Objective and Subjective Decision Making for Growth-Stage Leadership Teams

I’m fortunate to work with a cross-section of growth-stage leadership teams helping them reset, strengthen, and sustain team performance in a post-investment operating environment.  

The commitment of time towards team health and performance generally comes with an understanding and expectation that the total dollar investment put into the hiring and incenting of a Founder/CEO and their team must translate into a meaningful return on investment over time. With a multitude of challenges, opportunities, and choices to be made, the pressure to coalesce and perform is very real if growth and profitability goals and targets are to be met. 

While most, if not all, teams display behavior patterns which help or hinder their performance, what often comes up—and is often unseen or named, until brought to light—is situationally effective objective and subjective thinking and decision making.  

Two Sides of the Coin 

Objective thinking and decision making are generally viewed through the lens of analysis, or a belief in a specific set of behaviors and outcomes. They can also be seen as somewhat of an arms-length mindset, or a view free from assumption. They may also underscore or “reward” particular personality and thinking styles. In growth-stage companies, where resources (and cash) are often limited, and the stakes are quite high, objective thinking and decision making are virtually indispensable.  

Subjective thinking and decision making, on the other hand, are especially important when uncertainty and change are heightened, a dynamic that is central to the life of growth-stage culture. In an increasingly EQ-centric workplace, strong intuition can be seen as a real strength -- more personal, empathetic, human and inspired. It can also be seen as somewhat disconnected to the task at hand and too open-ended, or lacking in discipline and focus, and less quantifiable.   

Situational Self-Awareness 

Using team diagnostics such as AIIR Team Effectiveness Survey, early post-investment leadership team assessments often reflect weakness in team situational self-awareness rooted in a lack of healthy debate and/or deferment to CEO demand or expectation of action. Absent self-reflection, CEOs and their team’s fall on past habits to the detriment of themselves and the individuals they lead. Already under immense pressure and scrutiny to deliver results, many leadership teams overly lean in the direction of action and objectivity, while neglecting subjective leadership traits. An unintended consequence of such an approach is the undermining of culture and trust.   

Leadership teams who score high on team culture, but lower in areas around productivity, often suffer from decision paralysis, while overweighting on the need to be liked (especially by the CEO) in the face of tough choices and decisions. The lack of timely decision making becomes an anchor to team performance while negatively affecting the wider organization.  

Improvement Through Deliberate Practice  

Effective team leadership is always situational and context-dependent. For growth-stage leadership teams, the stakes are often more acute. Through deliberate action and practice, leadership teams can cultivate timely objective and subjective decision-making skills. With help from a skilled HR leader or third-party facilitator, here are a few team exercises (lasting up to 2 hours) designed to help your team explore and apply balanced, situationally appropriate thinking and decision-making during key moments. 

The following examples focus on performance and potential among key leaders and SMEs:   

Using data and measurable criteria, focusing on team performance assessments:

• Break the leadership team up into small groups. Each group is given a mock set of performance data (or actual anonymized data from their teams) to review. 

• Each group assesses performance based solely on the data presented and identifies strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. 

• Bring the team back together to compare assessments. Discuss how focusing on objective data allows for measurable evaluations, but may miss context, inclusive of personal challenges or team dynamics. 

Encouraging subjective thinking by understanding perspective and context:

• Provide a real-life scenario where a team member's performance is affected by external factors (e.g., family issues, personal stress, burnout). 

• Break into pairs or small groups and assign each person the role of the team member whose performance is being evaluated. The leader must interview their "team member" to understand his/her perspective, challenges and feelings. 

• After the roleplaying exercise, ask each leader to reflect on how subjective factors—such as emotions, personal circumstances or motivation—impact performance. 

Creating balance, using objective metrics and subjective insights to gauge performance:

• Have the leadership team work in pairs to assess a fictional or anonymized team member using both sets of criteria - objective (e.g., KPIs, project completions, revenue impact) and subjective (e.g., teamwork, leadership potential, effort, emotional resilience). 

• Each pair then discusses how the balance of objective data and subjective observations shapes their overall assessment. 

• Discuss as a group which criteria were relied on more heavily, and how both objective and subjective inputs can be incorporated and weighed in future evaluations. 

Revealing potential blind spots that can be assessed and addressed:

• Collect anonymous feedback from the leadership team’s direct reports about how they personally perceived their own performance assessments (i.e., objective vs subjective, strengths, and areas of improvement). 

• Share aggregated feedback with the leadership team and have them reflect on whether they each tended to favor objective or subjective feedback. 

• Facilitate a discussion on why certain biases or blind spots may exist (e.g., over-reliance on data, personal rapport influencing subjective judgment, etc.) and how to address them. 

Promoting decisions that blend objective data with subjective understanding:

• Develop various scenarios where the leadership team needs to make performance decisions. For example, a team member has hit all their performance KPIs but is struggling with team dynamics or direct report engagement. 

• Leaders get divided into groups and are presented with different performance scenarios. They must decide about the team member’s future —promotion, further development, or corrective action — using both objective data and subjective insights. 

• Each group presents their decision and the rationale behind how they weighed objective metrics versus subjective factors like the team member’s emotional intelligence or teamwork. Facilitate a discussion about the difficulties of balancing both types of input and what strategies work best. 

While there may certainly be other viable and effective approaches for arriving at similar outcomes, by facilitating exercises that highlight both objective and subjective thinking in decision making, individual leadership team members will learn when to lean in one direction vs. another, become more aware of personal biases or situational misapplications, and – ultimately – adapt more holistic approaches that will encourage and promote a more fully formed understanding around the value and importance of each.