How to Develop Frontline Leaders Who Can Manage Risk and Lead Through Uncertainty

Craig Coyle: Forty units, time critical, headed to a customer whose line is already waiting for them. In final inspection, truck leaves in two hours. One unit comes back flagged. A board diameter, two thousandths over print, missed all the way through the process, and of course, caught here in final inspection at the last station before the dock. The supervisor's standing over the part right now. Which begs the question. What would your supervisor do? Welcome to the Frontline Leadership Podcast, where we help organizations strengthen and empower the leaders that their operations depend on. I'm your host, Craig Coyle, former Apache helicopter pilot, aerospace leader, and founder of Operation Lead. And today we're tackling one of the most undertaught skills in the professional world. How to make a good call fast when you don't have all the information you'd like to have. Let's dive in. A few episodes back, I brought my friend Chris Seifert to the show to share with us a framework for the big decisions, the ones with real time to think, real stakes to weigh, and a real process worth slowing down for. If you haven't heard that episode, it's episode 23, go back and give it a listen. It's a genuinely strong tool for the calls that both deserve and demand deliberation. But here's the thing about the world that we all live in: most decisions don't look anything like that. They don't get a meeting, they don't get a whiteboard. They get 30 seconds, if that, a half complete picture, and a team standing there waiting to see what's gonna happen next. And I think this is where most organizations quietly fail their supervisors. See, we promote someone because they were excellent at the job, not a wrong decision, but then we hand them dozens of these split second calls a day without ever teaching them how to make one. So they default to one or two things. Either they escalate everything, whether it needed to climb the chain or not. Which then bottlenecks every leader above them, or they freeze, hoping the situation resolves itself before they have to own a decision. And look, neither of those are character flaws. It's what happens when anyone who's been given the responsibility to decide without ever being given a way to do it. And look, I'll admit up front that I am not naturally gifted as a decision maker. I'm an overthinker and a recovering perfectionist, just deciding where to go out to dinner. throws me into an endless cycle of what ifs and if-bens. And look, if I wasn't raised in a professional environment that trains decision making relentlessly as a core tenet of its leader development, my career as a leader would probably have looked very different. So today I want to share with you what empowered me to not just understand decision making, but to get good at it. It's a simple framework, fast enough to actually use in the moment. One that complements what Chris gave us rather than replacing it. Before we get into the framework itself, I want to slow down and name what a good decision maker is actually juggling. This is what really unlocked me. It's not the steps to making a decision, but it's the underlying variables. And once you can clearly see these things, decisions get a lot less mysterious, especially the fast ones. The first variable is time. See, the first move in any decision is sizing up the situation, and the part almost everybody skips is figuring out. How much time they actually have. That single question changes everything downstream. General Patton's famous for the quote a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. A great decision made too slowly can quickly become a bad decision. And similarly, unnecessarily rushed decisions too often produce completely avoidable consequences. Speed isn't separate from quality, it's a component of A lot of leader development quietly teaches the opposite. It rewards deliberation and treats decisiveness as a risk to be managed. But there are very few blanket truths in leadership, especially decision-making. Things are always situationally dependent. Understanding the situation and the time you have is vital to your success. And here's what surprises people. Naming a firm deadline for your own decision isn't a constraint, it's freedom. It's what lets you analyze against something real instead of drifting into open-ended uncertainty, which is exactly where both procrastination and paralysis live. A decision with no deadline doesn't get better with more time, it just gets later. I have personally lived in both extremes of this spectrum. In a cockpit. On combat missions where decisions had to be made immediately, and conversely, navigating personnel disputes where understanding the time I had available actually helped me prevent making a terrible decision too quickly. One contextual element, a layer in here. There's a planning principle for military doctrine that captures elements of this variable well. It's commonly called the one-third, two-thirds rule. A leader takes roughly a third of the available time for their own planning and deliberately leaves two thirds for the people underneath them to plan, prepare, and execute. It's a discipline against hoarding the clock. Unless you're the frontline supervisor making the final call in a chain of decisions, your decision will require subsequent decisions by your subordinates. This has to be factored into your timeline as well. A great decision isn't great if it can't be executed effectively. So make sure you're allowing proper decision and execution time for everything that flows out of your decision. The second