November 5, 2025 • 15 mins
This episode covers practical ways for a Chief of Staff to reduce decision fatigue for their principal and executive team, like removing low-value tasks from their plate and organizing clear, concise email options for faster decisions. Emily shares real examples, such as giving decision options in an “A, B, C” format and using thresholds for approvals, to keep leaders focused on high-impact choices. The discussion also highlights ways for Chiefs of Staff to streamline their own decision-making by automating data collection and tightening up decision frameworks.
Links Mentioned:
Free Resources:
- Strategic Planning Checklist
- Chief of Staff Skills Assessment Checklist
- A Day in the Life of a Chief of Staff
- Chief of Staff Toolkit
Get in Touch With Emily:
- Connect on LinkedIn
- Follow on YouTube
- Learn more about coaching
- Sign up for the newsletter
- Clarity Call with Emily
Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
00:55 Clearing the Principal's Plate
01:57 Email Communication Tips
05:08 Dialogue with Your Principal
06:27 Optimizing Executive Team Decisions
07:19 Setting Decision Thresholds
09:41 Automating Data for Decision Making
12:19 Making Binary Decisions
13:51 Final Takeaways on Decision Fatigue
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
emily-sander_3_10-01-2025_12 (00:25):
As chief of Staff, one of the most
valuable things you can do is toprotect your principal and your
team from decision fatigue.
So if your principal is spendingan inordinate amount of time on
low value choices, that's timeand energy being stolen from
strategic high level decisionsthat move the needle.
(00:45):
So your job is to clear thedecks and make sure they're
spending the vast majority oftheir time, if not all of their
time.
In this high quality decisionmode.
All right.
Let's talk about principles fora second.
What can you remove from theirplate entirely?
What should they not even betouching?
What should they not even beaware of?
(01:06):
And there's obviously fine linesand nuances between, actually
they should be informed aboutthese types of things, but there
should be no decision around itversus like, they don't even
need to know about that.
Why are we expending any oftheir energy and mental
bandwidth on that?
Just remove that thing entirely.
So it could be remove a decisionor just remove that thing
entirely.
(01:26):
It gets'em all riled up for noreason and the team has it, or
whatever it is.
So what can be removed fromtheir plate altogether?
Next, what decisions do theyneed to actually make and how
can you tee them up mosteffectively?
How can you present them?
And I literally think of like a,like a tee.
Like a tee ball.
Like when you're baseball, youput the ball on the tee or maybe
golf, or you put the ball againon the tee and you set it up so
(01:49):
a person can swing away at it.
That's your job As chief ofstaff, tee up this decision.
For your principle, and that canbe done in a myriad of ways.
Here's a small example, but a,uh, it's a small but.
Powerful example that I use withmy principal is when I would
send him emails, sometimes theseemails would have a decision in
them and I would briefly, verybriefly recap the situation.
(02:14):
And if he was already aware ofthis situation, I literally
could put one word or like thephrase of like, you know, here's
the context.
Here's, here's what we'retalking about.
Here's the universe we're livingin.
Out of all the 47 things youhave, uh, remember this
strategic partner negotiation.
And that could be like theopening if it was something that
he wasn't as aware of, or maybehe needed a refresher or maybe
(02:35):
there was some new informationthat came to light, or maybe
this was a brand new topic, thatopening could be a little bit
longer and more in depth, but itwas not.
Pages and pages of scroll andscroll, and there is no
paragraph breaks in this thing.
It was a crisp, neat, concise,easy to consume and understand.
Here's out of all the thingsyou're doing, here's what I'm
(02:56):
talking about, and here's thecontext that's relevant for you.
A lot of people just throw inevery single data point
information, and he said this,and they said this, and here's
this thing and here's thecontext and here's the
exception, and here's this datapoint, and here's the source
material.
Here's the color.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Just strip out everything exceptfor the bare essentials.
What is relevant for thiscommunication and this decision
(03:18):
to be made?
And then, and then, and he lovedthis by the way.
I would put literally likeoptions or next steps, A, B, C,
D.
