97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know

Chapter 44. How to Share Decisions for Strong Execution

Katie Womersley

There’s a lot of great research on how to make good decisions, more decisions, and faster decisions. But as a manager, getting the decisions made (well, fast, and by the appropriate people) is just the first step. You also need to make sure that these decisions are acted upon. This means that they need to be clearly understood, shared with the proper people, and can be easily referenced.

Being intentional about sharing decisions increases the quality of your team’s decision making and builds stronger alignment across your team. Clearly communicating decisions is vital for a team to execute those decisions, yet many leaders struggle to do this effectively. Following are four methods that you can consider to help you sharpen your communications with your team:

1. Clarify the decision

To make and communicate decisions effectively, you need a very clear statement of what the decision is. Don’t skip this step!

If you’ve ever been in a meeting and thought, “Wait…what are we deciding?” everyone’s time is getting wasted. These meetings are worse than pointless: you are running the risk of everyone walking away with a different takeaway, having heard whatever it was that they wanted to hear. After this type of meeting, each person is then also likely to walk away mistakenly thinking that everyone else also supports ...