In the end, both high performing and failing organizations get what they want. Recruit, hire, evaluate, and promote for performance and integrity and you will get it. Decide on your leaders like it will strongly impact the careers and lives of many good people because it will. Choose them like the very survival of the company is at stake because it is. #LeadershipLessonsWithDrSaviak

One of the most important responsibilities of leadership is assessing people fairly. This is especially important for a new leader joining an organization, taking over a team, or inheriting an existing structure. People should not be assessed based on first impressions, charisma, confidence, speaking style, personal chemistry, or informal opinions from others. These may be signals, but they are not evidence. The best approach is to assess people through a structured, evidence-based process over a defined observation period. In my view, employees should be assessed across two key dimensions: Capability and Willingness. Capability includes technical competence, quality of work, problem-solving ability, decision-making, execution, reliability, prioritization, communication, stakeholder management, and leadership potential. It should be assessed through observable evidence, such as performance data, KPIs, quality of output, delivery history, project outcomes, stakeholder feedback, meeting observations, and examples of completed work. Willingness includes ownership, accountability, engagement, responsiveness, initiative, openness to feedback, learning attitude, adaptability, collaboration, and alignment with team and organizational goals. It should also be assessed through behavior over time, not personality. A practical leadership approach is to map employees across four categories: 1) High Capability / High Willingness - Empower, recognize, retain, and give them greater responsibility. 2) High Capability / Low Willingness - Understand the root cause, clarify expectations, and address behavior directly. 3) Low Capability / High Willingness - Coach, train, support, and provide a clear development path. 4) Low Capability / Low Willingness - Set clear expectations, document evidence, provide a fair opportunity to improve, and take appropriate action if improvement does not happen. The objective is to understand where each person stands today, what support they need, and what leadership action is required. I believe the assessment process should follow three simple phases. First: Observe before concluding. During the first 30 to 60 days, leaders should listen, attend meetings, conduct one-to-one discussions, review performance history, understand role expectations, and observe how people interact and deliver. Second: Collect multiple sources of input. No employee should be assessed based on one meeting, one comment, one mistake, or one person’s opinion. A good leader triangulates information using direct observation, KPIs, past performance, peer feedback, stakeholder input, project outcomes, and behavioral examples. Third: Calibrate the assessment. Leaders should challenge their own assumptions by discussing assessments with HR, other managers, and relevant stakeholders.

We make decisions all the time, some small, some big. But how do we know we have made the right decision? The 4Cs of Excellent Decisions help you assess this upfront. Knowing whether a decision is good or bad is easy after the fact, once you know the results. The challenge is to know this at the time of making the decision. This applies to every decision, but becomes more important when the decision is • Complex • High impact • Costly • Irreversible Strategic decisions typically have all these four characteristics. This makes it particularly important to assess the quality of your strategic decisions before you actually make them. The follow criteria will help: CLEAR Is the decision clear, concrete and understood on all its facets?  Is it clear why it is made? Is it clear what the consequences are? Is it clear what it takes to implement it? CORRECT Is the underlying evidence accurate and correct? Are the assumptions leading to this decision correct? Is there sufficient qualitative or quantitative data to support the decision? Has the process for making this decision been correct? COMPLETE Are all important factors taken into account? Is the information needed to make this decision complete? Have all relevant stakeholders been involved? Have all alternatives been taken into account? CONSENSUS Is there a shared understanding of the decision and its context? Do relevant stakeholders agree on the decision made? Have all objections been carefully considered? Is it clear how to deal with those stakeholders that do not agree? These are the 4Cs of Excellent Decisions. Use them to evaluate all your important decisions. Think about your last key decision, did it fulfill all four criteria? === If you like this, you also like my The Strategic Leadership Playbook, which contains 64 tools like this with clear instructions for how to use them. Buy the book here: https://lnkd.in/eGz9AZwP #decisionmaking #leadershipgrowth #businessmanagement