variable is risk versus reward. Decision making, at its core, is a game of weighing what you stand to gain against what you stand to lose. That sounds obvious until you watch how rarely it's actually done on purpose. Most bad floor decisions aren't bad because the supervisor didn't care. They're bad because nobody ever reframed the trade-offs before acting. A supervisor who can say plainly, here's what we gain if this works, and here's what it costs us if it doesn't, has always Already done most of the hard work. The framing is doing the heavy lifting, not instinct or gut feel, the framing. And the prerequisite here is understanding risk. Every potential decision or course of action involves risk. The challenge is that risk may not be as obvious in certain plans by others. Financial risk, schedule risk, or short-term risk are often very obvious. But opportunity cost, flexibility risk, and long-term risk often aren't. Only when we're able to see risk in all its manifestations are we actually fully capable of evaluating risk and reward. And a final piece to risk is almost always overlooked because it actually has nothing to do with risk itself. It's EQ. The widely accepted anchoring bias tells us that we're often emotionally attached to the first idea or plan we come up with, even if it isn't logically the best decision. Further practitioners often highlight the tangible correlation between low EQ and poor decision making. Sometimes the greatest risk around a decision isn't the decision at all. It's the person making it. And the third variable is authority and the mission underneath it. So the last piece here, and it's the one people miss the most, I think. Good decision makers don't operate in a vacuum. Knowing precisely what you have authority over and what you don't is what lets you move fast and confidently on the calls that are yours, and it frees you to loop in the right person immediately on the ones that aren't. See when those lines are blurry, everyone slows down. Because everyone's spending energy guessing whether they're even allowed to act. But clear authority only gets you halfway there. Go back to episode 32, where we talked about the missing step between your mission and what actually gets done. It's mission nesting and the idea of commander's intent as the translation bridge between the mission and the action on the ground. Authority tells a supervisor what they're allowed to decide. Intent tells them how to decide it well. Especially on the calls, nobody explicitly covered in a procedure. When you give your subordinates intent, you're giving them the intellectual authority that empowers them to make good decisions in the heat of battle. A supervisor who understands both authority and intent isn't just checking, I am I allowed to do this. They're checking, does this serve what we're actually here to accomplish? That's the difference between a technically permitted decision and What likely becomes a genuinely good one. So three variables: time, risk versus reward, and authority-anchored intent. They're gonna enter every decision-making equation, regardless of how big or small the situation or problem is. These variables they help us work through a decision, but they don't guide us through the decision-making process. And that's exactly the problem a fighter pilot named John Boyd spent his entire career. Trying to solve. In the early 1950s, American F 86 Sabres were flying against Soviet built MiG-15s all over Korea. On paper, the MiG had real advantages. It could outclimb, outturn the saber in all the situations. And yet, US pilots were winning the majority of those engagements, and it was by a wide margin. So John Boyd, who flew fighters himself and went on to become one of the most influential military strategists of the 20th century, dug into why. His conclusion wasn't about the aircraft. It was actually about the tempo. See, American pilots could move through the mental cycle of a dog fight faster than their opponents. Take in what was happening, understand what it meant, decide what to do about it and act, and then do it again, faster than the other guy could keep up. That speed of cycling let them dictate the terms of the fight instead of reacting to it. Boyd eventually formalized what he observed into a model that's now known as the OODA loop. Observe, orient, Decide and act. It's a simple framework for making decisions that can be applied to any context at any speed, and our variables fit neatly within it. So first step is observe. It's your situational assessment. Specifically, it's where you clock how much time you actually have. You can't set a deadline for a decision. You haven't started sizing up yet. The second piece is orient. It's where you make sense of what you're seeing. And this is where two things converge. It's the risk versus reward frame and the mission intent we just talked about. Orientation, it's not neutral. You're not just observing raw facts, but you're interpreting them against context. And a supervisor who already understands intent is orienting from running start. They already know what good looks like for the mission, so reading a new situation against it is faster and more accurate than starting from zero every time. Step three is decide, and that's where you commit. You commit against the deadline you set and observe, not against some open-ended search for certainly. This is where the one-third, two-thirds instinct pays off. You're not hunting for the perfect answer. You're finding a good answer inside the time you actually have because a great decision made too late has already failed. And then finally, step four is act. It's where you