What do executives do, anyway?

(…) the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.That’s all.Not to decide. Not to break ties. Not to set strategy. Not to be the expert on every, or any topic. Just to sit in the room while the right people make good decisions in alignment with their values. And if they do, to endorse it. And if they don’t, to send them back to try again.

If the decision is already made before the meeting, why do we need the meeting? Because the right decision might not happen without the existence of that meeting. The executive gives formal weight to a major decision. The executive holds the two disagreeing leads responsible: they must figure out not what’s best for them, but what’s best for the company.

If the executive makes their own decisions and forces them downstream: the executive doesn’t have enough information to make good decisions in detail, so the decision won’t be optimal. And there won’t be much buy-in from people downstream 

If the executive chooses not to be involved in conflicts that are “not important enough; you figure it out”: political power games ensue. Whoever can force their way will win, killing morale

If the executive accepts escalations, then tries to make a tie-breaker decision: non-optimal decisions get made, because again the executive is, out of the three people, the least qualified to decide

If the executive brings in more people to discuss the issue: this is something the two leads should have done already. If they didn’t, they are failing at their job, and need to learn how to do it better. Step one is the executive sends them a message: “Go back. Include these additional people/groups in your decision. Come back when you’ve thought it through properly.”

in a large organization, executives don’t set strategy. Not even the CEO sets strategy. Why? Because it’s an illusion to believe you can enforce a strategy. (…) if the person at the top is trying to “set a strategy” by making operational decisions, those decisions will be based on insufficient facts, because there are simply far too many facts for one person. That means, if your decisions should be based on facts, you will make worse decisions than your subordinates.

What executives need to do is come up with organizational values that indirectly result in the strategy they want. (…) If one of your values is to make the tools that run faster and smoother, your employees will probably make less bloatware and you’ll probably hire different employees than if your values are to scale fast and capture the most customers in the shortest time.

If your old strategy is failing, you can’t fix the company by just declaring a new strategy. You do it by declaring new values. Then you enforce those values. And that’s going to make a lot of people very upset. (If you do this too often, you deserve what you get.)