Your Advisors Are Wrong 90% of The Time Here's why trusting your gut might be killing your company... And how the world's best leaders make personnel decisions that actually work. I've spent the last few years studying how companies hire, fire, and promote. Here's the uncomfortable truth: Most business leaders make personnel decisions based on FEELINGS. Not facts. And it's costing them millions. Let me show you how elite organizations do it differently: 🎯 They Build Advisory Boards, Not Yes-Men Average companies: • Hire people they "click" with • Promote based on tenure • Keep underperformers too long Elite organizations: • Create diverse advisory panels • Use data-driven assessments • Make tough calls quickly 🎮 They Play Chess, Not Checkers Most leaders think short-term: "We need someone NOW" "They seem nice" "They have experience" Top leaders think strategically: • Culture fit vs. Culture add • Future potential vs. Past performance • Team dynamics vs. Individual skills 🔍 They Follow a Proven Framework The best companies use what I call the "3D Method"... Direction: • Where's the company going? • What skills will we need? • Who can take us there? Data: • Performance metrics • Assessment results • Peer feedback Decision: • Multiple perspectives • Clear criteria • Documented rationale ⚡ They Break Traditional Rules Forget what you learned about hiring: • Interviews are mostly useless • Resume experience is overrated • First impressions are misleading Instead, focus on: • Work sample tests • Behavioral patterns • Team compatibility 🎭 They Know When to Override Advisors Here's the secret nobody talks about: Sometimes your advisors will be dead wrong. But you need them anyway. Why? Because they force you to: • Justify your decisions • Consider alternatives • Document your thinking The Truth? Making personnel decisions is an art AND a science. But most leaders treat it like a gut feeling. Want to build an elite team? Stop trusting your instincts alone. Start building systems that work. Because in today's market... The company with the best talent wins. Every. Single. Time. What are your thoughts on these?

The decision framework that transformed my leadership effectiveness: (Before: Intuition-based choices. After: Structured decision process.) Even experienced leaders make poor decisions when they lack a systematic approach. My decision-making evolution: At 26: Gut-feel decisions, inconsistent results At 32: Experience-based choices, better but still variable At 35: Framework-driven process, consistently superior outcomes Three elements that transformed my approach: 1. Pre-decision preparation → Question formulation clarity → Decision criteria definition → Information gathering protocol → Stakeholder perspective collection 2. Decision execution structure → Cognitive bias mitigation → Alternative option development → Consequence mapping → Probabilistic thinking 3. Post-decision learning → Outcome documentation → Process evaluation → Feedback integration → Decision journal maintenance Since implementing this framework: My decision quality has improved dramatically My team's confidence in leadership has strengthened Our execution alignment has increased Our learning from both successes and failures has accelerated The quality of your decisions determines the quality of your results. A systematic approach consistently outperforms intuition alone. How are you structuring your decision-making process? - Want boardroom intelligence with zero noise? Every week we share curated insights that cut through the chaos and help you make the best policy decisions: Join here: https://lnkd.in/garzxSxG LION Specialty. The Leader in Institutional Insurance. 🦁

𝟱 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻-𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 Decision-making frameworks provide leaders with structured approaches to tackle complex problems, improve team alignment, and drive better outcomes. By using these tools, leaders can enhance their decision-making process, save time, and increase the likelihood of making successful choices. Here are 5 powerful frameworks every leader should know: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘆𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 ↳ Description: Helps leaders identify the context of a situation (simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic) and choose appropriate actions. ↳ Used for: Adapting leadership style and decision-making approach based on the nature of the problem. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝗹𝗲 ↳ Description: Focuses on the "Why," "How," and "What" of decision-making, emphasising the importance of purpose. ↳ Used for: Aligning decisions with core values and organisational mission. 𝗖𝗦𝗗 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗿𝗶𝘅 ↳ Description: Organises information into Certainties, Suppositions, and Doubts. ↳ Used for: Clarifying knowledge gaps and guiding further investigation before making decisions. 𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗘/𝗜𝗖𝗘 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 ↳ Description: Prioritises options based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Ease (or Effort). ↳ Used for: Objectively evaluating and ranking multiple options or initiatives. 𝗘𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗵𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗿𝗶𝘅 ↳ Description: Categorises decisions based on importance and urgency (or impact and reversibility). ↳ Used for: Prioritising tasks and allocating appropriate time and resources to decisions. By incorporating these frameworks into your leadership toolkit, you can enhance your decision-making process, foster better team collaboration, and drive more successful outcomes for your organisation. 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂: Which of these decision-making frameworks resonates most with your leadership style, and why? Share your thoughts in the comments! #LeadershipSkills #DecisionMaking #BusinessStrategy