We live in a global, incredibly complex and fast paced world. In most organizations of bigger than small size you can see the complexity of interaction increasing with every new employee, every new product and every new customer. If you are a manager in such environment you may sooner or later find yourself in a position that your decisions are actually not yours to make. Or at least, you feel that way.

You can’t just add a new benefit for your team, you need to talk to HR and finance teams. You cannot just add a feature to your product, you need to talk to product management, marketing, sales, and customers. You cannot just set your own working hours as they depend on when the rest of your team or your customers are around.

There are so many constrains that you feel you are no longer a manager but just a proxy for decisions made by someone else. Guess what, you and only you are responsible for this! You are responsible for your own actions and more importantly you are responsible for your own feelings.

To make things worse, your feelings, words and actions have a direct impact on your team. If you get to the habit of blaming others for your inability to make things happen it will reflect on the team spirit. “He doesn’t have the power to make decisions.” “Everything needs to be decided in HQ.” “We told them this won’t work and they don’t listen.” “Customers have no clue what they want.” Before you know it you have a culture of “us against them”, with “them” being another team, another department, location, or even customers.

So what can you do to change things and to make sure you and your team don’t end up with senseless negative self-talk that will prevent you from enjoying your work and deliver great results?

Not your decision? Then do your best to influence it

Very few decisions are yours only. Most of the time you need to cooperate with others to get their buy-in, acceptance and to ensure there are as few negative consequences as possible. If you want to feel like a king and make unilateral decisions impacting lives of all the peasants in your kingdom than bad news. You were born couple of hundred years too late.

Today, it is all about influence. You don’t need formal power to make things happen. Yes, it takes a bit more time and way more communication with way more people but ultimately you can “make decisions” through other people. I would suggest you check out these articles to get some tips and tricks on how to influence the environment around you: The Art Of Influencing Others – Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3. So it is just for you to get comfortable with this mode of working.

Don’t be a messenger but own the message

You should never communicate a message to your team unless you understand what is behind it and can present it as “our decision”. If you constantly talk to your team about “someone decided something and we have to live with it” then you are the one who is spoiling the mood in the team.

If you need to communicate to the team a decision that you don’t understand then talk to the actual decision maker to learn “why”. What is behind the decision and why it was done? Even if you disagree with the decision, the time to influence it was before it was made. Once decision is done, it is done. Now your job is to implement it.

When you learned “why” it is your job to present it to your team in a way that will make sense to them. Yes, it can be sometimes tricky since the context in which the original decision maker lives is very different from the context in which your team lives (eg. CEO versus engineers). But that is exactly why you are here. You are the translator, you are the sense maker, and you are the one who needs to lead your team to implement the decision and feel good about it.

“As a leader, the biggest value you bring to your team is helping them make sense of the world around them @GeekyLeader” [Tweet this]

Spend your effort and focus on things you can change

And if you really want to make some decisions solely on your own, or you want to give your team this ability to simply decide something without the need to ask half of the planet for permission then consider what are the aspects of your job that are fully under your control.

If you think about it you will most likely discover that there are tons of things that you can decide and in fact that you are deciding every day without even realizing it. Then focus your attention and the attention of your team on these. After a while you will see that the mood in the team improved even though the external circumstances are the same.

Human brain is a great help in this since we get more of those things that we focus on. I’m sure you heard the example with the yellow car. If I ask you right now how many yellow cars you saw over the last week when commuting to the office you might be hard pressed to remember more than a few (assuming the cabs in your city are not yellow).

But since I just focused your attention on yellow cars you will tell me tomorrow that you counted ten yellow cars on your way home. More than you saw in the previous month. Must be some sort of yellow cars outbreak, right?

When you really think about it all these things boil down to two basic themes: communication and attitude. Communication will form how you are perceived externally by your team (so they trust you and follow you) and the rest of the stakeholders in whatever decision needs to be done (so you can properly influence things).

Attitude or mindset is how you perceive your role internally (how you feel about your role, your impact and your successes and failures) and what you focus your attention on.

So next time when you start feeling hopeless and feeling that all the decisions are done for you, just think about how much it is “them” and how much it is “you”. Maybe this introspection will help you find a way how to have a good feeling, greater success and bigger impact on the world.

Photo: © fuzzbones / Dollar Photo Club