Like a multiple choice questionand answer.
And so he could run through thatand we got to such a point where
we could, we had a mind meldgoing on.
I could almost, with a hundredpercent certainty, predict what
(03:41):
questions he would ask, whatinformation he would want.
So I would put that in the topparagraph or top sentence, and
then the different options wehad going forward.
And I would.
Be talking to the teams.
I would be thinking through thatmyself before he ever got to it,
and I would put these options ornext steps, option A, option B,
option C.
These could be words.
(04:02):
These might be one sentence veryshort.
It's like a multiple choice qand a, and sometimes he would
literally reply to my email withb.
I would know what to do with it.
But that was teeing up adecision that was, by the way,
an email, not a series ofmeetings, and we just, and he
was decisive and I would executethat decision.
(04:23):
Small note here, I would alwayshave the option of other, so I
wasn't trying to jam him, jamhim into like, there's only
these three or four or fiveoptions.
There was always other where hewould be like, do it this way,
or think about it this way, or Ineed more information on this.
So he might ask, like I readyour.
Little short paragraph up top.
Uh, I'm curious about this.
Did we ask him this?
(04:44):
And so he might respond withthat, and I would go get that
reply on that email and he'd belike, okay, go with option C.
So that's kind of a shorthand,but that's an example of teeing
up a decision where they don'thave to like go running around
and have, you know, all theseconversations.
You've already done that andyou've teed up the relevant
information.
You can do that in a whole bunchof different ways, but that's
just an example of teeing up therelevant information for your
(05:05):
principal to make a gooddecision.
Okay.
The next thing to do with yourprinciple is have this
conversation or have thisdialogue Around.
Look, part of my job is to makesure your decision making
capital is being spent on thehighest impact calls.
On the highest impact decisions.
There are so many decisions thatonly the CEO can make, and if
(05:27):
you have a different kind ofprinciple, only the CRO, the
CTO, the CHRO, whatever it is,their decisions only they can
make.
Given their role.
So they need to be focused onthose types of things.
They need to be focused onthings that move the needle, not
the minutia, not thedistractions, get that off their
plate, but have thatconversation or an, an ongoing
(05:48):
conversations about that andreally make that part of, my job
is to.
Keep you here and playing inthis space.
And hopefully they're gonna belike, yeah, like that's where I
wanna play as well.
Tell me if I'm getting out ofbounds and, and, and there can
be banter and, and pushbackaround what that looks like.
Actually, Emily, I need to be inthose.
(06:09):
Don't, don't box me out of that.
I need to be in thosediscussions.
Okay.
Like, do you need to be in thoseor can I, Nope.
I need to be in those.
All right, cool.
Have those discussions.
But, but keep it, keep it soboth of you are pointing at the
same thing.
I want you principle.
In the best spot to be makingthese high impact calls Okay,
next executive team.
So running a similar process foryour entire executive team as
(06:33):
chief of staff.
You can sit there and literally,I would go through the roster of
my exec team and I would say,okay, what is she got on her
plate?
What does he have on his plate?
What are items where our CFO isspending time on unnecessary
approvals?
She's sitting there and she'sgetting these pings and she's
getting these slacks, andsomeone else can approve that,
(06:53):
that level of that amount orthat type of decision should be
delegated to someone else who isactually closer to the
information and is perfectlycapable of making that decision
and might be in better positionto make that decision.
So what unnecessary things orthese like micro, micro
decisions, micro calls arebeing.
Put on all of your executiveleadership team's plates, and
(07:16):
can you remove those?
How can you best remove those?
The other kind of nuance thinghere with the exec team is where
are the thresholds?
So for instance, I justmentioned the CFO.
So a pretty straightforwardthreshold would be anything
below this amount of money canbe approved by VPs and this
amount of money by directors andthis amount of money by
managers.
(07:36):
Those were like clear Tthresholds of decision making.
You can apply that sameprinciple to other types of
decisions.
Hey.
With, um, tier one customers,our strategic enterprise
customers, we're gonna need asenior account manager to make
these types of decisions.
