If you are in business you often have to deal with another team members. Sometimes a decision simply can´t be made because of one team member was not able to reply in a regular time. Not being able to make decisions slows down your efficiency, interrupts your workflow and simply prevents you from being successful. In my business life this happened several times until I found a solution that really works.

Once you send out an idea, a plan or just a guideline for the upcoming strategy you simply need to enter one single sentence. „If no reply till XXXXX at XX am it means that you agree to the plan“. I could not believe it. But after having this started years ago everybody involved has started to take my emails into the first row. Everybody knows that I have already a plan, or at least I plan to make a decision. If my team members don´t reply in time it means that they have agreed as well.

No worries. In average I don´t get any replies since most of the time they agree with my plans.

Some of you might think that this reduces the creativity of the team members. To be honest, I don´t care! We have to work on time, we have to decide fast and we have to do a perfect job. So if you can´t follow the speed of the team you might want to change your team. But please don´t ask me to wait for your input. But talking about team and writing a sentence like this does not really match. Of  course this guideline has to be used by every member. This does mean that of course also I have to reply in the given Time frame. At the end it´s also a sign of respect giving the your team player a high importance in the row of tasks you follow.