Deciding How to Decide

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(SPEECH) WAYNE RIVERS: Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about deciding how to decide. That sounds foolish, but it used to come up more often than it does now. I think we're with a better group of contractors that understand how to decide, but that was a real thing for me 10, 15 years ago, companies where decisions just didn't get made. I'm going to go over some of the reasons why that happens. So this comes from my friend Donald Cooper's newsletter. How are decisions made in your business? How are various levels and types of decisions made in your business, and is the current way the best way? This is an important question to spend time thinking about and discussing. There are some key decisions that need to be mulled over and thoughtfully considered, but every day there are hundreds of decisions that need to be made quickly or the business grinds to a halt. But how decisions are made is something that most businesses don't think about, examine, and question, and I think he's right.

Now what about this is important to you? He's right. A hundred decisions in a construction company with all the projects going on, it could be a thousand little decisions that have to be made every day to keep things moving along. So there are some ways to make these decisions and to decide how to decide, and there's some ways that are less effective. So what, according to Donald Cooper and a little bit for me, what are the typical styles of decision-making?

Number one, authoritarian decision-making. One person makes every decision and, oh, whoa, whoa to the people who make a decision without clearing it with that authoritarian boss figure first. That's tough. We don't see that much anymore. That used to be very prevalent, I guess. When we were working with founders and smaller construction companies, that tended to be more prevalent. Companies that have that decision-making style can't grow beyond a certain thing because one person's span of control is just not that big. So authoritarian control can work really well up to a point, and then you hit that ceiling of complexity.

Number two, decisions get made but there's no execution because of unclear communications, lack of accountability, et cetera, et cetera. I've been in meetings, and this has been fairly recently, and we have good discussions, and then we come to the conclusion and everybody's feeling pretty good, and I've asked the question, "What did we decide?" And then everybody has to go back and think, "Oh, what did we decide to do?" Because if you go to a meeting, if you invest 30 minutes or 15 minutes or two hours of your time in a meeting, and you think you covered some ground, but nobody walks out of there with to-dos, "I've got to do this, he's got to do that, she's got to do a third thing," and you want those to-dos to have potentially budgets if that's necessary, but you want them to have timely execution standards. So you want to know who, what, how much, when, et cetera, et cetera. Without all that, you didn't make a decision at all. Okay?

Number three, man, analysis paralysis. Just, oh, we need more information, we can't really decide yet, we need this, we need that, the other. I remember hearing a story about, and I'm sure this is apocryphal, but a guy leaves his house to go to work in the morning and he sits at the end of the driveway, and his spouse comes out and says, "What are you doing? You've been sitting here for 10 minutes." He says, "I'm waiting for all the lights on the way to work to be green." You can see why that apocryphal story makes sense. These decisions need to get made on construction sites and construction boardrooms, in AR and AP. Decisions need to get made every day and continuing to gather more and more and more and more information, at some point... in fact, Dan Sullivan says, "When you've got 80% of what you think you need, make the decision then. The extra 20% is not going to make that much difference." And if you're a nimble organization and you're an intelligent and a learning organization and you did make a mistake, which we all do, you can overcome it.

Number four, discussions, especially in family businesses which are fraught with emotion and even politics, so decisions are at best delayed if they get made at all. This is a common thing in family businesses to this day where they say. "We make decisions by consensus," and what they mean is we make decisions unanimously. So that means that any one person in the family business system can veto almost any decision the company makes. This happens to this very day, 2026, in the construction industry. I've seen it recently in fact. Now you think about that. We've got six stakeholders, let's say, in the family business, and five agree that we need to do something, one does not. The one person carries the day because the family wants what? Harmony, and they fear that if they displease this one person, they will have disharmony. Well, guess what? They've already got disharmony because five people think we need to go in this direction, one person says, no, another direction, or not yet, or whatever it is. This emotional decision-making is so counterproductive, and the morbid desire almost for excessive family harmony holds so many contractors back.

Number five, now we're getting to a couple of solid decision-making processes here. Number five, a management committee, executive committee, call it what you want, which openly and respectfully discusses and analyzes issues. They make decisions by vote if necessary. They have implementation plans. They've got details, the who, when, what, why, how much, et cetera, et cetera. All that's built in and they're accountable for the decisions that they make and the execution which is awfully important.

And number six, routine decisions get made at the lowest possible level of the organization. If your AR person can make a decision that you don't have to make, let them do it. If they make those decisions carefully and reliably over time, wonderful. If they don't, you probably have the wrong person. But push those decisions down into the organization. I'm a big believer in bottom up. I think so many construction companies are populated by so many talented people that lots and lots and lots of decisions can get pushed down in the organization. At our place, there are very few decisions I have to make because we have great people throughout already making those decisions. So once in a while something will come up and it'll be a challenge and they say, "Wayne, we really need you to weigh in on this," but that almost never happens which is a great thing. That's where you want to be.

Okay. Decide how you want to decide. Let me know your comments, [email protected]. This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.

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On screen text, Wayne Rivers, Performance Construction Advisors

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