1 Decision Making Habit to Save Time, Move Faster, and Increase Buy-In
If your decision-making keeps meeting more resistance than you expected, take a look at your process. You probably assume you understand how it looks from their side. You skip the conversation because you’re confident you have the full picture. Or you move forward without asking who else your action touches. This gap between deciding and understanding impact grows out of your desire for speed and certainty, but it has a way of turning seemingly reasonable decisions into avoidable rework. To save time, move faster, and increase buy-in, make checking perspective a habit instead of an afterthought.
Quality Decision Making Means Walking in Others’ Shoes
You’ve made the call. It solves the problem in front of you, it’s defensible, and it makes sense from where you sit. Then you announce it—and watch the energy in the room change. Someone asks a question you didn’t see coming. Someone else goes quiet in the way that tells you they’re already bracing for the fallout. What looked like a clean decision on paper just became a change-management problem.
The unexpected resistance didn’t happen because you needed to finesse your presentation. You decided before you understood what the decision would mean for the people living with it. A moment spent walking in others’ shoes would make all the difference.
And that’s why Walk in Others’ Shoes is a critical SynergyStack® Team Development System habit. Do you genuinely want to understand their perspective and what your decisions and actions mean for them? It’s easy to nod along to that sentence, but harder to actually build it into how you make decisions.
The Cost of Skipping This Step
When you don’t check the effects before you decide, the cost doesn’t disappear—it just shows up later, and bigger. Resistance that looks like pushback is often surprise. Rework happens
because nobody flagged the practical snag that was obvious to them and invisible to you. And every time people learn about a decision that affects them only after its final, you teach them that their input isn’t part of the process. You slowly and surely disempower your people and they stop trying. That’s expensive to undo.
Or worse, you miss critical information that would prevent failure or ensure success. And now you’ve wasted time, money, and your credibility because you didn’t invest a few more minutes in others’ perspectives.
Checking perspective first isn’t slower in any way that matters. It’s actually faster than the alternative.
Your Decision Making Perspectives Checklist
Before you finalize a decision that touches other people, run through these questions:
- Who does this affect that I haven’t talked to? Map it past the obvious stakeholders.
- What does this look like from their role, not mine? Not what you assume it looks like—what it actually looks like, given their workload, their goals, their constraints.
- What would I need to know right now if I were them? This flips you from broadcasting to anticipating.
- Who’s affected but not in the room for this conversation? The people most affected are often the least represented when the decision gets made.
- What’s the literal or figurative field trip I could take before I decide? Sometimes this means going to watch the process happen. Sometimes it means one honest conversation.
- What would make this decision harder to defend if I heard their side first? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that’s useful information, not a reason to skip the question.
Avoid the temptation to answer these questions alone. You can’t have their perspective – so go get it.
And you won’t need all six questions every time. Even asking two of them consistently will change the quality of your decisions.
Avoid Analysis Paralysis
There’s a real risk with a checklist like this: it can quietly turn into a way to avoid deciding at all. If you wait until you’ve talked to everyone, gathered every perspective, and eliminated every unknown, you’ll miss the window the decision needed to be made in.
The habit isn’t “understand everyone’s perspective before you’re allowed to act.” It’s “understand enough to make a better decision than you would have otherwise.” In practice, it usually means one or two conversations, not a months-long listening tour.
Schedule the finish: if you can’t reach the right person in a reasonable window, make the call with what you know, name what you didn’t have time to check, and stay open to adjusting once you hear from them.
A decision made with partial perspective and revisited later beats a decision endlessly delayed in search of complete perspective. Curiosity should sharpen your judgment, not replace it.
Build Curiosity Into Your Decision Making Rhythm
Walk in others’ shoes is a habit, not a one-time checklist you remember under pressure. Fold it into the rhythms you already have. Ask the questions in your one-on-ones before you finalize something that touches your direct report’s work. Bring them into executive visits.
If you work in a matrix organization, this is non-negotiable—the people affected by your decision often don’t report to you and won’t find out through the usual channels unless you go to them first.
A Habit for Everyone
Walking in others’ shoes isn’t only for leaders. It matters just as much between peers and even managing up.
Say you’re part of a project team and you decide to switch the format of your weekly status update because the new version is faster for you to put together. Before you make the switch, it’s worth asking: how does my manager use this report before it goes to leadership? Is there a number in here that another team pulls out and reuses somewhere I don’t see? A five-minute check with your manager and the colleague downstream costs you almost nothing. Skipping it and finding out later that you broke someone else’s process costs a lot more—and it costs you credibility, too.
This habit scales in every direction: up to your manager, sideways to your peers, and down to the people who report to you.
Decision Making Habit: Before and After
Here’s what it looks like in practice. A leader needs to consolidate two team meetings into one to save time.
Version one: she announces the change in an email, effective the following Monday. Within a week, she learns the two teams were using that separate meeting time to work through a handoff that now has nowhere to happen. She spends the next month rebuilding a process that used to work fine.
Version two: before finalizing the change, she asks both team leads one question—”What does this meeting currently make possible that a combined one wouldn’t?” That one conversation surfaces the handoff, and she adjusts the plan before it ever goes out.
Same decision, same goal, a fraction of the cost in wasted time and energy.
Mini-Personal Experiments to Walk in Others’ Shoes
If you want to invest in this curiosity decision-making habit, here are 3 more mini-personal experiments you can use:
- Empathy Prompt a Day
Each day for 30 days, ask one teammate: “What’s one thing about your role that people often overlook or misunderstand?” Track the insights—look for patterns across functions.
- Workday Field Trip (Immersive Shadowing)
Block 60–90 minutes to shadow a teammate in a different function. Join a meeting, observe a workflow, or walk through their daily tools/processes. Focus on learning their constraints, goals, and pain points. Debrief afterward with one reflection: “Here’s what surprised me most about your work.”
- Role Ripple Review
Each week, pick one task or project and check in with someone downstream: “What was the impact of this on your end?” Track how often the intent of your work matched the experience of others.
Pick one to start with or rotate through them across the month — whatever works best for you and your team.
The Decision Making Habit In One Sentence
Before you decide, ask what it means for the person who must live with it. Not everyone, not forever—just long enough to make a better decision. That’s what it means to walk in other’s shoes and get the perspective you need.
For more on building this habit into team culture, see:
- Creative Teams: 12 Habits That Foster Curiosity and Collaboration
- Matrix Organization: Powerful Questions to Reduce Angst and Build Trust
- Invite Input: The Habit that Turns Silence into Solutions
And if you want to help your team develop these habits of collaboration to work better together and get more done with less stress, check out the full SynergyStack® System. In less than 60 minutes you can transform everyone’s focus and productivity.
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