execute, you communicate inside your authority link. You loop in the people who need to know. You stay inside what's yours to decide and you move. A decision that isn't communicated isn't finished. This is the team sport piece. So let's walk through what this process might look like with a supervisor working through the scenario we open the episode with. Observe, confirm the flag. One unit of 40, nonconforming, already routed into the NCR process. It's out of her hands, won't clear in two hours. Somewhere upstream this got missed until it hit her final inspection station. A real question, but not this one, not right now. The actual constraint in front of her. What happens to the 39 while a flag unit works through a process she can't control? On a customer's line that's already waiting. Orient. She reads this against what's actually true. The customer isn't idly waiting on a shipment. Their line is stopped on it. Holding all 40 punishes them for a problem contained to one part, and turns a one-unit delay into a full production stoppage on their end. Decide. She gives herself 15 minutes to confirm logistics can segregate and then ship the 39 conforming units on the original truck with a flagged unit pulled, tagged, and routed separately once it clears. Not the disposition, not hers, just the shipping call, which is. And then act. She authorizes the split shipment, flags the one unit priority with the quality engineer so it doesn't sit in a queue, and calls the account herself to get ahead of the one unit delay before they notice it on their end. How did this get missed question goes in her notes for tomorrow's process review, not before the truck leaves. Two hours standing over one flag part becomes a documented, authority respecting call that keeps a customer's line running instead of stopping it twice. Now, I want you to notice what UDA isn't. It isn't a replacement for what Chris gave us in episode 23. It's the fast floor-level cousin, same underlying discipline of assess, frame, commit act just built for a clock measured in seconds instead of days or months. So, why is this important? When we don't install this skill set with purpose, our organizations experience a decision-making void with widespread consequences. Supervisors default to escalation in every decision, even the small ones, climb the chain out of habit, not necessity. That backs up onto you and every other leader above the floor, taking senior leaders away from the work they should be doing. It teaches your best people that their judgment isn't trusted. Which is its own kind of demoralizing effect. Or maybe even worse, supervisors default to freezing, and you get a floor that moves at the speed of hesitation, with real production and quality cost attached to every stall as you scratch your head trying to figure out why you can't move the needle on efficiency. Neither outcome is really about the individual supervisor. It's about what they were never given. So if you're in a position to affect this. Here's what I think your job is. First, get your authority lines genuinely clear. Not implied, not assumed, actually defined and communicated. So the team sport piece is real instead of theoretical. Your supervisors can't move fast on their own calls if they're not sure which calls are actually theirs. Remember, leadership is like a grand symphony. Everyone needs to know what instrument they're playing and what sheet of music they're on. That's the conductor's role. Second, Make sure intent is alive as something leaders can actually understand, not something that lives in a strategy deck. If a supervisor can't tell you in their own words what this shift or this line is actually trying to accomplish this week, Orient's gonna break down before it even starts. Third, give explicit permission to decide without escalating everything. If every decision still climbs the chain out of habit, you haven't solved the problem. You've just made your supervisors feel worse about a system you haven't changed. And remember why this is so important. Leaders on the front lines almost always have better, more accurate decision making information than you have sitting removed from it. And fourth, build in repetition. Nobody gets good at Uda from hearing it once on a podcast. It becomes reflexive through reps, debriefs after real decisions, scenario walkthroughs, deliberately asking, walk me through how you saw that, instead of just judging the outcome. Reflex under pressure gets built in the calm moments beforehand, not in the moment itself. This is where Chris's powerful question from episode twenty three comes to life. Well, what do you think? Use it as a tool for developing your leaders. if you want to know whether your organization is actually setting up your supervisors to make good calls under pressure, or if you're ready for a deeper conversation about building this kind of capability and more across your leadership team, I encourage you to head to operationlead.com to learn about our system and process. Look, good decision making under pressure isn't a personality trait some leaders magically have and others don't. It's a skill, and it's built on understanding and respecting time, weighing risk against reward, and knowing your authority inside a mission you actually understand. Give your people that. And the floor stops waiting for permission it was never going to get and starts moving. Next week we're going a layer deeper. into how the way your supervisors think about problems in the first place shapes everything downstream about how their teams perform. I'll see you then. I'm Craig Coyle, and this is the Frontline Leadership Podcast. Let's lead.