From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

Five-day alignment

- Last component of this in terms of being quality decision making. It's very important everyone's on the same page in terms of how long you want these processes to unfold. It's really important when we talk about what we've decided and determined. We expect alignment within five days and if there's not alignment within five days we expect clean escalation. Note, I said five day alignment not five day decision making. Some decisions will take much longer than five days. A lot of our most important decisions do, they just do. You need to conduct experiments, you want to learn, you want to see how things unfold, you got to launch a product, competition is coming, there's plenty of reasons things are going to go beyond five days. But if on the path towards the determining your recommendations, your decisions, the team is misaligned and that misalignment goes longer than five days, in our company that's too long. So you want to make sure, people who are misaligned come together, resolve the disagreement, get aligned on the path towards making the decision and if they are not they clean escalate. They go to the decision maker, they say we are misaligned. They go together, not behind the other person's back. They are completely transparent about where the misalignment is occurring and they allow for the decision maker to say thank you I hear you, we're going to draw this back into alignment, this is a call I'm going to make, you may disagree with it one person or the other person, please disagree and commit and let's get back to work. I can't tell you the number of times, certainly in the earlier days of the company where things wouldn't go five days, sometimes they didn't go five weeks, they would go five months and it's one of the most disappointing things when you're a manager, an executive within an organization and your expectation is that everyone is orientated towards speed and quality of decisions and you find out teams can't get out of their own way because at some level they are completely misaligned and no one is making a call. It creates all the wrong kinds of friction within your organization. Okay? So FCS, Focus, Fewer things done better, Communicating the right things to the right people at the right time. Speed and quality of decisions and two enormously helpful axioms or tools that we use here, rapid decision framework and five day alignment.

Contents