Anything else a accountexecutive can make or a
(07:57):
solutions engineer can make, orwhatever you might have those
types of designations, it mightbe, look, if this is gonna
impact these two initiatives,anything that impacts.
The direction of these twoinitiatives and the direction
we're going with these has to berun through the chief of staff,
whatever it is, but make surethat those thresholds are as
clear as possible.
(08:18):
Are there always, or most likelygonna be some like, uh, it's
just based on the scenario, caseby case.
Sure.
And then make sure, like, let's,let's just have that
conversation and hopefully it'sjust not a big deal.
People have each other's back.
Let's do a quick call.
Let's do a quick slack just totouch base.
Cool.
Cool.
But on everything that you canjust have these general
guidelines that people can gooff of and hopefully they're not
(08:42):
going to.
Nitpick to the letter and to theminutiae of like, you didn't say
it like this, so therefore Ithought I could do it.
Hopefully it's in the spirit oftake the gist of this threshold.
Take the spirit or the way thatit is intended and you kind of
can pick up what I'm like, yeah,yeah.
For this kind of stuff.
Emily, you want us to check inwith you?
Yes, exactly.
For this kind of stuff.
(09:02):
We got it.
Yep.
Just run with that.
Cool.
So have those types ofdiscussions and expectation
setting and rechecking in withpeople on those ongoing items.
Okay.
And finally, you wanna removedecision fatigue from yourself
As chief of staff, that's a big,big deal.
So you've got things flying fromevery direction across the
business at you, and you'vegotta make some decisions too.
(09:23):
Again, you wanna be making highquality decisions in strategic
areas.
Your job is not to tally up asmany decisions as you can make
in a day.
It's No, no, no, no.
Where should I be placing myfocus and placing intentionally,
placing my energy to makedecisions?
I think you can proactively teeup things like context and data
(09:46):
for yourself, so that might beokay.
I always have to make a call on,I don't know this every month or
this every week or whatever.
It's okay.
I always will wanna know this,this, and this.
Can I automate that data from asystem?
So every time I have to makethat decision, I always have
that at hand.
Can I, work with a team one timeto stand up a automated poll
(10:08):
that just gets like, I don'tknow, a Salesforce report sent
to me, to my inbox every Fridaymorning.
So I have it right there whenI'm trying to make that
decision.
Can I automate or work with.
Team members that I might haveon my team or I'm working with
collaboratively on can we tee upthe trade-offs?
So understanding as much bigpicture context as I can.
(10:32):
Before as I'm making thatdecision.
So it could be okay, like, letme use account managers again.
The account managers are gonnahave the closest information on
the strategic book of business,and I want this type of
information from last week whenI'm making this decision.
So I'm gonna ask them to eithersend me.
Some anecdotal information onemail and have it to me by
(10:53):
Friday morning, or I'm going tosay, Hey, can you just keep tabs
on this kind of stuff?
And as you're going through yourregular cadence of weekly
check-ins with your customers inthis Salesforce field, can you
make sure to put any notes.
Along those lines.
You're doing that.
Anyway, you should be trackingthis stuff anyway, but just make
(11:13):
sure you have this slant onstuff.
'cause I'm gonna be pulling fromthis field and I'm gonna be
looking for that stuff to makethese kinds of decisions on
Friday mornings.
So you collect all those datafeeds and then you have the
information you want or need.
Right there you have some of thetrade off information.
Big picture.
Okay.
If we do this, that customermight be at risk.
Okay, this one's looking betternow.
(11:35):
Okay, so maybe that's adifferent decision this week.
And then you also have, if youwant recommendations from
people.
So you can suck inrecommendations, trade-offs from
different per perspectivesaround the organization.
And you can collect them andtake them all together and say,
okay.
Big picture, cross department,connecting all the dots.
(11:56):
I'm taking what other people areseeing in their specific areas
and they're giving me theiropinion and their
recommendation, and now overall,I need to either make a decision
on that or possibly make arecommendation to my principal
based on that information.
