The Final Step of Decision Making: Navigating the Aftermath

Three steps to keep your team and company culture together in the face of complicated emotions around decision making.

Picture this scenario: You’ve just finished a long decision-making process, with multiple competing ideas, everyone lobbying for their idea, and plenty of other hiccups on the way. You’ve made your choice, and now the company can move on, right? That’s not quite the case.

The aftermath of a decision can be emotionally similar to a grieving process for those whose ideas weren’t selected despite all the work they put into it. As a result, how leaders manage the emotional fallout and next steps can have an outsized impact down the line. Decisions are not made in a vacuum, and how a team member feels about the decision-making process has the potential to impact the entire team moving forward.

Unfortunately, many business leaders continue to believe business isn’t emotional at all. To debunk that, author Mollie West Duffy put it most plainly: “The idea that we make rational decisions without any feelings is wrong.” Feelings can have consequences down the line if they aren’t addressed.

To keep your team and company culture together in the face of these complicated emotions, consider the following three steps.

1. Acknowledge the Emotional Factor

While some may tell you feelings shouldn’t play a role in business, humans simply aren’t able to sever their emotions from their work. Harvard Business Review puts it best (emphasis mine): “Every organization has an emotional culture, even if it’s one of suppression.” Successfully navigating the emotional experience of a decision means not just knowing people will have feelings about it, but showing team members you are aware of those feelings and avoiding seeming like you are picking winners and losers.

People put a lot of work into proposing ideas, and if you do not go with their option, they are likely going to feel bad about that personally and on a business level—it’s hard not to. As a result, if you move right along without taking the time to acknowledge that hard work and those even harder feelings, their feelings can end up festering and eventually poison the company’s culture.

Acknowledgment can be on both a personal and a company-wide level, and I recommend incorporating both whenever possible.

2. Manage the Individual Deciders

In the traditional five stages of grief, the final step is acceptance. The onus and burden is on leadership to help shepherd people to that place so that they can remain engaged with your company’s North Star goals. It’s worth taking the time to sit down with each key stakeholder with whom you’ve consulted.

In that conversation, it’s critical to both acknowledge their feelings and offer them a path forward. Equally, it’s essential to communicate that you understand this wasn’t their choice, but you appreciate the effort and passion and know it was made in the spirit of doing the best for the company. Communicating in this emotionally oriented manner can give people the space they need to process their feelings.

The second part of this conversation, offering the path forward, has both practical and personal applications. The world keeps going, and so does your company. Depending on the scale of this decision, having all hands on deck may make the difference between success and failure.

At the same time, giving someone the space to take ownership and the understanding of how their work will be critical to moving the company forward can significantly boost motivation and engagement. Bi Worldwide has found that “employees who know how their goals connect to the larger picture feel more inspired, such that they are 10.1 times more likely to feel motivated to take action at work.”

3. Scaling the Decision Making

Going one-on-one with key stakeholders is essential, but there’s not enough time to sit down with every employee. At the same time, statistics show that transparency has a number of tangible benefits.

Slack found that 80% of workers want to know more about how decisions are being made by their employers, suggesting this is currently a massively unmet need, especially when 70% of workers say they’re most engaged in their jobs when senior management communicates openly with them. Gallup found the top quartile of companies with highly engaged employees averaged about 23% more profitability than the bottom quartile, along with other benefits like increased retention and improved customer loyalty.

As a result, your next step should be scaling up the communications work and emotional narratives you’ve developed in your individual communications. What this scale-up looks like can take several different forms, depending on the scale and impact of the decision itself. For smaller decisions, often an internal letter alone will suffice. However, for larger, more consequential decisions, a town hall meeting or a similar format may be better to achieve your goals.

Whatever your scaled-up communication looks like, it should have the following elements:

• Emotional Acknowledgment: Perhaps gratitude for hard work; perhaps an acknowledgment of the surprise of a decision if one had to be made quickly
• Why The Decision Was Made: Including the realities of the business that affected this decision
• What The Decision Will Affect Moving Forward: Including position changes or reorganizations
• How To Share More Detailed, Bottom-Up Feedback Or Questions: Increasing engagement

Most critically, this communication has to ground the decision in the company’s North Star by explaining how the choice reinforces what your company does better than anyone else. Ultimately, you are aiming to be as transparent as possible; we all say it’s a key value, but this communication represents a chance to put it into practice.

Business decisions can be made for any number of reasons. Sometimes, people may be missing key context that led to your prioritizing one plan of action over another. Sometimes, it just might be the wrong time. At a dysfunctional company, decisions can be made on a purely personal basis, which is never the right direction to take.

Thoughtful decision making is part of a strong company culture. By effectively managing the aftermath of a decision, you can move forward with a more efficient, more engaged, and healthier company.

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NOTE: This post was adapted from an article that appeared in Fast Company, May 9, 2024.