Judgement’s Role in Leadership
Part of leading a Customer Success team is also about being a good leader. So, from time to time, I will also share some of my learnings and takeaways from my own leadership development. Whether you’re a seasoned manager or you just became a manager for the first time, there will be some gems here for you! You can see the last installment here: Leadership and Ownership
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As leaders, we must make judgement calls on a regular basis — if not every day. However, “making the right call” or even just “making a call” isn’t easy and can be uncomfortable especially for young leaders. Furthermore, the reality is that we need to make the right call often — if not almost always — for the sake of our teams and the entire company; but how is this even possible when there are so many things going on?
So, for this installment of the management reflection series, I wanted to discuss more about what is “judgement” and how we as leaders can prepare ourselves to make good judgement calls. Furthermore, in the discussion questions, we will also discuss how we can spread these learnings/mindset to our teams as well so that they can also make good judgement calls.
In light of all of the things that are going on, I’ve kept it to two great articles this time around to help us dive into this topic more; the first covers what is judgement and its phases, while the second one covers the mindset/qualities that we need to possess to help foster a culture of good judgement.
Discussion/Reflection Questions
- Think about a time in the past 6 months when you had to make a judgement call (good or bad) for your team. Tell us about that call in the context of preparation, decision, and execution (or perhaps lack thereof).
- How can we help ourselves, each other, and our team to make judgement calls well?
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Making Judgment Calls
https://hbr.org/2007/10/making-judgment-calls
- Talks about how judgement is the combination of vision and strategy and how good leadership judgement can set the tone for a better brand/culture
- “A judgment that is not successfully executed is a failed judgment no matter how smart the strategy.”
- It goes over the three phases of judgement: preparation, decision, and execution; filled with stories from both successful and failed moments from very high-profiled business leaders
- For those that don’t want the cool stories; this article is shorter and hits on similar points: https://www.lollydaskal.com/leadership/leadership-judgments/
Four Big Ways Leaders Exercise Good Judgment
https://www.forbes.com/2010/03/31/ceo-judgement-ego-leadership-managing-ccl.html#23b8a734198c
- This goes deeper into not only what good judgement can achieve, but the leadership qualities that we need to help us exercise good judgement