But teeing all that up foryourself and being aware of all
of those elements, I think is areally good exercise for a chief
(12:18):
of staff to go through.
And another thing that goesalong with that, actually really
quick, the example that poppedinto my head is, can you make it
binary, not open-ended.
So can you make it Yes.
No, go stop.
Green red.
Versus what do you think aboutthis?
Or what are your kind ofrecommendations and pros and
cons and puts and takes here.
(12:40):
So if you can make it like boom,boom, that also helps with
decision fatigue.
'cause part of it is quantityand volume.
Yes.
But part of, part of volume islike the weight of the thing,
right?
It's a weighty decision.
That's a big decision.
Okay.
Are we gonna have to lay offpeople?
How many are we gonna shut downthis product line?
Are we going to put all ourchips on the table with budget
(13:01):
on here, and hopefully in 18months we have this thing stood
up and ready to go and there'smarket fit.
Like those are big, weightydecisions.
So if you can say some of those.
Why we as leaders and executiveget paid the big bucks to make
those big, weighty, meatydecisions.
And part of it is getting thedecisions that that don't have
(13:24):
to be open-ended into a as tighta compartment as they can be.
So you wanna make those liketight decisions, okay?
Yes.
No.
If, and you can do this for allthe, all the parties we talked
about for your principal, canyou make those tighter decisions
for your exec team?
Can you do that for yourself?
Can you do that?
So I would have a think about,there's the, the quantity of
(13:45):
decisions, and then there's theweight and the heft of a
decision.
So think about those elements aswell.
Alright, so takeaways we'vetalked about.
At the end of the day, reducingdecision fatigue isn't about
the, isn't just about the amountof decisions you make.
It's about it's, it's aboutpreventing the wrong people from
making the wrong decisions ormaking sure the right people
(14:08):
make the right decisions.
You know what I mean?
It's also around filtering,framing, and focusing.
Boom, three F's, alliteration.
Here we go.
Filtering, framing, andfocusing.
Those were good.
So we're gonna filter.
Decisions based on who's makingthat, like what's the
appropriate decision, what'srelevant for them to make, what
can only they do?
(14:28):
We are framing that, so we'regiving context, we're teeing it
up, we're framing it in the mosthelpful and accurate manner, and
we're focusing people andourselves on what we should be
focused on.
So if you go through some ofthose, some of the elements and
considerations we've talkedabout in this episode, I really
think as chief of staff, one ofyour biggest value adds is
(14:48):
helping your principal and yourteam with decision fatigue.
Because if they can be makingfewer higher quality decisions,
the team, the company, thecustomers will just run better.
All right, with that, I'll catchyou next week on leveraging
leadership.
As chief of Staff, one of the most
valuable things you can do is toprotect your principal and your
team from decision fatigue.
So if your principal is spendingan inordinate amount of time on
low value choices, that's timeand energy being stolen from
strategic high level decisionsthat move the needle.
(00:45):
So your job is to clear thedecks and make sure they're
spending the vast majority oftheir time, if not all of their
time.
In this high quality decisionmode.
All right.
Let's talk about principles fora second.
What can you remove from theirplate entirely?
What should they not even betouching?
What should they not even beaware of?
(01:06):
And there's obviously fine linesand nuances between, actually
they should be informed aboutthese types of things, but there
should be no decision around itversus like, they don't even
need to know about that.
Why are we expending any oftheir energy and mental
bandwidth on that?
Just remove that thing entirely.
So it could be remove a decisionor just remove that thing
entirely.
(01:26):
It gets'em all riled up for noreason and the team has it, or
whatever it is.
So what can be removed fromtheir plate altogether?
Next, what decisions do theyneed to actually make and how
can you tee them up mosteffectively?
How can you present them?
And I literally think of like a,like a tee.
Like a tee ball.
Like when you're baseball, youput the ball on the tee or maybe
golf, or you put the ball againon the tee and you set it up so
(01:49):
a person can swing away at it.
That's your job As chief ofstaff, tee up this decision.
For your principle, and that canbe done in a myriad of ways.
