Give your support team more input with this decision-making framework

There are three great advantages to involving your support team – or indeed any team – in decision making:

• It gives team members a greater sense of ownership, which contributes to feeling motivated and like their work matters. 
• It offers fresh business ideas. If only senior leadership is involved in decision-making, it increases the risk of stagnation. Sourcing ideas from your support team means you’re more likely to get a more diverse set of responses.
• Your employees are an incredibly useful resource. Those on your support team (and in other customer-facing roles) will have a unique perspective on customer needs and pain points. 

This is the idea that when planning or making decisions, people can often spend more time on the small, inconsequential details than on the major issues.

The original example was of a committee working on the plans for a nuclear power plant but getting distracted by which materials to use for the staff bike shed, hence the term “bikeshedding.”

... based on the level of importance, and the level of team involvement:

• Open to team suggestions decisions: For these, open the question to the team (Slack conversations, surveys, or team meetings) to get feedback and ideas.
• Multiple-choice decisions: Leadership asks for input on a few options via polls in Slack or Google Forms. 
• Reversible decisions: In these situations, the team trials the proposed solution gives feedback, and you have the opportunity to address issues or reverse back to the previous state if needed.
• Executive, strategic decisions: These decisions aren’t open for discussion. In cases like these, explaining the “why” behind the decision is key, so communication is our main priority.