Here's a small example, but a,uh, it's a small but.
Powerful example that I use withmy principal is when I would
send him emails, sometimes theseemails would have a decision in
them and I would briefly, verybriefly recap the situation.
(02:14):
And if he was already aware ofthis situation, I literally
could put one word or like thephrase of like, you know, here's
the context.
Here's, here's what we'retalking about.
Here's the universe we're livingin.
Out of all the 47 things youhave, uh, remember this
strategic partner negotiation.
And that could be like theopening if it was something that
he wasn't as aware of, or maybehe needed a refresher or maybe
(02:35):
there was some new informationthat came to light, or maybe
this was a brand new topic, thatopening could be a little bit
longer and more in depth, but itwas not.
Pages and pages of scroll andscroll, and there is no
paragraph breaks in this thing.
It was a crisp, neat, concise,easy to consume and understand.
Here's out of all the thingsyou're doing, here's what I'm
(02:56):
talking about, and here's thecontext that's relevant for you.
A lot of people just throw inevery single data point
information, and he said this,and they said this, and here's
this thing and here's thecontext and here's the
exception, and here's this datapoint, and here's the source
material.
Here's the color.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Just strip out everything exceptfor the bare essentials.
What is relevant for thiscommunication and this decision
(03:18):
to be made?
And then, and then, and he lovedthis by the way.
I would put literally likeoptions or next steps, A, B, C,
D.
Like a multiple choice questionand answer.
And so he could run through thatand we got to such a point where
we could, we had a mind meldgoing on.
I could almost, with a hundredpercent certainty, predict what
(03:41):
questions he would ask, whatinformation he would want.
So I would put that in the topparagraph or top sentence, and
then the different options wehad going forward.
And I would.
Be talking to the teams.
I would be thinking through thatmyself before he ever got to it,
and I would put these options ornext steps, option A, option B,
option C.
These could be words.
(04:02):
These might be one sentence veryshort.
It's like a multiple choice qand a, and sometimes he would
literally reply to my email withb.
I would know what to do with it.
But that was teeing up adecision that was, by the way,
an email, not a series ofmeetings, and we just, and he
was decisive and I would executethat decision.
(04:23):
Small note here, I would alwayshave the option of other, so I
wasn't trying to jam him, jamhim into like, there's only
these three or four or fiveoptions.
There was always other where hewould be like, do it this way,
or think about it this way, or Ineed more information on this.
So he might ask, like I readyour.
Little short paragraph up top.
Uh, I'm curious about this.
Did we ask him this?
(04:44):
And so he might respond withthat, and I would go get that
reply on that email and he'd belike, okay, go with option C.
So that's kind of a shorthand,but that's an example of teeing
up a decision where they don'thave to like go running around
and have, you know, all theseconversations.
You've already done that andyou've teed up the relevant
information.
You can do that in a whole bunchof different ways, but that's
just an example of teeing up therelevant information for your
(05:05):
principal to make a gooddecision.
Okay.
The next thing to do with yourprinciple is have this
conversation or have thisdialogue Around.
Look, part of my job is to makesure your decision making
capital is being spent on thehighest impact calls.
On the highest impact decisions.
There are so many decisions thatonly the CEO can make, and if
(05:27):
you have a different kind ofprinciple, only the CRO, the
CTO, the CHRO, whatever it is,their decisions only they can
make.
Given their role.
So they need to be focused onthose types of things.
They need to be focused onthings that move the needle, not
the minutia, not thedistractions, get that off their
plate, but have thatconversation or an, an ongoing
(05:48):
conversations about that andreally make that part of, my job
is to.
Keep you here and playing inthis space.
And hopefully they're gonna belike, yeah, like that's where I
wanna play as well.
Tell me if I'm getting out ofbounds and, and, and there can
be banter and, and pushbackaround what that looks like.
Actually, Emily, I need to be inthose.
(06:09):
Don't, don't box me out of that.
I need to be in thosediscussions.
Okay.
Like, do you need to be in thoseor can I, Nope.
I need to be in those.
All right, cool.
Have those discussions.
But, but keep it, keep it soboth of you are pointing at the
same thing.
I want you principle.
In the best spot to be makingthese high impact calls Okay,
next executive team.
So running a similar process foryour entire executive team as
(06:33):
chief of staff.
You can sit there and literally,I would go through the roster of
my exec team and I would say,okay, what is she got on her
plate?
What does he have on his plate?
What are items where our CFO isspending time on unnecessary
approvals?
She's sitting there and she'sgetting these pings and she's
getting these slacks, andsomeone else can approve that,
(06:53):
that level of that amount orthat type of decision should be
delegated to someone else who isactually closer to the
information and is perfectlycapable of making that decision
and might be in better positionto make that decision.
So what unnecessary things orthese like micro, micro
decisions, micro calls arebeing.
Put on all of your executiveleadership team's plates, and
(07:16):
can you remove those?
How can you best remove those?
The other kind of nuance thinghere with the exec team is where
are the thresholds?
So for instance, I justmentioned the CFO.
So a pretty straightforwardthreshold would be anything
below this amount of money canbe approved by VPs and this
amount of money by directors andthis amount of money by
managers.
(07:36):
Those were like clear Tthresholds of decision making.
You can apply that sameprinciple to other types of
decisions.
Hey.
With, um, tier one customers,our strategic enterprise
customers, we're gonna need asenior account manager to make
these types of decisions.
Anything else a accountexecutive can make or a
(07:57):
solutions engineer can make, orwhatever you might have those
types of designations, it mightbe, look, if this is gonna
impact these two initiatives,anything that impacts.
The direction of these twoinitiatives and the direction
we're going with these has to berun through the chief of staff,
whatever it is, but make surethat those thresholds are as
clear as possible.
(08:18):
Are there always, or most likelygonna be some like, uh, it's
just based on the scenario, caseby case.
Sure.
And then make sure, like, let's,let's just have that
conversation and hopefully it'sjust not a big deal.
People have each other's back.
Let's do a quick call.
Let's do a quick slack just totouch base.
Cool.
Cool.
But on everything that you canjust have these general
guidelines that people can gooff of and hopefully they're not
(08:42):
going to.
Nitpick to the letter and to theminutiae of like, you didn't say
it like this, so therefore Ithought I could do it.
Hopefully it's in the spirit oftake the gist of this threshold.
Take the spirit or the way thatit is intended and you kind of
can pick up what I'm like, yeah,yeah.
For this kind of stuff.
Emily, you want us to check inwith you?
Yes, exactly.
For this kind of stuff.
(09:02):
We got it.
Yep.
Just run with that.
Cool.
So have those types ofdiscussions and expectation
setting and rechecking in withpeople on those ongoing items.
Okay.
And finally, you wanna removedecision fatigue from yourself
As chief of staff, that's a big,big deal.
So you've got things flying fromevery direction across the
business at you, and you'vegotta make some decisions too.
(09:23):
Again, you wanna be making highquality decisions in strategic
areas.
Your job is not to tally up asmany decisions as you can make
in a day.
It's No, no, no, no.
Where should I be placing myfocus and placing intentionally,
placing my energy to makedecisions?
I think you can proactively teeup things like context and data
(09:46):
for yourself, so that might beokay.
I always have to make a call on,I don't know this every month or
this every week or whatever.
It's okay.
I always will wanna know this,this, and this.
Can I automate that data from asystem?
So every time I have to makethat decision, I always have
that at hand.
Can I, work with a team one timeto stand up a automated poll
(10:08):
that just gets like, I don'tknow, a Salesforce report sent
to me, to my inbox every Fridaymorning.
So I have it right there whenI'm trying to make that
decision.
Can I automate or work with.
Team members that I might haveon my team or I'm working with
collaboratively on can we tee upthe trade-offs?
So understanding as much bigpicture context as I can.
(10:32):
Before as I'm making thatdecision.
So it could be okay, like, letme use account managers again.
The account managers are gonnahave the closest information on
the strategic book of business,and I want this type of
information from last week whenI'm making this decision.
So I'm gonna ask them to eithersend me.
Some anecdotal information onemail and have it to me by
(10:53):
Friday morning, or I'm going tosay, Hey, can you just keep tabs
on this kind of stuff?
And as you're going through yourregular cadence of weekly
check-ins with your customers inthis Salesforce field, can you
make sure to put any notes.
Along those lines.
You're doing that.
Anyway, you should be trackingthis stuff anyway, but just make
(11:13):
sure you have this slant onstuff.
'cause I'm gonna be pulling fromthis field and I'm gonna be
looking for that stuff to makethese kinds of decisions on
Friday mornings.
So you collect all those datafeeds and then you have the
information you want or need.
Right there you have some of thetrade off information.
Big picture.
Okay.
If we do this, that customermight be at risk.
Okay, this one's looking betternow.
(11:35):
Okay, so maybe that's adifferent decision this week.
And then you also have, if youwant recommendations from
people.
So you can suck inrecommendations, trade-offs from
different per perspectivesaround the organization.
And you can collect them andtake them all together and say,
okay.
Big picture, cross department,connecting all the dots.
(11:56):
I'm taking what other people areseeing in their specific areas
and they're giving me theiropinion and their
recommendation, and now overall,I need to either make a decision
on that or possibly make arecommendation to my principal
based on that information.
But teeing all that up foryourself and being aware of all
of those elements, I think is areally good exercise for a chief
(12:18):
of staff to go through.
And another thing that goesalong with that, actually really
quick, the example that poppedinto my head is, can you make it
binary, not open-ended.
So can you make it Yes.
No, go stop.
Green red.
Versus what do you think aboutthis?
Or what are your kind ofrecommendations and pros and
cons and puts and takes here.
(12:40):
So if you can make it like boom,boom, that also helps with
decision fatigue.
'cause part of it is quantityand volume.
Yes.
But part of, part of volume islike the weight of the thing,
right?
It's a weighty decision.
That's a big decision.
Okay.
Are we gonna have to lay offpeople?
How many are we gonna shut downthis product line?
Are we going to put all ourchips on the table with budget
(13:01):
on here, and hopefully in 18months we have this thing stood
up and ready to go and there'smarket fit.
Like those are big, weightydecisions.
So if you can say some of those.
Why we as leaders and executiveget paid the big bucks to make
those big, weighty, meatydecisions.
And part of it is getting thedecisions that that don't have
(13:24):
to be open-ended into a as tighta compartment as they can be.
So you wanna make those liketight decisions, okay?
Yes.
No.
If, and you can do this for allthe, all the parties we talked
about for your principal, canyou make those tighter decisions
for your exec team?
Can you do that for yourself?
Can you do that?
So I would have a think about,there's the, the quantity of
(13:45):
decisions, and then there's theweight and the heft of a
decision.
So think about those elements aswell.
Alright, so takeaways we'vetalked about.
At the end of the day, reducingdecision fatigue isn't about
the, isn't just about the amountof decisions you make.
It's about it's, it's aboutpreventing the wrong people from
making the wrong decisions ormaking sure the right people
(14:08):
make the right decisions.
You know what I mean?
It's also around filtering,framing, and focusing.
Boom, three F's, alliteration.
Here we go.
Filtering, framing, andfocusing.
Those were good.
So we're gonna filter.
Decisions based on who's makingthat, like what's the
appropriate decision, what'srelevant for them to make, what
can only they do?
(14:28):
We are framing that, so we'regiving context, we're teeing it
up, we're framing it in the mosthelpful and accurate manner, and
we're focusing people andourselves on what we should be
focused on.
So if you go through some ofthose, some of the elements and
considerations we've talkedabout in this episode, I really
think as chief of staff, one ofyour biggest value adds is
(14:48):
helping your principal and yourteam with decision fatigue.
Because if they can be makingfewer higher quality decisions,
the team, the company, thecustomers will just run better.
All right, with that, I'll catchyou next week on leveraging
leadership.
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